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Modish  adj.  According to the mode, or customary manner; conformed to the fashion; fashionable; hence, conventional; as, a modish dress; a modish feast. "Modish forms of address."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Modish" Quotes from Famous Books



... would sit eating cherries with him out of one paper bag, with an affectionate and ironical smile twisting up an eyebrow and curling his lips a little. And he was always careful to have money in his pocket, and to be modish in his dress, so that his son need not blush for him. They were perfect friends, but never seemed to have occasion for verbal confidences, both having the competitive self-consciousness of Forsytes. They knew they ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... what periwigged phrase Won the heart of this sentimental Quaker, At what gold-laced speech of those modish days ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte

... of winding along the banks of the river, as far as the church, that she might see the fine new monument raised to the memory of Lady Modish. Her sisters insisted on going to the next village, as they wanted to buy muslin for a doll's frock. After some little altercation on each side Caroline, with affectionate condescension, gave way to her sisters' inclination, though, as eldest, she had the right of choice, ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas

... m[)o]derate, m[)o]dest, or our present word m[)o]dern. And the law under which Shakespeare uses the word is this: whatsoever is so trivial as to fall into the relation of a mere shape or fleeting mode to a permanent substance, that with Shakespeare is modish, or (according to his form) modern.[29] Thus, a weak, trivial argument (or instantia, the scholastic term for an argument not latent merely, or merely having the office of sustaining a truth, but urged as ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... arranged the whole party without a question, and who understood so little of modish airs as to suspect neither affectation nor trick in the absence of mind and indolence of manners which he observed in Mr Meadows, was utterly amazed by this interrogatory, and staring himself in return, said, "Sir, you seemed so thoughtful—I ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... York." Thurston smiled in sickly fashion. He had all along been uncomfortably aware of the sharp contrast between his own modish attire and the somewhat disreputable leathern chaps of his ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower

... "quiet felicity" of the artist with the absurd travesties worn on our American stage, we can better understand the pleasure which filled Mr. James's heart. What, for example, would Madame Nathalie have thought of the modish gowns which Mrs. Fiske introduces into the middle-class Norwegian life of Ibsen's dramas? No plays can less well bear such inaccuracies, because they depend on their stage-setting to bring before our eyes their alien aspect, to make us feel an atmosphere with which we are ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... smart pretty fellows in Bristol are numbers, some Who so modish are grown, that they think plain sense cumbersome; And lest they should seem to be queer or ridiculous, They affect to believe neither ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... stalking round with anxious search, Spying the time-worn flaws in ev'ry arch;— It chanc'd his new-come neebor took his e'e, And e'en a vex'd and angry heart had he! Wi' thieveless sneer to see his modish mien, He, down the water, gies him ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... Touchwood, his throat muffled in his large Indian handkerchief, huge gouty shoes thrust upon his feet, his bobwig well powdered, and the gold-headed cane in his hand, carried upright as a sergeant's halberd. One glance of contemptuous survey entitled Jekyl, according to his modish ideas, to rank the old gentleman as a regular-built quiz, and to treat him as the young gentlemen of his Majesty's Guards think themselves entitled to use every unfashionable variety of the human species. A slight inclination of a bow, and a very cold "You have the advantage of me, sir," dropped ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... companion, who were not a little surprised to see this minister of Plutus in the shape of a young sprightly beau, trimmed up in all the foppery of the fashion; for they had hitherto always associated with the idea of an usurer old age and rusty apparel. After divers modish congees, he begged to know to what he should attribute the honour of their message; when Ferdinand, who acted the orator, told him, that his friend Count Melvil, having occasion for a sum of money, had been directed to a gentleman of his name, "and, I suppose," added he, "you are the son of the ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... "Heddus roll," so graphically described, it is easy to understand the denunciations of the time upon women's headgear. In no contemporary record or account, no matter who the writer, can be found such a vivacious and witty description of the modish hairdressing of that day as in the pages ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow

