mawkish

English

Alternative forms

• maukish (obsolete)

Etymology

From mawk +‎ -ish.

Pronunciation

• (UK, US) IPA^(key): /ˈmɔːkɪʃ/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• (cot–caught merger) IPA^(key): /ˈmɑːkɪʃ/
• Rhymes: -ɔːkɪʃ

Adjective

mawkish (comparative more mawkish, superlative most mawkish)

1. Excessively or falsely sentimental; showing a sickly excess of sentiment.

   Synonyms: cutesy, maudlin, schmaltzy, sickly-sweet, slushy, mushy, soppy, treacly

   Antonym: rational

   • 2014 August 11, Dave Itzkoff, “Robin Williams, Oscar-Winning Comedian, Dies at 63 in Suspected Suicide”, in New York Times‎:

     Some of Mr. Williams’s performances were criticized for a mawkish sentimentality, like “Patch Adams,” a 1998 film that once again cast him as a good-hearted doctor, and “Bicentennial Man,” a 1999 science-fiction feature in which he played an android.

   • 2019 May 12, Adrian Searle, “Mawkish monuments and the beach from hell: our verdict on the Venice Biennale”, in The Guardian‎:

     I found [Christoph] Buchel’s appropriation of the boat in which so many migrants lost their lives a vile and mawkish spectacle in the context of the biennale.

   • 2022 April 5, Tina Brown, “How Princess Diana’s Dance With the Media Impacted William and Harry”, in Vanity Fair‎:

     The tabloids branded him James Hewitt forevermore as the “love rat,” and Pasternak was excoriated for peddling mawkish fantasy.

     (Adapted from the book The Palace Papers, published 2022 by Penguin Books.)

   • 2023 August 28, Jay Foreman, 10:23 from the start, in Why British cities make no sense‎, spoken by Mark Cooper-Jones, via YouTube, archived from the original on 15 July 2024:

     After all, a vague, archaic, mostly harmless tradition fraught with pomp and ceremony and mawkish self-aggrandising with a bit of royalty thrown in is about the most British thing imaginable and would never happen in a boring sensible country like Germany.

2. (archaic or dialectal) Feeling sick, queasy.
3. (archaic) Sickening or insipid in taste or smell.

Derived terms

• mawkishly
• mawkishness
• unmawkish

Anagrams

• hawkism