twee
/twiː
/adjective (tweer /ˈtwiːə/, tweest /ˈtwiːɪst/) British
Excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental: although the film’s a bit twee, it’s watchable...
- The restaurant is spacious and pretty without being twee and the adjoining low-ceilinged pub is comfy, cosy and welcoming.
- The shops are twee and cute and sell a million varieties of soap; you could browse for a lifetime upgrading your T-shirt collection.
- The one ride I know that is incredibly twee and sweet is called ‘Its a Small World’.
Synonyms
quaint, sweet, bijou, dainty, pretty, pretty-pretty
informal cute, cutesy
sentimental, over-sentimental, mawkish, affected, precious
British informal soppy
Derivatives
tweely
- Even more vomit-inducing is a particularly distressing variant of the little yellow sign that proudly but tweely proclaims ‘Small Person On Board’.
- The Tea room is a converted farm out - building which has a terrace outside and a rather tweely decorated interior.
- But they were tweely sweet and in keeping with the old world charm of Hertford.
tweeness
- The tiny hotel, technically a ‘restaurant with rooms’ as it has only five of them, is a haven of oak-beamed loveliness without an ounce of tweeness to spoil it.
- Every detail of the plot reeks of tweeness, and the score never quite decides whether it is intended as a fairy-tale operetta or a light-hearted musical.
- More to the point, there was none of the provincial tweeness I had expected to find, only a bright but welcoming interior and a menu that made the mouth water.
Origin
Early 20th century: representing a child's pronunciation of sweet.
A child's pronunciation of sweet, recorded from the first decade of the 20th century. Originally twee was as complimentary as sweet, now it is intended as an insult, meaning ‘excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental’.