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supercilious
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  • Gwendolen.  [Superciliously.]  No, thank you.  Sugar is not fashionable any more.   (source)
    superciliously = arrogant disdain of those one views as unworthy
  • At last at twenty-six she found herself penned into marriage with a supercilious and ruined nobleman and the Cathedral of Lima fairly buzzed with the sneers of her guests.   (source)
    supercilious = arrogant
  • She was not a supercilious or an over-dainty woman.   (source)
  • Long elegant lines of sight stretched out before me, mazelike halls which had the feel of a haunted mansion: periwigged lords, cool Gainsborough beauties, gazing superciliously down at my distress.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Nash looked at Cass with that absolutely infuriating superciliousness achieved only by chambermaids who have lately become great ladies.†   (source)
  • While I looked at Thomas Stone and sat next to the supercilious Constance, a slow fuse burned inside me and it was about to ignite.†   (source)
  • The journalists are knocking back the champagne as if they've never seen it before; the PR girls are looking supercilious and sipping water.†   (source)
  • "Oh?" said the colonel superciliously.†   (source)
  • Waited until certain it had gone hot and true— then told Terra where to look for it and where and when to expect it, so that all would know that F.N.'s claims of victory were on a par with their century of lies about Luna—all in Stu's best, snotty, supercilious phrases delivered in his cultured accents.†   (source)
  • Denny developed a lofty tone of voice, supercilious and amused.†   (source)
  • Before he left, Alexander shot me a languid, supercilious look.†   (source)
  • Oh, clever, supercilious young man!†   (source)
  • If instead of using that sarcastic tone you took the trouble to find out what we do in our classes, you wouldn't be so supercilious.†   (source)
  • The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.   (source)
  • "Shut up about my sister," said Ron roughly, Phineas Nigellus raised supercilious eyebrows.†   (source)
  • It was odd, but this time his smile seemed to her neither mysterious nor supercilious.†   (source)
  • Meggie couldn't decide whether it was mocking, supercilious, or just awkward.†   (source)
  • She gave a snort and smiled superciliously.†   (source)
  • "Oh, right," says Lucy, and I give her a supercilious smile.†   (source)
  • Heavens, Liberius Averkievich, I'm not being supercilious.†   (source)
  • 'You take remedial Potions!' asked Zacharias Smith superciliously, having cornered Harry in the Entrance Hall after lunch.†   (source)
  • The angel had probably once stood on the stone plinth in front of the first column; now she had had to give way to another statue, whose gaunt, waxen face seemed to look down at Meggie with a supercilious expression.†   (source)
  • At a party a week earlier, I had met a man thirty-five in appearance, smooth, polite, but with that supercilious air that says: "Your fly is unzipped, old man, but I'm too urbane to mention it.†   (source)
  • In less violent form, in subtle digs and supercilious little drawing-room slanders, Southerners who had ventured north were to endure such exploitative assaults upon their indwelling guilt during an era of unalleviated discomfort which ended officially on a morning in August, 1963, when on North Water Street in Edgartown, Massachusetts, the youngish, straw-haired, dimple-kneed wife of the yacht-club commodore, a prominent Brahmin investment banker, was seen brandishing a copy of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time as she uttered to a friend, in tones of clamp-jawed desolation, these words: "My dear, it's going to happen to all of us!"†   (source)
  • There was great variety in their faces, but in nearly all something supercilious and sardonic.†   (source)
  • It's a club, it's the old school, it's Skull and Bones, and there is no nasty supercilious twist to a mouth like the twist the drunk gets when he hangs over the bar beside the old pal who has turned out to be a big-shot and who hasn't changed a bit, or when the old pal takes him home to dinner and introduces him to the pretty little clear-eyed woman and the healthy kids.†   (source)
  • "But how very good of you to have come", he replied superciliously; for had I not told him that I hated dancing ?†   (source)
  • And the air of supercilious elegance which had clung about him in his striking Zouave uniform was completely gone.†   (source)
  • But she only tumbled the floor with dirty under-linen, and the charwoman and the shop-boys called after me a dozen times a day, mocking my prim and supercilious gait.†   (source)
