Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Mawkish, sickly, or sickening quality.
- noun Sickly or qualmish sentimentality.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The quality or state of being mawkish.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The property of being
mawkish .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun falsely emotional in a maudlin way
- noun insincere pathos
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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This the pure young creature refused to do, with that exaggerated modesty which has been called mawkishness in the story, but which in a real occurrence looks very like heroism.
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 12, No. 33, December, 1873 Various
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'_A Story of Sorrow and Crime_' is an affecting monitory sketch, devoid of that mawkishness which is sometimes the characteristic of kindred performances.
The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 Volume 23, Number 6 Various 1840
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Severn attributes Keats's temporary "mawkishness" to Hunt's society
The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals. Vol. 2 George Gordon Byron Byron 1806
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Bucky is one of the world's decent men and is portrayed with profound sympathy and without mawkishness.
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I was fearing mawkishness, but this tells the life-affirming story of Em and Dex's relationship each 15 July, from fresh-faced graduates in the 80s through to middle age in the noughties, with the inevitable will-they-won't-they get it together . . .
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Nicole Cabell's Leila was assured but prone to mawkishness.
The Turn of the Screw; Ariadne auf Naxos; Les pêcheurs de perles; Mitsuko Uchida Fiona Maddocks 2010
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Writer Mick Ford's drama carefully avoids mawkishness and melodrama.
The weekend's TV highlights Andrew Mueller 2010
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Rather daringly, and consciously risking the charge of mawkishness, she actually closes on a maxim that was gleaned from a Chinese fortune cookie.
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The climactic confrontation in the tower between Snape and Dumbledore had a touch of Hitchcock (Vertigo), and it left me with the same feeling as that classic; a sense of finality without mawkishness.
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Rather daringly, and consciously risking the charge of mawkishness, she actually closes on a maxim that was gleaned from a Chinese fortune cookie.
polymorph commented on the word mawkishness
This word appears in Pablo Neruda's Toward an Impure Poetry:
"Let no one forget them. Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away in a frenzy's abandonment---moonlight, the swan in the gathering darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet's concern, essential and absolute."
Google found etymology here:
17c: from obsolete mawk a maggot, from Norse mathkr.
See also mawkish
April 14, 2007