What's the difference between elegant and genteel?

Elegant


Definition:

  • (a.) 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.) Exercising a nice choice; discriminating beauty or sensitive to beauty; as, elegant taste.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Today, she wears an elegant salmon-pink blouse with white trousers and a long, pale pink coat.
  • (2) Rather than an off-plan Oxshott monster-mansion, he moved his family to an elegant Eaton Terrace townhouse in south-west London.
  • (3) She followed that with a job at Bibendum – she still talks of Simon Hopkinson, "such an elegant cook, so particular and clean and efficient", with deep reverence – and another at Roscoff in Northern Ireland.
  • (4) It's typically sober and elegant, and Cotillard excels in a nervy, vulnerable role.
  • (5) Yet, in spite of this restriction, the 2-mu plasmid of yeast has evolved an elegant mechanism which can allow it to rapidly amplify its copy number without initiating multiple rounds of replication.
  • (6) It is readily expressed as clinical sensitivity and specificity, and elegantly represented by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve.
  • (7) And there is plenty of beauty in London - seeing Parliament Square in the snow, the dome of St Paul's rising above the City, the simple perfection of a Georgian terrace or the quietly elegant streets of Mayfair.
  • (8) The portion of my sample prawn orzo was a modest but polished plate of food, the dense bisque and silky grains of pasta elegantly punctuated by small bursts of tart, sweet semi-dried tomato.
  • (9) He believed that western liberal democracy, with its elegant balance of liberty and equality, could not be bettered; that its attainment would lead to a general calming in world affairs; and that in the long run it would be the only credible game in town.
  • (10) Total-Body Scanner is rather an elegant method but a discontinuous one.
  • (11) Foundas also praises Magic's photography, calling its "elegantly choreographed traveling master shots bathed in natural light" a key part of "one of his most beautifully made films."
  • (12) It is the latest in a series of sculpture commissions to occupy the elegant neoclassical galleries, which stretch back 86 metres from the museum's main entrance on the banks of the Thames.
  • (13) Sean Ingle Wimbledon No one has broken Roger Federer’s serve at these championships, let alone taken a set, and the appreciative midsummer murmurs from No1 Court as the seven-times Wimbledon champion elegantly dissected Tommy Robredo suggested they believe he retains the game to win a record eighth title.
  • (14) The intricate wood carving, the elegant furniture, the panelled walls, the grand entrance hall and the cantilevered stairs are undeniably impressive.
  • (15) Whenever I read Philip French's elegant and thoughtful criticism, I felt like I was in the company of someone who not only loved cinema but who felt a sense of responsibility toward it as an art form.
  • (16) It was not an elegant parting, as Christine Bleakley was pushed out by the BBC on Sunday afternoon , leaving ITV to scramble a contract together for her to sign two hours later.
  • (17) It positioned Kelela as a significant new vocalist, her phrasing indebted to pop but somehow elegantly haunting.
  • (18) The unfairly maligned camel is a model of sleek, practical and elegant design compared with the clumsy creature the coalition has produced.
  • (19) The idea that huge, intractable social issues such as sexism and racism could be affected in such simple ways had a powerful intuitive appeal, and hinted at the possibility of equally simple, elegant solutions.
  • (20) The Elegance room – it sounds like a department of Harrods – sets the grand social portraits of Rubens alongside artists they “influenced”.

Genteel


Definition:

  • (a.) Possessing or exhibiting the qualities popularly regarded as belonging to high birth and breeding; free from vulgarity, or lowness of taste or behavior; adapted to a refined or cultivated taste; polite; well-bred; as, genteel company, manners, address.
  • (a.) Graceful in mien or form; elegant in appearance, dress, or manner; as, the lady has a genteel person. Law.
  • (a.) Suited to the position of lady or a gentleman; as, to live in a genteel allowance.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Cleeve Hill was once the site of a 'bawdy' racecourse, before it was moved down the hill into genteel Cheltenham.
  • (2) While the opening tranche of "tales" derive from the work of forgotten contemporary humorists, the pieces of London reportage that he began to contribute to the Morning Chronicle in autumn 1834 ("Gin Shops", "Shabby-Genteel People", "The Pawnbroker's Shop") are like nothing else in pre-Victorian journalism: bantering and hard-headed by turns, hectic and profuse, falling over themselves to convey every last detail of the metropolitan front-line from which Dickens sent back his dispatches.
  • (3) An hour north of Paris in genteel Chantilly, England have prepared in unusually low-key fashion two years after a humiliating World Cup in which they were sent packing after two matches.
  • (4) Gustave's beatific smile and genteel demeanour work harmoniously with the purple hotel uniforms (Anderson does love a man in uniform).
  • (5) How popular would "Boris Island" – the mayor's fantasy airport in the Thames estuary – be in Clacton and genteel Frinton?
  • (6) From the late 1950s to the 1970s, the new, subsidised British drama was making waves at the Royal Court Theatre and in the regions - and finding critical support from commentators weary of the genteel West End theatre.
  • (7) Last week, the UK Statistics Authority gave him a reprimand that broke from the genteel language of the civil service.
  • (8) They signed Bush expressly as the first major British female exponent of this genteel genre.
  • (9) It is another to be given a genteel kicking by David Hare (who wrote in this newspaper last week that the Labour leader was worse than Neil Kinnock).
  • (10) Today Paris is still the different cities encapsulated by Hugo and Manet; Manet's chic Left Bank haunts are as fashionable and relatively genteel as 150 years ago.
  • (11) The wild, unstable undercliff on the Dorset-Devon border provided John Fowles with the perfect landscape to contrast with the genteel world of Lyme Regis in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (“In summer it is the nearest this country can offer to a tropical jungle”).
  • (12) This being a story about powerful, litigious people, it was composed in befittingly genteel terms; the pair are described as having a "friendship".
  • (13) It's a sleepy little town, beloved by genteel visitors who come for its microclimate – said to be 3C warmer than the rest of France – and exotic gardens.
  • (14) Norbert Smith: A Life was a brilliant satirical one-off on the history of British cinema through the eyes of a genteel luvvie who had seen it all, from 30s Will Hay comedies through to swinging 60s thrillers.
  • (15) There, his mother, in her mid-30s, dressed in a spotless white blouse, and with a Lady Diana-like haircut, was reading a newspaper and sipping from a genteel white teacup.
  • (16) She was born Muriel Camberg to a Jewish engineer father and an English, music-teacher mother, in the genteel Edinburgh inner suburb of Bruntsfield.
  • (17) But in the summer of 1983 this genteel corner, bypassed by shoppers and tourists, found itself a focus of national interest.
  • (18) An acrimonious divorce, scandal over a young model and nude photos at pool parties – Silvio Berlusconi's family traumas might not seem the ideal backdrop for the genteel spouses' programme at a G8 summit.
  • (19) And the genteel visitors who first inspected it had no means of knowing that even as expert an anatomist as Stubbs had got some details wrong.
  • (20) In the genteel, cultivated and fashionable crowd, Manet painted himself and his friends: the poets Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, and composer Jacques Offenbach.