penny-dreadfulish

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English

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Etymology

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From penny dreadful +‎ -ish.

Adjective

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penny-dreadfulish (comparative more penny-dreadfulish, superlative most penny-dreadfulish)

  1. Resembling or characteristic of a penny dreadful.
    • 1913, Doris Egerton Jones, Pied Piper, George W. Jacobs & Company, page 254:
      She has been quite penny-dreadfulish-sword-and-mask mysterious lately; she goes about with her lips pursed up and a sparkle in her eye.
    • 1936, Barnaby Ross, Drury Lane's Last Case, republished, March 1946, as by Ellery Queen, Little, Brown, page 250:
      But if Sedlar and Ales aren't the same, then there's only one conclusion to come to: they bear an uncanny resemblance to each other! We've been evading that conclusion because it seems—er—pulpy and penny-dreadfulish; but you can't get around it.
    • 2009 October 22, Jan Stuart, “Fiction Chronicle”, in The New York Times:
      "Dracula the Un-Dead” forsakes the epistolary format of its forebear in favor of a penny-dreadfulish narrative pitting the first book’s surviving characters against a monomaniacal vampire countess.