... the human race I am sorry that you attach so much importance to the personal sufferings of the late royal martyr, and that an anxiety for the issue of the present convulsions should not have prevented you from joining in the idle cry of modish lamentation which has resounded from the Court to the cottage. You wish it to be supposed you are one of those who are unpersuaded of the guilt of Louis XVI. If you had attended to the history of the French Revolution as minutely as its importance demands, so far from stopping ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... fine coloring and clear eyes, silently agreed with her. The widow made a charming picture in her modish tea-gown, and the physician, watching her with an appraising eye, acknowledged the beauty which had captivated all Washington. Mrs. Brewster had carried her honors tactfully, a fact which had gained her popularity even among the dowagers and match-making mothers ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... readers were entertained with elaborate allegories, in which the passions, the vices, and even the habits of mankind were personified. Lighter ethical topics were served up in letters from Philotryphus, Septimius, or others ending in us, and in communications from Flirtilla, Jack Modish, and Co. Eastern tales and apologues, meditations on human life, essays on morality, inquiries as to whether the arts and sciences were serviceable or prejudicial to the human race, dissertations on the wisdom and virtue of the Chinese, were all the fashion in literature. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... stretched on her bier with "her head to the east," and Dirk Hatterick (equal to Shakspeare's Master Barnardine), and Glossin, the soul of an attorney, and Dandy Dinmont, with his terrier-pack and his pony Dumple, and the fiery Colonel Mannering, and the modish old counsellor Pleydell, and Dominie Sampson,[138] and Rob Roy (like the eagle in his eyry), and Baillie Nicol Jarvie, and the inimitable Major Galbraith, and Rashleigh Osbaldistone, and Die Vernon, the best of secret-keepers; and in the Antiquary, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... repentance is without remorse. His Achilles is youth itself, glorious, cruel, pitiful, splendid, and sad, ardent and loving, and conscious of its doom. Homer, in truth, is to be matched only with Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare he has not the occasional wilfulness, freakishness, and modish obscurity. He is a poet all of gold, universal as humanity, simple as childhood, musical now as the flow of his own rivers, now as the heavy plunging wave ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... ownership which thrilled him. Something of the same sensation was upon him now. She was the sort of woman he had craved for always—slim, elegant, and what to him, with his quick powers of observation, counted for so much, she was modish, reflecting in her presence, her dress and carriage, even her speech, the best type of the prevailing fashion. She excited comment wherever she appeared. People, as he knew very well even now, were envying him his companion. And beneath ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... uneasily; about the big drinking room of the Cafe Sinister after his angry parting with Elsie Welcome, looked up suddenly and saw the street door open. He stood still staring. The new arrival was Mary Randall. She wore a smart tailored suit and a modish hat. Druce noted these details of costume, the shining bronze hair, the fresh complexion and the trim figure. He gasped ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks

... time for many years that Willoughby Hall had been occupied by any other than caretakers; and Fairhaven, to confess the truth, was a trifle ill-at-ease before the modish persons who now tenanted the old mansion; and consoled itself after ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al

... her modish suit so cunningly devised to emphasize her charms, with the flowers slipping from her arms to the dusty rug, she wept at the vagueness of her recollections, the fading away of grief, to which she had once ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman

... suggestion here and there, after the secret freemasonry of her sex. "You are well rid of this forsworn captain, dear Mistress Thankful; and methinks that with hair as beautiful as yours, the new style of wearing it, though a modish frivolity, is most becoming. I assure you 'tis much affected in New York and Philadelphia,—drawn straight back from the forehead, after ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte

... flagstones gray with dust; An all-round east wind volleying straws and grit; ST. MARTIN'S STEPS, where every venomous gust Lingers to buffet, or sneap, the passing cit; And in the gutter, squelching a rotten boot, Draped in a wrap that, modish ten-year syne, Partners, obscene with sweat and grease and soot, A horrible hat, that once was just as fine; The drunkard's mouth a-wash for something drinkable, The drunkard's eye alert for casual toppers, The drunkard's neck stooped ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley

... the patronage of London society. For him a pretty girl is a pretty girl, and it is enough. He seats her comfortably in a chair and paints her as she is. One cannot imagine him turning her into a nymph, a shepherdess, or a priestess of Hymen, or painting her with a very modish coiffure on her head and a pair of blue-ribboned sandals on her bare feet. These things Reynolds did habitually and moreover put his figures in attitudes with up-rolled eyes and extended arms and filled out his larger canvases with ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... impossible to read a page in Plato, Tully, and a thousand other ancient moralists, without being a greater and a better man for it. On the contrary, I could never read any of our modish French authors, or those of our own country who are the imitators and admirers of that trifling nation, without being for some time out of humour with myself, and at every thing ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore

