adjective (sometimes disapproving)
1 (of people and their way of life) quiet and polite, often in an exaggerated way; from, or pretending to be from, a high social class:
a genteel manner / upbringing * Her genteel accent irritated me. * He lived in genteel poverty (= trying to keep the style of a high social class, but with little money).
2 (of places) quiet and old-fashioned and perhaps slightly boring
genteelly adverb
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for genteel is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Does genteel appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — genteel appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.