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Glite Dictionary
🏫 Overly academic 🎨 Conventional or unoriginal
schoolish

schoolish

7.2
Like a classroom or teacher, very formal and focused on books
  • adjective
  • /ˈskuːlɪʃ/
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  • "You—oh, you think the talk is all," she rejects his schoolish blather, canceling the contrapuntally rigged dialogue.

Examples

  • The presentation was so schoolish that it felt more like a lecture than an engaging discussion.

  • Sort of—that is speaking; he and Mom brim and leak over with stuff different from what I know of public and schoolish prose and from the kinds of English in newspaper stories and in the books I read.

    Fiction book (1991)

  • It made me realize that science can be made into something interesting, and that not all science has to feel like boring schoolish EM science.

    Academic text (2018)

  • When I have hundreds of letters to sign, I take the bundle home, where I can most enjoy writing personal postscripts at my dining room table, informing my reader of the schoolish goings-on of his or her peculiar interest.

    Academic text (2005)

  • Her writing style was overly schoolish, filled with formal language and complex sentences that made it hard to read.

  • The decorations in the classroom were too schoolish, lacking any creativity or personal touch.

Synonyms

schoolmasterish
vsschoolish
9.7

Very strict and formal, correcting small mistakes like a teacher

is broader, meaning generally academic and formal rather than narrowly pedantic
schoolmasterly
vsschoolish
8.7

Being strict and formal like a teacher in a classroom

is more about academic formality than personal authority

Antonyms

casual
194 2.8

Informal and relaxed, not serious

informal
98 3.1

Not formal or official, relaxed and casual

How Academic

pedantic
13 8.1
academic
383 4.2
schoolish
7.2
plain
264 1.0
informal
98 3.1

Surface Forms

schoolish positive

Morphology

schoolish = school (transparent) = school + ish

The adjective is the straightforward result of adding '-ish' to 'school' to mean 'like or characteristic of school/schooling', a productive and common pattern.

Etymology

The word schoolish comes from school, which means 'place of learning', and the ending -ish means 'like'. So schoolish describes a style or tone that seems 'like school', often too formal and like classroom teaching.