... at home, in fear Of every censuring privateer; Forcing a wretched trade by beating down the sale, And selling basely by retail. The wits, I mean the atheists of the age, Who fain would rule the pulpit, as they do the stage, Wondrous refiners of philosophy, Of morals and divinity, By the new modish system of reducing all to sense, Against all logic, and concluding laws, Do own th'effects of Providence, And yet deny ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... though he held the book close before his face, it was memory alone that prompted the form; for the pages shook until the letters were blurred. Yet it was done, and, save one alone, every spectator who had come with a far different intent stayed and listened to the end. That one, a tall, modish alien with a red, flushed face covered with a two-days' growth of bread, was likewise watching when it began. But when it was over he was not there; and not one of those who had followed his lead had ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge

... the assembled artists of our day Waiting for light, for music and for song. A woman stood before them, fresh as May And beautiful; but, in that modish throng, ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes

... other hand we cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine and does not substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlers to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle and dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a commerce ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... had not seen her for some time; on this occasion, it was more. Partly, it might be due to the fact that she was dressed in a different way; her hair was done high on her head, and she wore a light grey dress of modish cut and design. Her face, too, had grown fuller; the hollows in her cheeks had vanished; and her skin had that peculiar clear pallor that was characteristic of it ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... two ladies at the table, one of venerable aspect, with short, white curls, held from her face by side-combs, a modish breakfast-cap, and a morning-gown of thin gray silk. The other was young enough to be her daughter, as indeed she was, dressed in deep mourning. Rising instantly from her place as hostess behind the silver service, she extended her hand ...
— The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... women would parade their charms, the courtly dresses of those beauties of Bird-cage Walk, by St. James's Park, where "Lady Betty Modish" was born—full, long, bouffant brocades, hair piled high, long and graceful scarfs, and gloves reaching to the elbow. Even the rouge and powder were a mask to hide the cheek which did or did not blush when ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... merely modish will soon go out of fashion, and if you practise it in age, you will appear ...
— Advice to Young Musicians. Musikalische Haus- und Lebens-Regeln • Robert Schumann

... forenoons had to be thus occupied. Never forget it! The modish adaptation of woven fabrics to the female contour becomes increasingly complex and minute and exacting and time-occupying in precise proportion as the amount of time increases for which occupation ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... a suit of sulphur-yellow to fine linen, a well-fitting mouse-coloured great- coat furred in black, a pair of tight trousers of fashionable cut, and a hat of inimitable curl. After all, it was more likely that I should have recognised our visitors, than that they should have identified the modish gentleman with the miserable ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson

... hope either censures of his enemies or praises of himself, and they only could be expected to peruse them, whose passions left them leisure for the contemplation of abstracted truth, and whom virtue could please by her native dignity without the assistance of modish ornaments.' Gent. Mag. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... per Annum, as well as of an unblameable Life and Conversation; yet would not I be the Esquire for half his Estate; for if it was as much more, he'd freely pare with it all for a pair of Legs to his Mind: Whereas in the Reign of our first King Edward of glorious Memory, nothing more modish than a Brace of your fine taper Supporters; and his Majesty without an Inch of Calf, managed Affairs in Peace and War as laudably as the bravest and most politick of his Ancestors; and was as terrible to his Neighbours under the Royal Name of Long-shanks, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... jeeringly. "Some of us have hands to kiss and some regiments to fight. Harkee, macaroni. The general thinks 't would be a pity to spot those modish buskins and gloves. ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... Rooter") was of a pure, smooth, fair-haired appearance, and strangely clean for his age and occupation. His profile was of a symmetry he had not yet himself begun to appreciate; his dress was scrupulous and modish; and though he was short, nothing outward about him confirmed the more sinister of Florence's two adjectives. Nevertheless, her poor opinion of him was plain in her expression as she made her present intrusion upon his working hours. ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington

... covered the woman becoming disarranged, Pancha smoothed it into neatness, pausing to look with closer scrutiny into the marble face. It was so unlike the face she had seen before, rosy and smiling beneath the shade of modish hats, that no glimmer of recognition came to her. Chrystie was to her, as she was to the others, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... not compare Tancred and Fakredeen to Damon and Pythias, and as we cannot easily find in Pall Mall or Park Lane a parallel more modish, we must be content to say, that youth, sympathy, and occasion combined to create between them that intimacy which each was prompt to recognise as one of the principal sources of his happiness, and which the young Emir, at ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... as of brown nuts on her satin-smooth hair and a soft, ripe glow on her round cheeks. Her eyes were big and brown and velvety, under oddly-pointed black brows, and her crooked mouth was rose-red. She wore a smart brown suit, with two very modish little shoes peeping from beneath it; and her hat of dull pink straw, wreathed with golden-brown poppies, had the indefinable, unmistakable air which pertains to the "creation" of an artist in millinery. Priscilla had a sudden stinging consciousness that her own hat had been trimmed by ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... entrance unrebuked of Charity. What right? E'en so SIMON the Pharisee Might have demanded of the MAGDALEN, And with a fairer reason. But restrain The weariest waif from entrance to the fane Where pure young girls come for a special grace, Whither the smug-faced citizen may pace, The modish lady trail her silken skirt? Nay, Sir, it is too arbitrary-rash, This caveat, and with Charity must clash, Here sinful souls and spirits sorely hurt Find their last refuge and sole hope. Wherefore Against no soul that suffers close that door! Let MAGDALEN look on, if so she please, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 12, 1890 • Various

