You might be tempted to turn the radio dial when you hear a love song that is saccharine, meaning that it’s too sweet and sentimental to bear.
- Pronunciation: / 'sækəraɪn; -ɪn; -iːn/
- English description: overly sweet
- a cloth used as a head covering (and veil and shawl) by Muslim and Hindu women
- Synonyms: cloying
- Chinese Translation: 极甜的(ji2 tian2 de)
- Spanish Translation: empalagoso(a)
- ORIGIN: The adjective saccharine comes from the Middle Latin word forsugar. Saccharine is a type of sugar substitute that you might sprinkle on your cereal or berries to sweeten them without the calories of real sugar. The word is used to describe something so sweet that it’s annoying — like a very sentimental song or a tear-jerking commercial.
EXAMPLE SENTENCE:
- It was a scene straight out of a saccharine, unimaginative romantic comedy; in other words … it was perfect.
- Perhaps more to the point, ersatz re-creations of long-destroyed architecture or landscape architecture almost always turn out to feel saccharine and flimsy.
*New word description, story and part of "EXAMPLE SENTENCE" are cited in Vocabulary
Song of the Week: <Hey There Delilah>