Word Finder - gentleman

definition

A man of gentle but not noble birth, particularly a man of means (originally ownership of property) who does not work for a living but has no official status in a peerage; an armiferous man ranking below a knight.

example

Being a gentleman, Robert was entitled to shove other commoners into the gongpit but he still had to jump out of the way of the knights to avoid the same fate himself.

definition

Any well-bred, well-mannered, or charming man.

definition

An effeminate or oversophisticated man.

example

Well, la-di-da, aren't you just a proper gentleman?

synonyms

• cockney
• puss-gentleman
• sissy

definition

(polite term of address) Any man.

example

Please escort this gentleman to the gentlemen's room.

synonyms

• sahib

definition

(usually historical, sometimes derogatory) An amateur or dabbler in any field, particularly those of independent means.

synonyms

• dilettante

definition

An amateur player, particularly one whose wealth permits him to forego payment.

A gentleman gave me a beautiful card.

If you decide to leave, I will respect that, but be a gentleman about it.

Alex was the perfect gentleman, whether with his family or away from them.

The young gentleman was surprised and ashamed.

I'm sure you can, but please allow a gentleman the gesture.

The gentleman paid for your dinner.

A gentleman in Philadelphia has just written to my teacher about a deaf and blind child in Paris, whose parents are Poles.

The man who kept it all running was a soft-spoken, white-haired gentleman, John McKenzie, the chief engineer.

The old gentleman in his aristocratic imperiousness frequently reminds us of the amusing directions given by Sir John Wynne to his chaplain, quoted in Pennant's Tour in Wales.

Ashmole cites authorities for the contention that knighthood ennobles, insomuch that whosoever is a knight it necessarily follows that he is also a gentleman; " for, when a king gives the dignity to an ignoble person whose merit he would thereby recompense, he is understood to have conferred whatsoever is requisite for the completing of that which he bestows."

On the subject of agriculture he wrote The Gentleman Farmer (1776).

Here, as elsewhere in the old time, a nobleman and a gentleman meant the same thing, namely, a man who under certain conditions of descent was entitled to armorial bearings.

By the common law, if a villein were made a knight he was thereby enfranchised and accounted a gentleman, and if a person under age and in wardship were knighted both his minority and wardship terminated.

The officers of the order are the dean, the secretary, Lyon King of Arms and the gentleman usher of the Green Rod.

In Europe and America it is much used for collar, long facings and cuffs of a gentleman's coat; such a set may cost from, 200 to boo, and in all probability will soon cost more.

He was of a sanguine-choleric temperament, and when untroubled and unvexed a bright and cheerful gentleman, easy to get on with, and however many people happened to be in the same room with him, he was never at a loss for an answer to every one of them."

In 1582 Coke married the daughter of John Paston, a gentleman of Suffolk, receiving with her a fortune of £30,000; but in six months he was left a widower.

No opulent gentleman commoner, panting for oneand-twenty, could have treated the academical authorities with more gross disrespect.

With the medieval passion for adventure he combined the intellectual culture and freedom of a modern gentleman.

The first person who succeeded in making achromatic refracting telescopes seems to have been Chester Moor Hall, a gentleman of Essex.

He was the opposite of a gentleman, as far as she was concerned.

In 1635 he became a gentleman commoner at Christ Church, Oxford.

The interview is interrupted by a telephone call from the gentleman cracksman himself.

My previous vehicle was a Jap import, a Toyota Surf, in fact it did belong to a Japanese gentleman from Osaka.

But in a gentleman it's wonderful!

If you would like to be endearing to a woman, make sure to act like a gentleman.

From underage teenagers trying to look cool, to the older gentleman hoping to prove to the world he is still "bad", there are a wide variety of boozer tees available.

Today, men's tweed jackets are still recognized as the sign of an "English country gentleman" and thus add a little class to whomever is wearing them.

The prelate has always been the bishop of Winchester; the chancellor was formerly the bishop of Salisbury, but is now the bishop of Oxford; the registrarship and the deanery of Windsor have been united since the reign of Charles I.; the king of arms, whose duties were in the beginning discharged by Windsor herald, is Garter Principal King of Arms; and the usher is the gentleman usher of the Black Rod.

