Meaning of overgrand | Babel Free

Definitions

Excessively grand.

Examples

“It is a grand work, overgrand for the state of the people, for the minimum section of the canal in the first 75 miles has a 90-feet bottom breadth, and the great desideratum in the Ceded Districts is irrigation.”

“Miss Marigold, however, was no longer young, while Tibbie had been young as a first summer bird. Miss Marigold was to wear the uninteresting garments which so many brides wore now, but Tibbie herself had been dressed in white. Not satin, of course, or a wreath, or the overgrand ornament of a veil — both Tibbie and her mother were too sensible for that. But nobody who had seen Tibbie that day, whether in London or Timbuctoo, would have been stupid enough to take her for anything but a bride.”

“At the head of each chapter are one or two quotations from Byron, Keats and Shelley — from no one else: and Woodhouse and I think his lordship does not look overgrand in such company. Woodhouse also thinks that these quotations in so popular a book will be of great service to the fame of Keats...”

“The house is to be built low, so that one need not climb stairs all day, wood rather than stone to be used in construction, since the house need not last forever, and special attention to be paid to the orientation — that is, openness to the sun on all sides. Emerson’s practical sense of building appears in his criticism of flats he visited in Philadelphia and New York, where light entered only from front or rear, leaving the inner chambers dark. He takes note also of the sacrifice of convenience in some houses to a piazza, or an overgrand staircase; even of such mundane matters as ill-built chimneys and leaking cellars.”

“He was an artist, a good one; and though the galleries may neglect him and the historians of art pass him with a polite or a condescending paragraph, and though his mountains may be a little overgrand, his canyons overawesome, his skies unnecessarily dramatic, his art is recognizably of this earth and this West.”

“His guest was also happy to get for the first time a fairly accurate picture of the island economy in, to use an overgrand phrase, the “private sector.””

CEFR level