Finery
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Fineness; beauty. countable, obsolete, uncountable
- 2 elaborate or showy attire and accessories wordnet
- 3 Ornament; decoration; especially, excessive decoration; showy clothes; jewels. countable
"The city also shone through the luxury of the higher castes: in the fineries of their dress, the rich manner of their living, their many servants, silver table services, and showy furnishings."
- 4 fine point; minute characteristic countable, uncountable
"the translator should master the language he translates from as thoroughly as his mother tongue, knowing all its fineries"
- 5 A charcoal hearth or furnace for the conversion of cast iron into wrought iron, or into iron suitable for puddling. countable, uncountable
"In front of the finery hearth in which the sow is melted down again, the finer is working with a long iron bar called a ringer (from French 'ringard') with which he keeps the molten iron in motion by stirring, an essential stage in the process of refining."
Example
More examples"She got home, but quite out of breath, without her carriage, and in her old clothes, having nothing left her of all her finery but one of the little slippers, fellow to the one she had dropped."
More for "finery"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.