Mr Aldis described him as a slender, modest young gentleman, who surprised him by his intelligence and thoughtfulness, but who seemed nervous as they walked to the meeting together.

Sir Thomas Gray, son of an English gentleman wounded in a rising at Lanark in May 1297, says that Wallace was chosen leader " by the commune of Scotland," and began operations by slaying Heselrig, sheriff of Clydesdale, at Lanark.

Wallace, in fact, was a gentleman of good education.

The death of his father had left him an estate of 1900 acres, the income from which (about £400) gave him the position of an independent country gentleman; and while engaged in the law he had added to his farms after the ambitious Virginia fashion, until, when he married in his thirtieth year, there were s000 acres all paid for; and almost as much more l came to him in 1773 on the death of his father-in-law.

Every Afghan gentleman can read and speak Persian, but beyond this acquirement education seems to be limited to the physical development of the youth by instruction in horsemanship and feats of skill.

Of the Calcutta colleges, that of Sanskrit was founded in 1824, when Lord Amherst was governor-general, the medical college by Lord William Bentinck in 1835, the Hooghly madrasa by a wealthy native gentleman in 1836.

Raja Dhuleep Singh received an allowance of £50,000 a year, on which he retired as a country gentleman to Norfolk in England.

At the same time he was a thorough gentleman and grand seigneur.

Montpelier, like Jefferson's Monticello and Monroe's Oak-Hill, was an expensive bit of "gentleman farming," which with his generous Virginia hospitality nearly ruined its owner financially.

To be a gentleman in Italy meant at this epoch to be a man acquainted with the rudiments at least of scholarship, refined in diction, capable of corresponding or of speaking in choice phrases, open to the beauty of the arts, intelligently interested in archaeology, taking for his models of conduct the great men of antiquity rather than the saints of the church.

It is further emphasized in a famous passage of the Orlando Innamorato where Boiardo compares the Italian ideal of an accomplished gentleman with the coarser type admired by nations of the north.

The general dissatisfaction received a somewhat unguarded and intemperate expression in a letter sent to the justices of Marlborough by a gentleman of the neighbourhood, named Oliver St John, 6 in which he denounced the attempt to raise funds in this way as contrary to law, reason and religion, as constituting in the king personally an act of perjury, involving in the same crime those who contributed, and thereby subjecting all parties to the curses levelled by the church at such offences.

The Yorkist faction seems to have been strongest in the eastern portion of the Principality, where the Mortimers were all-powerful, but later the close connexion of the house of Lancaster with Owen Tudor, a gentleman of Anglesea (beheaded in 1461) who had married Catherine of France, widow of Henry V., did much to invite Welsh sympathy on behalf of the claims of Henry Tudor his grandson, who claimed the English throne by right of his grandmother.

Within a few months of this culminating triumph, she was threatened with utter ruin by the discovery of a supposed liaison with her gentleman of the bedchamber, William Mons, a handsome and unscrupulous upstart, and the brother of a former mistress of Peter.

A Persian gentleman erected a cotton-spinning factory at Teheran in 1894 with expensive machinery; it turned out some excellent yarn but could not compete in price with imported yarns.

His father, Pons, comte de Fenelon, was a country gentleman of ancient lineage, large family and small estate.

His Semetic features are those of the Bedouin and he carries himself as straight and as loftily as any Arab gentleman.

William Pitt was educated at Eton, and in January 1727 was entered as a gentleman commoner at Trinity College, Oxford.

The best-known specimen of Pitt's eloquence, his reply to the sneers of Horatio Walpole at his youth and declamatory manner,which has found a place in somanyhandbooks of elocution, is evidently, in form at least, the work, not of Pitt, but of Dr Johnson, who furnished the report to the Gentleman's Magazine.

He has been generally described as a mere voluptuary, but Nubar Pasha spoke of him as a true Turkish gentleman of the old school.

While at supper about 6 o'clock an anonymous letter was brought by an unknown messenger which, having glanced at, he handed to Ward, a gentleman of his service and an intimate friend of Winter, the conspirator, to be read aloud.