felicitous
/fɪˈlɪsɪtəs
/adjective
1Well chosen or suited to the circumstances: a felicitous phrase...
- Despite the messiness inherent in natural systems, evolution has produced ‘machines of extreme perfection,’ to use Darwin's felicitous phrase.
- Has there ever been an economist with a more felicitous turn of phrase?
- Perhaps because Thérèse stands, to borrow Oscar Wilde's felicitous phrase (which he applied to himself), in symbolic relation to the culture of her age.
Synonyms
apt, well chosen, well expressed, well put, choice, fitting, suitable, appropriate, apposite, pertinent, germane, to the point, relevant, congruous, apropos
informal spot on
1.1Pleasing and fortunate: the view was the room’s only felicitous feature...
- Well-known as a felicitous writer of amusing features, he was just hitting his stride as a serious and ambitious chronicler of the political convulsions seizing the Islamic world.
- This makes it a happy hunting ground for anyone with the felicitous habit of looking at the lighter side of life.
- Finally, there remains the option of teaching taste - of training the bureaucracy in a felicitous mode of embodied expression and educating the polity to appreciate and respond to it.
Synonyms
fortunate, advantageous, good, favourable, lucky, happy, pleasing, encouraging
Derivatives
felicitously
/ adverb ...- The scope and content of judicial review involves, at its core, an issue of what Chief Justice Gleeson has felicitously called ‘judicial legitimacy’.
- It seems to be one of those pleasingly happy endings to a story that might have turned out far less felicitously, for although he may now be the benevolent patriarch, Gabriel has led a famously complicated personal life.
- Forest and tundra are spaced so felicitously that, in fact, one can set up camp in either place without having to hike too far or too little on any given day.
felicitousness
- The felicitousness of a literary utterance might thus involve its relation to the conventions of a genre.