Old-worldly

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    old-fashioned, reminiscent of a bygone era.

    "David and I were not "intimate" friends. There was always a certain old-worldly formality about our interchanges. There was something professorial and distant about David, something that commanded respect, partially, I think, because he was so respectful himself."

Example

More examples

"David and I were not "intimate" friends. There was always a certain old-worldly formality about our interchanges. There was something professorial and distant about David, something that commanded respect, partially, I think, because he was so respectful himself."

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.