During a series of interviews, Franzen expressed ambivalence about Oprah’s endorsement—[…] that he had found a few of her choices in the past “schmaltzy” and “one-dimensional.”
Source: wiktionary
Schmaltzy
//ˈʃmɒltsi//
Synonyms for "schmaltzy" (37 found)
Ranked by relevance and common usage.
Closest matches (8)
Strong matches (11)
Related words (18)
Related word relations
OpenGloss and ConceptNet supply richer edges like generalizations, collocations, and derivations.
Synonyms
1 entriesderived
2 entriesderived from
1 entriesrelated to
5 entriessimilar
1 entriesTranslations
11 translations across 5 languages.
French
2 entries- larmoyant adj (overly sentimental, emotional, maudlin or bathetic)
- tire-larmes adj (overly sentimental, emotional, maudlin or bathetic)
German
3 entries- larmoyant adj (overly sentimental, emotional, maudlin or bathetic)
- rührselig adj (overly sentimental, emotional, maudlin or bathetic)
- schmalzig adj (overly sentimental, emotional, maudlin or bathetic)
Greek
1 entries- σαχλός adj (overly sentimental, emotional, maudlin or bathetic)
Russian
3 entries- сентимента́льный adj (overly sentimental, emotional, maudlin or bathetic)
- слаща́вый adj (overly sentimental, emotional, maudlin or bathetic)
- слезли́вый adj (overly sentimental, emotional, maudlin or bathetic)
Swedish
2 entries- sliskig adj (overly sentimental, emotional, maudlin or bathetic)
- tårdrypande adj (overly sentimental, emotional, maudlin or bathetic)
Sample sentences
3 total sentences available.
“In France, it has the reputation of being a typically American mixture of clichés and of schmaltz,” he wrote in an email. “Clichés about us don’t interest us, and the French are not very schmaltzy.”
Source: wiktionary
As well as singing a lively Christmas number for the first time in a film (a good use of his country music success), Sutherland shares a schmaltzy waltz with Wilson: “It was a bit foreign for both of us but I think we had fun.”
Source: wiktionary
Keep exploring
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.