scrumptious
Appearance
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Probably from scrimp (“to put on short allowance, limit, straiten; to be frugal”) + -ious (suffix forming adjectives denoting the presence of a quality in any degree (usually an abundance)), possibly modelled after scrimption (“small portion, little bit, scrap”).[1]
Pronunciation
[edit]- (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA(key): /ˈskɹʌm(p)ʃəs/
Audio (Southern England): (file) - Hyphenation: scrump‧tious
Adjective
[edit]scrumptious (comparative more scrumptious, superlative most scrumptious) (originally US, informal)
- Of food: delectable, delicious.
- Synonyms: see Thesaurus:delicious
- Antonym: unscrumptious
- What a scrumptious treat!
- Of a person or thing: excellent, wonderful; also, very aesthetically pleasing or attractive; good enough to eat.
- 1865, George Meredith, “The Melting of the Thousand”, in Rhoda Fleming. […], volume II, London: Tinsley Brothers, […], →OCLC, page 262:
- […] I came here to have a wink at the fash'nables—hang me, if ever I see such a scrumptious lot.
- 1989 March 6, The Sydney Morning Herald, page 8S, column 1:
- Barbara Cartland scratched out this trusty 19th-century romancer concerning the scrumptious Serena Staverly (Diana Rigg), who has the dreadful misfortune to be lost in a game of cards to the flint-hearted Lord Justin.
- (obsolete, rare)
- Fastidious, picky.
- Very small; tiny.
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]
|
very aesthetically pleasing or attractive — see attractive
References
[edit]- ^ “scrumptious, adj.”, in OED Online , Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2023; “scrumptious, adj.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
Further reading
[edit]- [John Camden Hotten] (1859) “SCRUMPTIOUS”, in A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words, […], London: John Camden Hotten, […], →OCLC, page 88: “nice, particular, beautiful. Suffolk, scrumshus, stingy.”
- Joseph Wright, editor (1905), “SCRUMPTIOUS, adj.”, in The English Dialect Dictionary: […], volume V (R–S), London: Henry Frowde, […], publisher to the English Dialect Society, […]; New York, N.Y.: G[eorge] P[almer] Putnam’s Sons, →OCLC, page 292, column 1: “mean, stingy, close-fisted.”
Categories:
- English terms suffixed with -ious
- English 2-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio pronunciation
- English lemmas
- English adjectives
- American English
- English informal terms
- English terms with usage examples
- English terms with quotations
- English terms with obsolete senses
- English terms with rare senses
- en:Taste