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What is "elegant"

Crossword clues for elegant

elegant
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
elegant
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
elegant
▪ Italian people are often admired for their elegant clothes.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
as
▪ The room was as elegant as its occupant.
▪ His playing here is, as expected, note perfect, playful, but as elegant and swinging as ever.
▪ He could get no results as elegant as those with peas.
▪ Well, the reality is not quite as elegant as you might want.
▪ Its laws are as elegant as is the idea of natural selection.
▪ It is all as elegant as it is charming.
more
▪ Madame Escoffier's son gives it a more elegant name.
▪ The Brestowskis have tried to transform the space into a more elegant restaurant, but it isn't quite that.
▪ The shoe should flatter the foot, making it appear narrower and more elegant than it is.
▪ He in turn seemed to enjoy her conversation as a reminder of a more elegant and carefree prewar world.
▪ The substantial proportion of Cabernet makes for a slightly more elegant wine, with a delicious combination of spice and blackcurrant fruit.
▪ A more elegant and courtly preparation was quail in aspic, often served with foie gras or truMes.
▪ A much more elegant method is to re-program the computer's operating system to remove the safeguard.
▪ Some recipes include hard-boiled eggs and spinach, but this version is simpler and more elegant.
most
▪ The first class Regency Restaurant is one of the most elegant in Brighton and Hove.
▪ They used the straight original as the starting point for perhaps the most elegant demonstration of photographic compositing by computer yet devised.
▪ This has to be the most elegant and beautiful of all the tern tribe.
▪ He was almost the most elegant man many of them had ever seen.
▪ Constance thought the audience the most elegant crowd of people she had ever seen.
▪ The gardens are laid out in the most elegant manner and both the paintings and furniture are surprisingly fine.
▪ Some of the most elegant women in London come through these doors.
▪ I went in to watch the day's most elegant event ... the private driving competition.
so
▪ She felt a small warmth of pride kindle in her. So elegant he was.
▪ Around the main house were many smaller buildings, all white with the same red-tiled roofs that made the house so elegant.
▪ Fair, dark, slim, plump, elegant, not so elegant.
▪ The birch forests of Siberia, so upright, so elegant in autumn, had been broken by this winter campaign.
▪ Do we need this old Graeco-Roman game - like Eliot's Shakespeherian rag, so elegant, so intelligent?
▪ The fact that I had never seen my aunt looking so elegant added to my impression that I was imagining this.
very
▪ His work is always very elegant, always beautiful, but there is an element of surprise in it too.
▪ The Hamiltonian formulation provides a very elegant and symmetrical description of mechanics.
▪ They are quite unmistakable, and are often very elegant indeed, especially when they are perfectly circular and symmetrical.
▪ They are not particularly high, but very elegant and their remote location makes a visit a must.
▪ The women of Parma were very elegant.
▪ It had strange obtuse teeth, he thought it was part of an old church clock. Very elegant tapered spoke-arms.
▪ There must have been two dozen people there, all chattering brightly and looking very elegant.
■ NOUN
hotel
▪ Tucholsky once remarked that there were people who thought that staying in an elegant hotel made them elegant themselves.
▪ He takes the best suite in the turret of the elegant Hotel Excelsior.
house
▪ At night no light shows in the elegant houses on Srinagar's boulevards.
man
▪ He was almost the most elegant man many of them had ever seen.
▪ A thin, elegant man with shifty eyes and a high, unpleasant voice, Wood exuded a restless, hurried air.
▪ Then, plainly frantic to escape the elegant man, he punched the boat's engines into life.
restaurant
▪ Furnished to a very high standard, large elegant Restaurant with extensive menus.
▪ The Brestowskis have tried to transform the space into a more elegant restaurant, but it isn't quite that.
▪ There is an elegant restaurant and a piano bar.
▪ It houses an elegant restaurant from which the views across the Danube to the parliament building and much of Pest are magnificent.
solution
▪ It was for these reasons that a search for more elegant solutions was started in 1969-1970.
▪ I know what scientists mean when they talk about elegant solutions.
▪ This is not an elegant solution.
▪ AsiaSurf is a simple, elegant solution to a vexing software problem.
▪ One way would be: However the following example would be a more elegant solution.
surroundings
▪ The Consort Select menu and elegant surroundings.
▪ The management prides itself on offering comfortable accommodation in elegant surroundings, and puts an emphasis on providing excellent service.
▪ That's the unanimous verdict of shoppers who are impressed by the elegant surroundings, high quality shops and first rate service.
way
▪ It was slung around his shoulder in such an elegant way that it seemed a fashion accessory.
▪ Bio2 was an elegant way to do this.
▪ In the elegant way of innocent men, he accepted his gift graciously.
woman
▪ Judy, an elegant woman in her early 40s with a peaceful demeanour, bids us sit down in the verandah.
▪ Inside the elegant woman he saw a coarse one.
▪ Some of the most elegant women in London come through these doors.
▪ I date slender, elegant women.
▪ Now, remember the elegant woman, always dressed to the nines, with the infectious laugh.
▪ She is a tall, elegant woman with fine cheekbones and smooth pale skin.
▪ Marta Rita Prince de Garcia is an elegant woman with a penchant for the drama of life.
▪ Deborah was a tall, elegant woman with dark hair.
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
black/elegant etc (little) number
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ elegant handwriting
▪ All the dancers looked so elegant as they moved slowly round the room.
▪ an elegant rosewood dining table
▪ an elegant solution
▪ An elegant young woman sat at the next table, sipping a cocktail.
▪ He was a tall, elegant man, silver-haired and beautifully dressed.
▪ Her good looks and confident, elegant manner made her the centre of attention.
▪ Jody manages to look elegant, even in a simple pantsuit.
▪ She was wearing an elegant black suit.
▪ The elegant figure of Mr Reed appeared in the doorway.
▪ The house was elegant and well kept.
▪ The plain black dress set off her elegant neck.
▪ Vienna is a city of grand public buildings and elegant private ones.
▪ We first met him at an elegant hotel in the uptown district of Manhattan.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Furnished to a very high standard, large elegant Restaurant with extensive menus.
▪ Ludens also noticed her small feet, clad in expensive discreetly elegant shoes.
▪ My first impression of the hull above my head was how elegant and how travel-worn it looked.
▪ She had captured his father by promising an elegant uncluttered lifestyle very different from the neglected unhappy home he had come from.
▪ She has to be funny, touching and innately elegant.
▪ She was wearing her favourite yellow linen dress and pretty cream high-heeled shoes with Jim's pearls gleaming against her elegant neck.
▪ Tilney arrives with his sister, a more reserved and elegant girl than Isabella.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Elegant

