songish

English

Etymology

From song +‎ -ish.

Adjective

songish (comparative more songish, superlative most songish)

  1. (obsolete) Consisting of or containing songs.
    • 1680, John Dryden, Albion and Albanius:
      The other, which, for want of a proper English word, I must call the songish part, must abound in the softness and variety of numbers; its principal intention being to please the hearing, [...]
  2. (rare) Characteristic of a song; songlike
    • 1872, Baroness Carolina Oliphant Nairne Nairne, ‎Caroline Oliphant, ‎Charles Rogers, Life and Songs of the Baroness Nairne:
      I have struck off what I am sure would be objected to as not songish enough for the taste of the day. The air will now require to be sung each four lines, which I think answers as well as repeating each part.
    • 2007, Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World:
      This turning away from the performed, songish traits of the cantares, which seems an inevitable result of the inscriptive technology that brings them to us, breaks down any number of other metonymic connections of these songs to the indigenous world.
    • 2013, Martin Clayton, The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction:
      The anamnesis might even take the form, finally, of a meditation on how a musicology might constitute itself from a conceptual frame of sufficient breadth to see that song, the universal corollary of the human propensity toward language, is not so much a musical thing as music is songish.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for songish in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.)

Anagrams
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