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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
ostentatious
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a big, ostentatious engagement ring
▪ an ostentatious lifestyle
▪ I thought of framing the letter, but that would be ostentatious.
▪ Stretch limousines were an ostentatious symbol of wealth in the '80s.
▪ They built themselves huge, ostentatious houses.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Janir chose skiing, which like so many sports was laced with posturing and attitude and ostentatious display.
▪ New Yorkers drank too much, entertained too lavishly, and were ostentatious and wasteful with money.
▪ Sean Scully is one senior abstract painter whose work is both personal and ostentatious.
▪ She cobbled together a rough draft and then rewrote it, trying to remove the more ostentatious signs of plagiarism.
▪ The Fromes were certainly among the smartest parents present that evening, though in no ostentatious way.
▪ The most ostentatious team in professional sports made the decision to play football and let the histrionics take care of themselves.
▪ The plantation-style home is comfortable, not ostentatious, furnishings a rustic combination of flea market antiques and Storehouse chic.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Ostentatious

Ostentatious \Os`ten*ta"tious\, a. Fond of, or evincing, ostentation; unduly conspicuous; pretentious; boastful.

Far from being ostentatious of the good you do.
--Dryden.

The ostentatious professions of many years.
--Macaulay. [1913 Webster] -- Os`ten*ta"tious*ly, adv. -- Os`ten*ta"tious*ness, n.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
ostentatious

1701, from ostentation + -ous. Earlier in a similar sense were ostentative (c.1600); ostentive (1590s). Related: Ostentatiously; ostentatiousness (1650s).

Wiktionary
ostentatious

a. 1 Of ostentation. 2 Intended to attract notice. 3 Of tawdry display; kitsch.

WordNet
ostentatious
  1. adj. intended to attract notice and impress others; "an ostentatious sable coat" [syn: pretentious] [ant: unostentatious]

  2. of a display that is tawdry or vulgar [syn: pretentious, kitsch]

Usage examples of "ostentatious".

The government resisted this, and Lord John Eussell, with a tone of ridicule and acrimony, offered the motion an ostentatious opposition.

Upon the Protestant dissenters of England he poured loud and eloquent praise when he was agitating for Roman Catholic emancipation, as the English dissenters gave an ostentatious support to that movement.

He nodded at the emblems that had told him that she indeed followed feng shui diligently: an ostentatious bracelet of nine Chinese coins, a pin in the likeness of the homely goddess Guan Yin and a scarf with black fish on it.

Two days later, Erasmus stood inside an amazingly transformed incarnation of the mutable Central Spire, which now stood as an ostentatious golden-domed palace.

Erasmus stood inside an amazingly transformed incarnation of the mutable Central Spire, which now stood as an ostentatious golden-domed palace.

Eleanor often described Lady Renable as frivolous and ostentatious, and it was not an inaccurate description.

He soon left us, and after the Opera I saw him with the Duke of Haverfield, one of the most incorrigible roues of the day, leading out a woman of notoriously bad character and of the most ostentatious profligacy.

The car was ugly, impractical, ostentatious, uneconomical and badly designed for city driving, but it was expensive.

Brian Boru had used it as his audience chamber as well as his banqueting hall, calculatedly awing visitors with an ostentatious display of gold cups and bejeweled goblets on every table in the room.

He considered gold inlay for the squiggles and doohickii, but the thingumbob was too intricate for goldwork, and a gold quid would seem ostentatious.

Love, for her, is above all things, and by its very nature, a vainglorious, brazen-fronted, ostentatious, thriftless charlatan.

Such are the circumstances of this ostentatious and improbable relation, dictated, as it too plainly appears, by the vanity of the monarch, adorned by the unblushing servility of his flatterers, and received without contradiction by a distant and obsequious senate.

Some slight disturbances, though they were suppressed almost as soon as excited, in Syria and the frontiers of Armenia, afforded the enemies of the church a very plausible occasion to insinuate, that those troubles had been secretly fomented by the intrigues of the bishops, who had already forgotten their ostentatious professions of passive and unlimited obedience.

Even by Constantinopolitan standards it was an opulent, if not ostentatious, abode.

I think: that his language is ostentatious, his tone cornball and melodramatic, his selection of facts preposterously self-serving.