precious
47
7.6
- adjective
- /ˈprɛʃəs/
:
afectado
- Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain.
But I understand what he's just not being precious, not being too attached.
- But I understand what he's just not being precious, not being too attached.
- So boys and girls, get stuff out, stop being so precious.
- What right have you got to be so, so vain or so precious that you can't go through life without being offended?
- Open it up, Don't be precious about it, and just try to survive the feedback.
Examples
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So from a creative standpoint, the thing that SNL teaches you is to not be precious with your own material.
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Open it up, Don't be precious about it, and just try to survive the feedback.
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And then you kind of get through it and not being too precious about things.
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You could see the trouble they had taken to make themselves precious in the world.
Fiction book (1991) -
And like, it was during COVID that I started, I was like, why do I try to be so precious about my cars?
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I'm not going to get too precious with this.
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So I'm not going to be too precious about that.
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His speech was full of precious phrases that felt overly rehearsed and insincere.
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The play's precious dialogue made it hard to connect with the characters.
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I found her attempts at humor to be quite precious, lacking genuine spontaneity.
Synonyms
∞
1.1
Kind and gentle in a way that makes others comfortable
170
3.1
Trying to be charming in a way that feels false
16
7.2
To try to seem very sweet and childish in a fake way
Too cute in a silly or fake way
Antonyms
Idioms
Compounds
1
3.6
A stone like amethyst or turquoise used in jewelry that costs less than diamonds
A hard red or pink stony skeleton from Mediterranean sea animals used for jewelry
How Affected
Surface Forms
Morphology
precious = preci + ous
The 'affectedly delicate' sense is a semantic shift from the core value sense and cannot be predicted from the morphological parts by an average learner.
Etymology
Precious comes from the Latin word pretium meaning 'price' and the same root as price; a helpful way to remember the 'too delicate' sense is to imagine someone acting like an expensive object that must be handled very carefully, which can feel fake or annoying.