mawkish
/ˈmɔːkɪʃ/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.93 in modern English
19
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Excessively or falsely sentimental; showing a sickly excess of sentiment.
Example Sentences
- "Some of Mr. Williams’s performances were criticized for a mawkish sentimentality, like “Patch Adams,” a 1998 film that once again cast him as a good-hearted doctor, and “Bicentennial Man,” a 1999 science-fiction feature in which he played an android."
- "I found [Christoph] Buchel’s appropriation of the boat in which so many migrants lost their lives a vile and mawkish spectacle in the context of the biennale."
- "The tabloids branded him James Hewitt forevermore as the “love rat,” and Pasternak was excoriated for peddling mawkish fantasy."
- "After all, a vague, archaic, mostly harmless tradition fraught with pomp and ceremony and mawkish self-aggrandising with a bit of royalty thrown in is about the most British thing imaginable and would never happen in a boring sensible country like Germany."
Etymology
Etymology tree English mawk Proto-Indo-European *-iskos Proto-Germanic *-iskaz Proto-West Germanic *-isk Old English -isċ Middle English -isch English -ish English mawkish From mawk + -ish.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈmɔːkɪʃ/
- British English: /ˈmɔːkɪʃ/