  • He strutted on the track, his thighs as skinny as his calves and covered with straight black hairs, nifty and supercilious toward his competitors, the squares who were prancing and bracing.†   (source)
  • There was the charming, but weak; the strong, but supercilious; the brilliant, but remorseless; the very good fellow, but, I make no doubt, the awful bore; the sympathetic, but cold; the shabby, but—go into the next room—the foppish, worldly, and too well dressed.†   (source)
  • "To be sure, to be sure," Hans Castorp replied superciliously.†   (source)
  • There was no concealing the fact, Cecil had meant to be supercilious, and he had succeeded.†   (source)
  • I'm glad you do," and smiled in a slightly supercilious though affectionate way.†   (source)
  • The oak desk was dark and old and altogether perfect; the chairs were gently supercilious.†   (source)
  • Carol had warned herself not to be so "beastly supercilious."†   (source)
  • Yet there was nothing sarcastic or supercilious in the way Ames spoke.†   (source)
  • His supercilious attitude impressed Philip.†   (source)
  • "There's a measure in all things," Luzhin went on superciliously.†   (source)
  • The two valets sat aloof superciliously.†   (source)
  • Madame Defarge looked superciliously at the client, and nodded in confirmation.†   (source)
  • "No," said Stephen, with rather supercilious indifference.†   (source)
  • A supercilious and condescending smile played on his lips.†   (source)
  • There was even a supercilious note in his voice.†   (source)
  • "I am sure it's not," said he, superciliously over his shoulder; "I don't think anything about it."†   (source)
  • Though he looked down upon every one, he was a good comrade and not supercilious.†   (source)
  • Ivan's supercilious....I'd make an end of your monks, though, all the same.†   (source)
  • It's not as if I were his keeper," answered Smerdyakov quietly, distinctly, and superciliously.†   (source)
  • THE SON (22) tall, severe in his attitude of contempt for THE FATHER, supercilious and indifferent to THE MOTHER.†   (source)
  • "Confound the brute!" said Sir Andrew, with native British wrath, as Brogard leant up against the table, smoking and looking down superciliously at these two SACRRRES ANGLAIS.†   (source)
  • "I am told, on excellent authority, that her father keeps an American dry-goods store," said Sir Thomas Burdon, looking supercilious.†   (source)
  • MRS. CHEVELEY [Superciliously.]†   (source)
  • The interchange filled a pause and Rosemary's instinct was that something tactful should be said by somebody, but Dick made no attempt to break up the grouping formed by these late arrivals, not even to disarm Mrs. McKisco of her air of supercilious amusement.†   (source)
  • Robert was a square-rigged, swart, tempestuous boy, arrogant where there seemed to be no reason for arrogance, longed for by the anemic, milky sort of girls, yet ever supercilious to them.†   (source)
  • Thus they descended to the precincts of her father's homestead, and Arabella went in, nodding good-bye to him with a supercilious, affronted air.†   (source)
  • As Sue had not brought disgrace upon the school by drowning herself, the matron began to speak superciliously of her, and to express gladness that she was gone.†   (source)
  • How she would have loved to have confronted him and demanded to know what those words (spoken in his Mediterranean tongue, of which she understood not a syllable more than he of hers, though with none of his supercilious contempt)—what those words had been that he had called after the agreeable young German, just as the lad was about to approach her that night, this pretty little bourgeois lad who came from a good family and had a moist spot?†   (source)
  • The Martin Arrowsmith who had been supercilious toward Pickerbaugh and old Dr. Winters had for Rouncefield and Angus Duer and the other keen taut specialists of the clinic only the respect of the poor and uncertain for the rich and shrewd.†   (source)
  • Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.†   (source)
  • Now they were men and women of the world, very supercilious men and women; the boys condescended to Babbitt, they wore evening-clothes, and with hauteur they accepted cigarettes from silver cases.†   (source)
  • It has been humbled since by the supercilious modesty of the vast Hotel Thornleigh; dirty now is its tessellated floor and all the wild gilt tarnished, and in its ponderous leather chairs are torn seams and stogie ashes and horse-dealers.†   (source)
  • The Supercilious Sacrifice†   (source)
  • Passing down the aisle came a very fair-haired banker's son, also of Chicago, who had long eyed this supercilious beauty.†   (source)
