GAIETY

Pronunciation (US): (GB):

I. (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A festive merry feeling

Synonyms:

gaiety; playfulness

Classified under:

Nouns denoting feelings and emotions

Hypernyms ("gaiety" is a kind of...):

levity (feeling an inappropriate lack of seriousness)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A gay feeling

Synonyms:

gaiety; merriment

Classified under:

Nouns denoting feelings and emotions

Hypernyms ("gaiety" is a kind of...):

happiness (emotions experienced when in a state of well-being)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "gaiety"):

glee; gleefulness; hilarity; mirth; mirthfulness (great merriment)

jocularity; jocundity (a feeling facetious merriment)

jolliness; jollity; joviality (feeling jolly and jovial and full of good humor)

Credits

Context examples:

The shock, however, being less real than the relief, offered it no injury; and she began to talk with easy gaiety of the delightful melancholy which such a grove inspired.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

Hosts loved to detain the dry lawyer, when the light-hearted and loose-tongued had already their foot on the threshold; they liked to sit a while in his unobtrusive company, practising for solitude, sobering their minds in the man’s rich silence after the expense and strain of gaiety.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

He sees difficulties nowhere: and his pleasantness and gaiety will be a constant support to you.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

I am in a fine mood for gaiety.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

Some turn in the road, some new object suddenly perceived and recognised, reminded me of days gone by, and were associated with the lighthearted gaiety of boyhood.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

Her mind seemed wholly taken up with reminiscences of past gaiety, and aspirations after dissipations to come.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Every thing was too recent for gaiety, but the evening passed tranquilly away; there was no longer anything material to be dreaded, and the comfort of ease and familiarity would come in time.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

If I tacitly checked this playfulness, and persisted, she would look so scared and disconsolate, as she became more and more bewildered, that the remembrance of her natural gaiety when I first strayed into her path, and of her being my child-wife, would come reproachfully upon me; and I would lay the pencil down, and call for the guitar.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

When it came to such a pitch as this, she was not able to refrain from a start, or a heavy sigh, or even from walking about the room for a few seconds—and the only source whence any thing like consolation or composure could be drawn, was in the resolution of her own better conduct, and the hope that, however inferior in spirit and gaiety might be the following and every future winter of her life to the past, it would yet find her more rational, more acquainted with herself, and leave her less to regret when it were gone.