Glossy
adj, noun, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A glossy magazine. British, informal
"The supermarket glossies are full of celebrity gossip and fad diets."
- 2 a photograph that is printed on smooth shiny paper wordnet
- 3 A glossy photograph. informal
"His roster of patients was drawn almost exclusively from among what he liked to call creative people, chiefly writers and painters and composers, and he talked about them so freely that I sometimes half expected him to put up autographed glossies around the office, like the ones on the wall at the Stage Deli."
- 4 a magazine printed on good quality paper wordnet
- 5 A film depicting people with glamorous lifestyles. informal
"Anna Magnani has been making Hollywood glossies recently, so it was good to see her back again in a native Italian production, The Last Temptation, in which with great artistry and all her usual power she played a Nun who finds a woman's and even a mother's heart beating strongly beneath her 'sister's' habit."
- 1 Having a smooth, silklike, reflective (shiny) surface.
"glossy hair"
- 2 Attention-grabbing and superficially attractive. figuratively
"The trendy rehabs being pimped by the addiction industry's glossy PR."
- 1 superficially attractive and stylish; suggesting wealth or expense wordnet
- 2 reflecting light wordnet
- 3 (of paper and fabric and leather) having a surface made smooth and shiny especially by pressing between rollers wordnet
- 4 based on pretense; deceptively pleasing wordnet
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"This is the kind of gossip you usually find in a glossy magazine."
Etymology
From gloss + -y.
Related phrases
More for "glossy"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.