Elegant \El"e*gant\, a. [L. elegans, -antis; akin to eligere to pick out, choose, select: cf. F. ['e]l['e]gant. See Elect.]

  1. Very choice, and hence, pleasing to good taste; characterized by grace, propriety, and refinement, and the absence of every thing offensive; exciting admiration and approbation by symmetry, completeness, freedom from blemish, and the like; graceful; tasteful and highly attractive; as, elegant manners; elegant style of composition; an elegant speaker; an elegant structure.

    A more diligent cultivation of elegant literature.
    --Prescott.

  2. Exercising a nice choice; discriminating beauty or sensitive to beauty; as, elegant taste.

    Syn: Tasteful; polished; graceful; refined; comely; handsome; richly ornamental.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
elegant

late 15c., "tastefully ornate," from Middle French élégant (15c.), from Latin elegantem (nominative elegans) "choice, fine, tasteful," collateral form of present participle of eligere "select with care, choose." Meaning "characterized by refined grace" is from 1520s. Latin elegans originally was a term of reproach, "dainty, fastidious;" the notion of "tastefully refined" emerged in classical Latin. Related: Elegantly.\n\nElegant implies that anything of an artificial character to which it is applied is the result of training and cultivation through the study of models or ideals of grace; graceful implies less of consciousness, and suggests often a natural gift. A rustic, uneducated girl may be naturally graceful, but not elegant. \n

Wiktionary
elegant

a. 1 characterized by or exhibiting elegance. 2 Characterised by minimalism and intuitiveness while preserving exactness and precision.

Related phrases:
WordNet
elegant

  1. adj. refined and tasteful in appearance or behavior or style; "elegant handwriting"; "an elegant dark suit"; "she was elegant to her fingertips"; "small churches with elegant white spires"; "an elegant mathematical solution--simple and precise and lucid" [ant: inelegant]

  2. suggesting taste, ease, and wealth [syn: graceful, refined]

  3. of seemingly effortless beauty in form or proportion

  4. refined or imposing in manner or appearance; befitting a royal court; "a courtly gentleman" [syn: courtly, formal, stately]

Related phrases:
Wikipedia
Related phrases:

Usage examples of "elegant".

There was no money in his background, no Adams fortune or elegant Adams homestead like the Boston mansion of John Hancock.

Like the others, Adams and Jefferson each signed with his own delegation, Adams on the right, in a clear and firm, plain hand, Jefferson at lower center with a signature more precise and elegant, but equally legible.

Jefferson wrote as an elegant stylist performing for a select audience, as Adams fully appreciated, telling him his letters should be published for the delight of future generations.

Donhauser, imposing in her elegant yet practical satin jumpsuit, was the Anabaptist envoy to our Hope Nation colony.

Botany had lavished there its most elegant drapery of ferns of all kinds, snap-dragons with their violet mouths and golden pistils, the blue anchusa, the brown lichens, so that the old worn stones seemed mere accessories peeping out at intervals from this fresh growth.

But there were other, more elegant, scenarios that only a handful of Company officers, Angleton foremost among them, could fathom.

Most of the restaurants in Anguilla were casual, but a few were quite elegant, and she had no idea whether her dinner companion would be wearing jeans and a T-shirt, or a sport jacket and slacks.

They descended to a long balcony set with many tables, where Hamin introduced Gurgeh - and the drone - to various people, mostly apices plus a few elegant females.

Lucian, this age of indolence passed away without having produced a single writer of original genius, or who excelled in the arts of elegant composition.

Nero himself excelled, or affected to excel, in the elegant arts of music and poetry: nor should we despise his pursuits, had he not converted the pleasing relaxation of a leisure hour into the serious business and ambition of his life.

It could have been an elegant eighteenth-century Parisian drawing room, with its Beauvias tapestry and works by Valesquez, Steen, Arthur Frick, and Cezanne on the walls, Boulle cabinet and desk, Louis XVI chairs and tables, Bohemian crystal chandelier, and enormous blood-red Bakhtiari carpet.

She reminded Banks of the kind of elegant, remote blondes that Alfred Hitchcock had cast in so many of his films.

She found an elegant black knit with subtle beadwork and a softly flaring skirt and slipped it on, then stepped into her high-heeled black pumps.

Curtis, without looking around, showed that he had noticed the befurred elderly lady and two very pretty daughters who were taking Howard Devar under their elegant wings.

As for the professor, he drove back to London, saw a handful of patients at his consulting rooms, performed a delicate and difficult brain operation at the hospital and returned to his elegant home in a backwater of Belgravia to eat his dinner and then go to his study to catch up on his post.