donnish
- adjective
- /ˈdɑnɪʃ/
:
pedante
- His donnish attitude made it difficult for him to connect with his students during the informal discussion.
Examples
-
Gordon's essays are conversational and enthusiastic, never donnish.
Blog text (9) -
My work as an appellate judge is insulated, donnish, and reflective, consisting of little else but reading and writing; but my career in law has cut me off for several decades from close connection with other people who need poetry.
Academic text (2009) -
It's all very well to add depth to the background, as Sayers does with her Oxford dons and their donnish debates in Gaudy Night, but not at the expense of a corpse.
Fiction book (2000) -
The professor's donnish lectures, filled with excessive jargon, often put the students to sleep.
-
She approached the topic in a donnish manner, overloading her audience with complicated theories and references.
Synonyms
63
6.9
More about theory or small details than practical use
13
8.1
Paying too much attention to small rules or details, often annoying others
Too academic and formal for general readers to understand
Antonyms
How Pedantic
Surface Forms
Morphology
Etymology
The word donnish comes from don, a name for a college teacher that originally meant 'master' or 'sir'. So donnish describes someone who acts like a don, very academic or bookish and often too worried about small details.