... great; and thus is he constantly hampered. Many the things I had done; but then the cost of such changes Who does not fear, especially now in this season of danger? Long since my house was smiling upon me in modish apparel! Long since great panes of glass were gleaming in all of the windows! But who can do as the merchant does, who, with his resources, Knows the methods as well by which the best is arrived at? Look at that house over yonder,—the new one; behold with what splendor 'Gainst the background of ...
— Hermann and Dorothea • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... once noted that these staid and decorous people looked straight before them in an attitude of quiet expectancy. A few little children turned on me their round, curious eyes, but no one else stared at the blundering stranger, whose modish coat, with a sprig of wild roses in its buttonhole, made him rather a conspicuous contrast to the other ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe

... two may be used for making this pretty jacket, which is extremely modish, and very comfortable for the cool days and evenings sure to be experienced during summer outings. Six skeins of fourfold Germantown will be sufficient; or four skeins of one color for the body and two of white for the border, if made in ...
— Handbook of Wool Knitting and Crochet • Anonymous

... our social life. They are the ground of the heavy moralizings by which we are outwearied, about Life as a Comedy, and Comedy as a jade, {4} when popular writers, conscious of fatigue in creativeness, desire to be cogent in a modish cynicism: perversions of the idea of life, and of the proper esteem for the society we have wrested from brutishness, and would carry higher. Stock images of this description are accepted by the timid and the sensitive, as well as by the saturnine, quite seriously; for not many look abroad ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... represents the influences which affected Raeburn. In any case, his later portraits, especially of women, possess qualities of charm and beauty which, while never merely pretty or meretricious, connect them in some measure with the more modish and less sincere and virile work of Lawrence. But otherwise—and, unlike his southern contemporaries, he never sacrificed character to elegance or subordinated individuality to type—the evolution of his style ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw

... forgot! What boots it for thee to have dipt thy hand In odors wafted from Arabian land? Ah! what avails thy scented solitaire, Thy careless swing and pertly tripping air, The crimson wash that glows upon thy face, Thy modish hat, and coat that flames with lace! In vain thy dress, in vain thy trimmings shine, If the Parisian snuff-box be not thine. Come to my nose, then, Snuff, nor come alone, Bring taste with thee, for taste is all ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings

... reflection quite plainly. She was suddenly inspired to take the soft taffeta girdle from the waist of her dark blue muslin gown, and bind it turban-wise about her head. The effect was pleasingly modish and conventional, and she quickened her steps—satisfied. There was a tingle in the air that set her blood pleasantly in motion, and she established a rhythm of pace that made her feel almost as if she were walking to music. Insensibly her mind took up its responsibilities again as the blood, stimulated ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley

... though more elaborate, was not a bit more impressive, and the phrases she used, the turn of her sentences, the colour of her speech, very little resembled anything that would have fallen from a damsel bred in the modish world. Her affectation was shot through with spontaneity; her impertinence had a juvenile seriousness which made it much more amusing than offensive; and a feminine charm in her, striving to prevail over ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing

... meaning—The old Business of the Silver-World, Ned; by Fortune, it's a mad Age we live in, Ned; and here be so many—wicked Rogues, about this damn'd leud Town, that, 'faith, I am fain to speak in the vulgar modish Style, in my own Defence, and railly Matrimony and ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn

... * One soon learns that the difference between comfort and misery, if not health and illness, may depend on whether he is properly clad. Proper, in this case does not mean modish, but suitable, serviceable, proven by the touchstone of experience to be best for the work or play that is in hand. When you seek a guide in the mountains, he looks first in your eyes and then at your shoes. If both are ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... clothes. Surely there was a clue concealed somewhere among them, if only he could find it. They were poor clothes, and yet, judging by their cut, he fancied the girl had looked exceedingly well in them—nay, even modish. She had evidently spent much time on them, as the beautiful needlework attested. At this point Anderson's mind ran out on to thin ice again, so he reverted to the girl herself for the nth time. She was Canadian, her hands were useful, ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach

