ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Mawkish

Definition, Meaning & Examples

Pronunciation /ˈmɔːkɪʃ/ · Part of speech adjective

Quick meaning: Mawkish is an adjective meaning Excessively or falsely sentimental; showing a sickly excess of sentiment.

Meaning

Excessively or falsely sentimental; showing a sickly excess of sentiment.

More Meanings

  1. (archaic or dialectal) Feeling sick, queasy.
  2. (archaic) Sickening or insipid in taste or smell.

Example Sentences

The tabloids branded him James Hewitt forevermore as the “love rat,” and Pasternak was excoriated for peddling mawkish fantasy.
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.
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.
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.

Synonyms for mawkish

Depending on context, synonyms include bathetic, cheesy, corny, drippy, gooey, hokey.

Antonyms for mawkish

Common opposites include apathetic, rational, stoic.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include schmaltzy, sentimental, emotional, bathetic, mushy, slushy.

Related Dictionary Tools

Sources & Attribution

FreeDictionaryAPI.com / Wiktionary · Original source · CC BY-SA 4.0

Dictionary data is provided by FreeDictionaryAPI.com and sourced from Wiktionary under its stated license.