(n.) A forked tool used by clothiers in dressing cloth.
(n.) To dress with, or as with, a preen; to trim or dress with the beak, as the feathers; -- said of birds.
(n.) To trim up, as trees.
Example Sentences:
(1) "Anne Hathaway at least tried to sing and dance and preen along to the goings on, but Franco seemed distant, uninterested and content to keep his Cheshire-cat-meets-smug smile on display throughout."
(2) His running here was unstinting and he doubled his tally with a clinical finish after a first touch too smart for Pogatetz, preening perhaps after giving Boro a sniff of reprieve.
(3) Having started out preening (he tells a former colleague that he lives "the life of Riley"), he ends up howling alone on a small rock, the decision to adorn himself with a beautiful young wife having stolen his stature, robbed him of his dignity.
(4) What's more, his genial stiffness and shy self-awareness give him a kind of awkward dignity compared to the preening smugness of Cruz.
(5) He remembers Obama's incoming cabinet posing for portraits in the White House during the height of the crisis: “what a weird and preening thing for us to do while the world is burning”.
(6) 'Jonathan Saunders, Preen, Berardi, Kane and JW Anderson are on fire' Those are the names you will be raving about now.
(7) Romney's event is being organised by Scott Preen, a London company that specialises in high-profile political fundraising parties.
(8) If the Packham show emphasised a disconnect between the fashion industry's quest for trends and pure red carpet dressing, then the Preen show later in the day underlined how a move to the US can give a British label a healthy dollop of slickness.
(9) At best, these corporate-dominated panels are mostly useless: preening sessions in which chief executives exercise messiah complexes.
(10) Total lipid was extracted from chicken (Gallus domesticus) epidermis, leg scale, claws, feathers and preen glands and analyzed by quantitative thin-layer chromatography.
(11) Comparatively higher activity was observed in the extent of ambulation and rearing at 5 weeks old, rearing and preening at 7 weeks old, and preening and defecation at 11 weeks old in the Sprague-Dawley rats compared with the Wistar rats.
(12) In his preening, know-it-all professional arrogance, Cruise thinks he's bulletproof, but the mouse roars, and the hitman pays (incidentally, when casting a soullessly efficient, emotionally unavailable professional, could there be a more perfect candidate than Cruise?).
(13) The animals showed depressed response of preening on day 2 and 6.
(14) In 1909, the American illustrator Rose O’Neill drew a comic strip about “kewpies” (taken from cupid) – preening babylike creatures with tiny wings and huge heads, which were handed out as carnival prizes and capered around Jell-O ads (to this day, Kewpie Mayonnaise, introduced in 1925, is the top-selling brand in Japan).
(15) Trichobilharzia ocellata cercariae attach readily to the foot skin of their duck host, but poorly to preen-gland contents.
(16) Jane, a journalist in her 40s, thinks so: "I won't stay long in the weights room," she says: "The men are preening themselves.
(17) In the short-term, times spent feeding, drinking and preening decreased.
(18) Daily decrease was observed in ambulation, rearing and preening responses, with maximum decrement on the seventh day of Dimecron intoxication.
(19) From day 9, the preening response exhibited a continuous increasing pattern until the last day of the experiment.
(20) Power is meaningless unless it’s displayed, enacted: hence Vladimir Putin’s bare-chested preening or his sessions of bone-crushing judo .
Swanky
Definition:
(n.) An active and clever young fellow.
Example Sentences:
(1) For developers and their dependent ecosystem of estate agents, architects, lawyers and builders, it has been a one-way super-bet.” About £15bn of investment is pouring into the Nine Elms area, which is directly across the river from super-swanky Chelsea but was until recently wasteland, sheds and warehouses.
(2) Yet the enemy of the bourgeoisie is impeccably bourgeois, and when I arrived for our meeting at a swanky hotel near the Arc de Triomphe, I found Haneke – just off a flight from Vienna, where he lives – tucking into a luxurious lunch in the restaurant.
(3) The swanky Royal Harbour (a title bestowed on it by George IV in 1821) and marina (where you can get your fish and chips and ice-creams) is right next door and there are children's rides on the beach itself.
(4) While the parcel cleared customs (expected to take three days) the men insisted Bowles stay in their swanky apartment in Goa and she was accompanied at all times.
(5) Transport for London, which runs the capital's tubes and buses, originally committed itself to relocating to swanky new space in the Shard, but eventually pulled out, with the consent of the building's owners.
(6) As well as swanky estate agents and yacht builders, all this is music to the ears of the big jewellers, auction houses and most prestigious wine estates.
(7) To the aesthete Guardian, the average City trader looks pretty ugly because they drive swanky cars and are spivs,” he tells me, “but you should respect the mores and the facts.” I promise to try.
(8) In some ways Co-op has all the accoutrements of big business: a swanky new £100m head office in central Manchester, glass-fronted and cylindrical, and big pay cheques for its bosses.
(9) Years ago I went out to a swanky birthday dinner, with set menu, which included some flat bits of pinky slime.
(10) As a result, he was able to buy the swanky vicarage in a Berkshire village that he still lives in.
(11) Or rather the London of bankers, lawyers and media folk who can afford to go to swanky restaurants.
(12) Furthermore, the swanky new developments planned for the manmade islands are being marketed not just at affluent Indonesians but, with a particular thrust, at overseas Chinese buyers from Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and mainland China, via aspirational television advertising that gushes in Mandarin about the vision of a “new lifestyle” in Pluit City.
(13) They’re both self-made, consider themselves the smartest guy in any room, have eponymous foundations (although Turnbull’s doesn’t tend to buy portraits of him), and both prefer their swanky personal residences than the ones the taxpayer has provided.
(14) There is no queue at the club-like wooden doors and just a few families are making use of the swanky and sizable (28m x 10m) pool.
(15) Beach towels at the swanky Fontainebleau Hotel have been embroidered with the words ‘kiss me’ from one of her pieces in her honour.
(16) Seated in a semi-swanky London hotel bar, the man opposite is a benign and playful presence, joshing that he'd like a gin and tonic (despite it being 11.30am), spying Cameron Diaz on the front of InStyle magazine and crying, "Look, they've put me on the cover!"
(17) After the Wall Street Crash in 1929, the family had to swap swanky London for rural Kent – though, as Trumpington admits, this new "poverty" was relative.
(18) They quaffed aperitifs at a swanky dinner in Brussels, where each table was named after a frightening enemy – from Godzilla and Darth Vader to Lord Voldemort and Doctor No .
(19) The same, stifling July heat does not reach the swanky air-conditioned rooms where the advocates and executors of India’s new industrial corridors are based.
(20) Venice is now firmly on the calendar of this new art world, alongside St Barts at Christmas and St Tropez in August, in a giddy round of glamour-filled socialising, from one swanky party to another.