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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
frippery
noun
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Hotel managers refused to install cable TV and other fripperies that would distract clients from gambling.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Still think of perfume as a frivolous frippery?
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Frippery

Frippery \Frip"per*y\, n. [F. friperie, fr. fruper. See Fripper.]

  1. Coast-off clothes. [Obs.]
    --B. Jonson.

  2. Hence: Secondhand finery; cheap and tawdry decoration; affected elegance.

    Fond of gauze and French frippery.
    --Goldsmith.

    The gauzy frippery of a French translation.
    --Sir W. Scott.

  3. A place where old clothes are sold.
    --Shak.

  4. The trade or traffic in old clothes.

Frippery

Frippery \Frip"per*y\, a. Trifling; contemptible.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
frippery

1560s, "old clothes, cast-off garments," from Middle French friperie "old clothes, an old clothes shop," from Old French freperie, feuperie "old rags, rubbish, old clothes" (13c.), from frepe, feupe "fringe; rags, old clothes," from Late Latin faluppa "chip, splinter, straw, fiber." The notion is of "things worn down, clothes rubbed to rags." The ironic meaning "finery" (but with overtones of tawdriness) dates from 1630s.

Wiktionary
frippery

n. 1 Ostentation, as in fancy clothing. 2 Useless things; trifles. 3 (context obsolete English) Cast-off clothes. 4 (context obsolete English) The trade or traffic in old clothes. 5 (context obsolete English) The place where old clothes are sold. 6 Hence: secondhand finery; cheap and tawdry decoration; affected elegance.

WordNet
frippery

n. something of little value or significance [syn: bagatelle, fluff, frivolity]

Usage examples of "frippery".

Her eyes looked into his, and hair erected on the back of his neck when he saw the emptiness of her formerly lively pupils, a dreadful, soulless emptiness that made her no longer interested in masculine small-talk, feminine fripperies or any of her oldtime conversational subjects.

Below the postmodern fripperies of its entrance, down in the railway station at its base, a train discharged its next batch of commuters.

The two vahines, according to the way of vahines, got together in a discussion and examination of feminine fripperies, while Tehei and I, manlike, went over fishing-tackle and wild-pig-hunting, to say nothing of the device whereby bonitas are caught on forty-foot poles from double canoes.

But, some silken-clad smoothers, some purple parasites, some fawners in frippery, some greedy and begartered ones in gorgeous garments, he does impeach--ay, and wrathfully!

Its buildings are plain, Spartan, almost naked for an eye used to the frippery of today's architectural style, but they are perfectly designed to carry out the functions they are destined for, to teach and to learn.

He had a much finer glass, presented to him along with his fancy-but-useless admiral's sword, in admonition that he would, henceforth, be watching things rather than actually doing things, but he had never once so much as put the gilded piece of frippery to his bad eye.

Molotov wondered how many Furries would be imported into the Soviet Union, and what sort of demand for such fripperies they would create among the majority who would not prove able to get their hands on them.

Jim perused the familiar trappings, the furniture, the fripperies, the odds and sods.

I doubt very much if he has any time to spare for such fripperies as public meetings and ratifications and discussions on the true meaning of a peach in the best liberal mode.

With an abundant supply of good dwarven ale nearby - Kethol was never sure if there was some magic involved, but it was consistently better than any humans brewed - it was clear that the local human brewers had only one mandate: make the beer as cheaply as possible, treating such things as good barley, unrotted hops, and washing out the vats in between batches as unnecessary fripperies.