What is vapid

There is no gilt, no mock modesty in his style; there is to vapid sentimentalism in the ideas he expounds. I would not barter one hour of such thoughts—chimerical though they may be—for ten years of this vapid , surface life.

For the first time he did not admire it very much; for the first time he found it a trifle soulless and vapid. New Word List Word List. Save This Word! See synonyms for vapid on Thesaurus. See antonyms for vapid on Thesaurus. Word in Definition. Princeton's WordNet 1. Wiktionary 5. Etymology: From vapidus. Webster Dictionary 0. Chambers 20th Century Dictionary 0. Alex US English.

David US English. Mark US English. Daniel British. Libby British. Then away goes the brisk and pleasant Spirits and leave a vapid or sour Drink. So wrote John Mortimer, an early 18th-century expert on agriculture, orchards, and cider-making, in his book on husbandry. His use was typical for his day, when vapid was often used specifically in reference to liquor. The term, which entered English in the 17th century, comes from vapidus, a Latin word that means "flat-tasting" and may be related to vapor.

These days, you're likely to hear people referring to wine as vapid. You're likely to hear the word in plenty of other situations, too.

Vapid, along with the synonyms insipid, flat, and inane, is often used to describe people and things that lack spirit and character. These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'vapid.

Send us feedback. See more words from the same year. As the hearings began for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan Accessed 12 Nov. See the full definition for vapid in the English Language Learners Dictionary. Outsets and onsets! He's attractive , but vapid. Stupid and silly. Related word vapidity. Examples of vapid. They are wonderfully, shamelessly vapid ; closures which declare their own narrative and aesthetic short-comings. From the Cambridge English Corpus. Has its popularity caused it to become so vapid as to be ripe for misuse?

When a hospital board chooses a vapid slogan to market organizational values, this sort of weak consensus often follows. Meantime in the west, political scientists diagnose citizen disaffection but have no remedy to offer outside anti-political neoliberalism or the wholly vapid 'third way'. I find vapid the complexity that denies the richness of human experience and the tradition of social institutions, or an architecture that confuses complexity-in-form for complexity-inexperience.

Were one ultra-attentive one might find this sing-songiness, and what has been dubbed a 'soap-opera' level of character insight and dramatic evolution, yields some slightly vapid results. It is as thin in substance—it is three and half pages if one excludes the appendices—as it is vapid in fact and in argument.

From the Hansard archive.