  • He did not go, because he was afraid to seem supercilious, and he talked with the girls and laughed, but in his heart was unhappiness.†   (source)
  • There were counteracting and corrective psychic factors, wholesome and ordering instincts—one might almost call them bourgeois—under whose compensating and modifying effects perverse components were fused to a consistent and useful whole; and this was, all in all, a common and welcome process, whose consequences, however (as Dr. Krokowski rather superciliously remarked), were of no importance to the physician or thinker.†   (source)
  • Like many of the cocksure young men who forage about cities in apparent contentment and who express their cynicism in supercilious slang, Escott was shy and lonely.†   (source)
  • No aching color of the sea and pride of supercilious people, but the reality of a round-bellied nickel alarm-clock on a shelf against a fuzzy unplaned pine wall, with a stiff gray wash-rag hanging above it and a kerosene-stove standing below.†   (source)
  • New York must be filled with such bowers, or the beautiful, insolent, supercilious creatures could not be.†   (source)
  • Your last, that dissertation on architecture, was perfectly awful— so "highbrow" that I picture you living in an intellectual and emotional vacuum; and beware of trying to classify people too definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with the world.†   (source)
  • But as she followed Kennicott to the elevator the coat-check girl, a confident young woman, with cheeks powdered like lime, and a blouse low and thin and furiously crimson, inspected her, and under that supercilious glance Carol was shy again.†   (source)
  • While they talked of him he stood a little apart from the others, watching the noisy party with a good-humoured but faint ly supercilious expression.†   (source)
  • Leora and he had assured each other that, for a student affair, dinner jacket and black waistcoat would be the thing, as stated in the Benson, Hanley and Koch Chart of Correct Gents' Wearing Apparel, but he grew miserable at the sight of voluptuous white waistcoats, and when that embryo famous surgeon, Angus Duer, came by, disdainful as a greyhound and pushing on white gloves (which are the whitest, the most superciliously white objects on earth), then Martin felt himself a hobbledehoy.†   (source)
  • "I don't believe I want to play any more," said the youngest, a blackhaired beauty, turned supercilious by fortune, as she pushed a euchre hand away from her.†   (source)
  • Philip liked to talk to the sailor-men, and when they found that he was not supercilious they told him long yarns of the distant journeys of their youth.†   (source)
  • She fancied that a man with dinner-coat and waxed mustache glanced superciliously at Harry's highly form-fitting bright-brown suit and Juanita's tan silk frock, which was doubtful at the seams.†   (source)
  • Amory finally prevailed, and Alec agreed to accept his face value in the presence of others if he was allowed rest periods when they were alone; so Amory "ran it out" at a great rate, bringing the most eccentric characters to dinner, wild-eyed grad students, preceptors with strange theories of God and government, to the cynical amazement of the supercilious Cottage Club.†   (source)
  • She proceeded to explain the pictures to him, superciliously but not without insight, and showed him what the painters had attempted and what he must look for.†   (source)
  • 'A speaker, if the gentleman likes it better,' said Mr. E. W. B. Childers, superciliously throwing the interpretation over his shoulder, and accompanying it with a shake of his long hair — which all shook at once.†   (source)
  • For, though elated by his rank, it did not render him supercilious; on the contrary, he was all attention to everybody.†   (source)
  • But the attorney saw that the impression was in favor of his client, and waving his hand with a supercilious manner, as if unwilling to insult the understanding of the jury with any further defence, he replied: "No, sir; I leave it for your honor to charge; I rest my case here."†   (source)
  • She took no notice of me until she had the candle in her hand, when she looked over her shoulder, superciliously saying, "You are to come this way to-day," and took me to quite another part of the house.†   (source)
  • But he was not relieved by that; for, let him think what he would, the Chief Butler had him in his supercilious eye, even when that eye was on the plate and other table-garniture; and he never let him out of it.†   (source)
  • So the young man makes his bow and goes downstairs, where the supercilious Mercury does not consider himself called upon to leave his Olympus by the hall-fire to let the young man out.†   (source)
