mincing
Mincing is an adjective that describes someone who is being especially dainty or refined. The voices of older women who speak as though they're young girls can be described as mincing.
Mincing is primarily used as an adjective meaning to be noticeably — and perhaps oddly or unnaturally — dainty or refined. You might remark, for example, on a lumberjack who takes mincing steps across a log, or a woman who speaks to her dog in a mincing voice. In these cases, the daintiness is unnatural — it's put on for show — or in the case of the lumberjack, so he won't fall off the log.
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affectedly dainty or refinedsynonyms: dainty, niminy-piminy, prim, tweerefined(used of persons and their behavior) cultivated and genteel
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Vocabulary lists containing mincing
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
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As you read Jack London's "To Build a Fire," learn this word list. Here are links to lists for texts in Grade 11's Collection 5: To Build a Fire, The Jungle, Food Product Design, The Lowest Animal, Genesis of the Tenement, The Story of an Hour, The Fish