(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.
Gentility
Definition:
(n.) Good extraction; dignity of birth.
(n.) The quality or qualities appropriate to those who are well born, as self-respect, dignity, courage, courtesy, politeness of manner, a graceful and easy mien and behavior, etc.; good breeding.
(n.) The class in society who are, or are expected to be, genteel; the gentry.
(n.) Paganism; heathenism.
Example Sentences:
(1) Having reached the age of 76, it might be expected that Valentina Tereshkova would be planning a life of quiet gentility: a bit of gardening, perhaps, or catching up on reading.
(2) The classic European blood libel, like many other classic European creations, had a strict set of images which must always contain a cherubic Gentile child sacrificed by those perfidious Jews, his blood to be used for ritual purposes.
(3) It claimed to be the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting of Jewish leaders, in which they discussed their goal of a global plan to subvert the morals of gentiles and control the press and the global economy.
(4) Gentile da Fabriano (d 1427) in his Adoration of the Kings, demonstrates a similar response of toe extension in the infant Jesus when one of the Magi kisses the baby's foot.
(5) Slope-ratio assay analysis of the results from the present study pooled with those from a similar previous study (C. Gorenstein and V. Gentil, Psychopharmacology, 80: 376-379, 1983) indicated that these doses are non-equivalent.
(6) Brecht provides a memorable montage of life in Nazi Germany where parents live in terror of being denounced by their son and where a Jewish wife, in order to protect her gentile husband, leaves him on the pretence of taking a holiday.
(7) And so, when black South Africans voted the African National Congress (ANC) into power in 1994, the organisation's gentility and grace seemed a rebuke to these rude fears.
(8) Gentile-di-Puglia ewes had high progesterone values during the winter-spring-summer period but during autumn progesterone values were very low and oestrous behaviour was not displayed.
(9) The comparison with Ile-de-France ewes indicates that a phase shift occurs in the annual ovarian activity in ewes of the Gentile-di-Puglia breed.
(10) The colostrum samples of 8 "Gentile di Puglia" ewes in the first three milkings after calving were also collected.
(11) He liked Somerset because it was "less cleaned-up" than the home counties: as Whitfield writes, he had a hatred for "English gentility … 'snug cottages with roses around the door'".
(12) Subjects attributing their failure to religious discrimination by gentiles reported feeling more aggression, sadness, anxiety, and egotism on the Mood Adjective Check List than those who could not invoke anti-Semitism as an explanation for their failure.
(13) Once an icon of British gentility (as perceived by non-Brits), the commissariat of trench coats , scarves, and other country squire accoutrements, Burberry had lost its cachet by sticking to a taste-numbing repetition.
(14) The scene at the count was a perfect picture of the brisk gentility by which Britain's broken electoral system conducts itself.
(15) The author is amazed at Dr. Holmes' characterization of a marriage between gentile and Jew as an act of morality.
(16) Phillip Goodall’s removes the agency of Jews to discuss antisemitism, as gentiles have often done historically, by stating that Jews can be victimisers themselves when they call out antisemitism.
(17) More modern changes - red cards for professional fouls and no tackling from behind (to combat Claudio Gentile, Vinnie Jones and their ilk), and the revised backpass rule (introduced after a World Cup-record low of 2.21 goals per game in Italia 90) - have all come after this same process: exploitation, then correction.
(18) Despite the opening of German universities to Jews in the 1860s, they were restricted to fields not attractive to their gentile colleagues, e.g.
(19) With some of the refereeing being abominable, there might just be a chance of someone in the Italian team doing the sort of job on Luis Suarez tonight that Claudio Gentile famously did on Diego Maradona back in 1982, after which Gentile blithely declared: "Football isn't for ballerinas".
(20) From Kenneth Williams to Tom Allen, there has always been a market for effeminate stylings allied to a waspish, holier-than-thou gentility.