... her hat and seated herself on a footstool near her aunt's chair, clasping her hands about her knees. Her slim and flexible figure, clad in a modish mourning costume, accommodated itself easily and gracefully to the trying position. Her bright and youthful face, with its pair of sparkling, life-enamoured eyes, tried to compose itself to the seriousness that the occasion ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... Pamela, this is but a faint sketch of the conduct I must have expected from my wife, let her quality have been what it would; or have lived with her on bad terms. Judge then, if to me a lady of the modish taste ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson

... save in the rough tweed skirt, coarse blouse, and tam-o'-shanter cap he was wont to see her in. The young woman had come back with several dresses in her arms, and Ashurst eyed her laying them against her own modish figure. There was one whose colour he liked, a dove-grey, but to imagine Megan clothed in it was beyond him. The young woman went away, and brought some more. But on Ashurst there had now come a feeling of paralysis. How choose? ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... fair, Picks up the Cards and Counters with great Care; Against her fate a smooth young Baron, Wit he had none, Beauty he had his share on, A soft clear Skin, a dapper Neck and Waist, In all Things suited to the modern Taste; And most polite, like all our modish Brood, That is, a very Fool, who's very leud: He ogles Miss, she squints, and turns aside, Nor can her Mask her rising Blushes hide; At last (as Bargains here are quickly made) She yeilds to be Caress'd, tho' still ...
— The Ladies Delight • Anonymous

... Jean. I had a long and much-loved fellow-creature's happiness or misery in my determination, and I durst not trifle with so important a deposit, nor have I any cause to repent it. If I have not got polite tittle-tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, I am not sickened and disquieted with the multiform curse of boarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart in the country.... A certain late publication ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... congenial to the analogy and principles of its respective language, as to remain settled and unaltered; this stile is probably to be sought in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be understood, without ambition of elegance. The polite are always catching modish innovations, and the learned depart from established forms of speech, in hope of finding or making better; those who wish for distinction forsake the vulgar, when the vulgar is right; but there is a conversation above grossness and below refinement, where propriety resides, and ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith

... But greater things were in store for her. She was engaged at two halls in the West End. Her horizon was fast receding and expanding. Homage became nightly tangible in bouquets, rings, brooches—things acceptable and (luckier than their donors) accepted. Even Sunday was not barren for Zuleika: modish hostesses gave her postprandially to their guests. Came that Sunday night, notanda candidissimo calculo! when she received certain guttural compliments which made absolute her vogue and enabled her to command, thenceforth, whatever terms ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... leaping impulsively forward on the chair that was as tightly upholstered in effect as he in his modish suit, then clutching himself there as if he had caught the impulse on the fly—"I just wish ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... very low to the newcomer. The dim candle-light afforded him a most unsatisfactory glimpse of her features. He took in at a glance, however, her tall, trim figure, the burnished crown of hair, and the surprisingly modish frock she wore. He had seen no other like it since leaving the older, more advanced towns along the Ohio,—not even in the thriving settlements of Wayne and Madison Counties or in the boastful village of Crawfordsville. He was startled. In all his journeyings ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon

... already well known in the modish world of town for his beauty and adventurous spirit. He was indeed already a beau and conqueror of female hearts. It was suspected that he cherished a private ambition to set the modes in beauties and embroidered waistcoats himself in time, and be ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... nodded, smiling. Her hand, held fast in Guy's, rested on his knee; Nan's charming head, with its modish dressing, lay against her shoulder. What more could a mother ask? Across the fireplace, Sam Burnett, most satisfactory of sons-in-law, and Margaret, Guy's best beloved, who had made the year one long honeymoon to him—so ...
— On Christmas Day In The Evening • Grace Louise Smith Richmond

... have no lords among them, but the rich men are respected somewhat more than the rest. They are of ordinary stature, and very lean, wearing their black hair frizzled over their shoulders like the Germans, and grease it daily with fish oil, which gives them a nasty smell; yet they consider this as modish. They are extremely poor, egregious liars, the greatest thieves in the world, and very treacherous. They have never heard of any Christians except the Portuguese, with whom they had war for thirteen or fourteen years, in which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr

... construction would approximate fairly well the school toilets of these young lady pupils. The boys wore overalls and flannel shirts, which, in contrast to the sketchy effects of their sisters' costumes, seemed almost modish. Mrs. Yellett then left the "class-room," saying she must take Ben's ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... alluded to were like "lightenin' bugs," but from the voice and gestures of the singer Mrs. Martin confusedly felt that they were intended for HERS, and even the refrain that "she dressed so neat and looked so sweet" was glaringly allusive to her own modish mourning. Alternately flushing and paling, with a hysteric smile hovering round her small reserved mouth, the unfortunate gentlewoman was fain to turn to the window to keep her countenance until it was concluded. ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... girl, cuts love, they say— Mere modish love perhaps it may: For any tool of any kind Can separate what ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess

... Militia, and that in 1765 he was appointed organist at Halifax. In the following year he removed to Bath as oboist in Linley's orchestra, and in October 1767 was promoted to the post of organist in the Octagon Chapel. The tide of prosperity now began to flow for him. The most brilliant and modish society in England was at that time to be met at Bath, and the young Hanoverian quickly found himself a favourite and the fashion in it. Engagements multiplied upon him. He became director of the public concerts; he conducted oratorios, engaged singers, organised ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... to manhood came, Song from celestial heights had wandered down, Put off her robe of sunlight, dew and flame, And donned a modish dress to charm ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson

... belated a fashion. We can but guess that an allusion in a letter from England, an incident at a conversazione at Ravenna, or perhaps the dialogues in Peacock's novels, Melincourt and Nightmare Abbey, brought to his recollection the half-modish, half-literary coteries of the earlier years of the Regency, and that he sketches the scenes and persons of his eclogue not from ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... the horns and fiddles sound no more, the merry, grinning players are but a pinch of dust like their betters, their haughty master but a scorned memory where once he reigned so royally, while the modish guests who frisked it so gayly in satin and velvet have long, long ago shaken the powder out of their locks, tied up their jaws and packed themselves away in their scant winding-sheets, resigned to the mournful company ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various

... George, you don't know what you're talking about. A little country wench may bloom into something very modish and elegant, once taken from her humble home and set amongst carpets of velvet and curtains of satin. ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin

... can acquit ourselves to our friends of the great world for the details of such an unfashionable courtship, so well as by giving them, before they retire for the night, a dip into a more modish view of things. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... Lord? She did not quite know what he meant. She went back over the morning's experience, beginning with her dressing-room, when before her mirror she donned her new and very pretty silk dress and arranged all her faultless toilet, adjusting the modish hat that became so well her own type of beauty, fitted on the fresh, dainty gloves that should clasp her beloved music when she should open her throat and sing like a glad bird, delighting in its ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock

... much care for dogs," said Rhoda. "Mrs Vane is the one for pets; that is, whenever they are modish. She carries dormice in her pocket, and keeps a lapdog and a squirrel. When the mode goes out, she gives the thing away, and ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt

... was improving, in a way. He had bought new clothes and a supply of linen, and although he did not wear them with the ease of one accustomed to modish dress they certainly improved his appearance. He was quiet and unassuming; he made no friends and few acquaintances; he never mentioned himself or his personal history and never referred to his wife except when forced to do so ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum

... is more conclusive as to the artificial construction of the vituperative sonnets. Again a comparison of this series with the efforts of the modish sonnetteers assigns to it its true character. Every sonnetteer of the sixteenth century, at some point in his career, devoted his energies to vituperation of a cruel siren. Ronsard in his sonnets celebrated in language quite as furious as Shakespeare's a 'fierce tigress,' a 'murderess,' ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... Adonais, pray, That on this memorable morning We twist those lovely lines astray, As modish maid, her charms adorning A trail may twine of eglantine Into the formal "set" of Fashion. Yet wouldst thou gladly lend thy line To present need; for patriot passion, Love of the little sea-girt land, Has ever fired our English singers. Of England's fame, from strand to strand, Their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various

... was! What a lot they got out of life! Varian walked quietly by the group, to enjoy better the pretty, modish picture they made. Their quick chatter, their bursts of laughter, the sweet faint odor of the tea, the gay dresses and light flannels, with the quiet, sombrely attired servants to add tone, all gave him, fresh from Hunter's quick sense of the effective, an ...
— Mrs. Dud's Sister • Josephine Daskam

... me?" Mrs. Feinermann gasped. Her hat was awry, and what had once been a modish pompadour was toppled to one side and shed hairpins with every palsied nod of her head. "I ain't done nothing!" ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass

... him?" said a flippant modish lady to his Grace of Osmonde one morning. "How will she know how to bear herself ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett



Words linked to "Modish" :   fashionable, modishness, stylish, latest, in style



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