  • "The Jew leaving Rotherwood," said he, raising himself on his elbow, and looking superciliously at him without quitting his pallet, "and travelling in company with the Palmer to boot—"†   (source)
  • His education tends, then, to give him the character of a supercilious and a hasty man; irascible, violent, and ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles, but easily discouraged if he cannot succeed upon his first attempt.†   (source)
  • Besides this, in his behavior to women Anatole had a manner which particularly inspires in them curiosity, awe, and even love—a supercilious consciousness of his own superiority.†   (source)
  • "All sorts of people keep booths here," answered the young man, glancing superciliously at Raskolnikov.†   (source)
  • Blanche Ingram, after having repelled, by supercilious taciturnity, some efforts of Mrs. Dent and Mrs. Eshton to draw her into conversation, had first murmured over some sentimental tunes and airs on the piano, and then, having fetched a novel from the library, had flung herself in haughty listlessness on a sofa, and prepared to beguile, by the spell of fiction, the tedious hours of absence.†   (source)
  • The driver of the fly turned a supercilious gaze upon them; he even treated the wedded pair themselves with something like condescension; for in what other state than heathen could people, rich or poor, exist who were doomed to abide in such a world's end as Egdon?†   (source)
  • His old feeling of supercilious pity for womankind in general was intensified by this suppliant appearing here as the double of the first.†   (source)
  • These reflections had tamed and brought down to a pitch of sounder judgment a temper, which, under other circumstances, might have waxed haughty, supercilious, and obstinate.†   (source)
  • Notwithstanding his humble rank, there was something in the mien and character of Sergeant Dunham that commanded respect: of a tall, imposing figure, grave and saturnine disposition, and accurate and precise in his acts and manner of thinking, even Cap, dogmatical and supercilious as he usually was with landsmen, did not presume to take the same liberties with the old soldier as he did with his other friends.†   (source)
  • A distant supercilious air makes a cold atmosphere about her, and there is nothing in her bearing, as there was before, to encourage openness.†   (source)
  • George's valet was looking on in a very supercilious manner at Mr. Clapp in his shirt-sleeves, watering his rose-bushes.†   (source)
  • On the one hand, he was resolute, prompt, familiar with all the details of a soldier's life, and used to war; on the other, he was supercilious as regards the provincials, opinionated on every subject connected with the narrow limits of his professional practice, much disposed to fancy the British empire the centre of all that is excellent in the world, and Scotland the focus of, at least, all moral excellence in that empire.†   (source)
  • Farfrae would never recognize him more than superciliously; his poverty ensured that, no less than his past conduct.†   (source)
  • He would have none but a tip-top college man to educate him—none of your quacks and pretenders—no, no. A few years before, he used to be savage, and inveigh against all parsons, scholars, and the like declaring that they were a pack of humbugs, and quacks that weren't fit to get their living but by grinding Latin and Greek, and a set of supercilious dogs that pretended to look down upon British merchants and gentlemen, who could buy up half a hundred of 'em.†   (source)
  • What was worst of all, there was something humiliating in it, and on their side something "supercilious and scornful."†   (source)
  • The startling, incredibly supercilious tone of this man who had once been his valet, was extraordinary in itself.†   (source)
  • He trembled for him, for his glory, and dreaded any affront to him, especially the refined, courteous irony of Miuesov and the supercilious half-utterances of the highly educated Ivan.†   (source)
  • What piqued him most was that these boys of fifteen turned up their noses at him too superciliously, and were at first disposed to treat him as "a small boy," not fit to associate with them, and that was an unendurable insult.†   (source)
  • He said it as naturally as Inspector Crome might have said it-but without the superciliousness.†   (source)
  • Somehow the quiet Humbird, and Sloane, with his impatient superciliousness, were the centre.†   (source)
  • Noted reed-drawers were they too, and looked round upon the other three with some superciliousness.†   (source)
  • Carol apologized for her superciliousness.†   (source)
  • There was in her no longer the superciliousness which had irritated him.†   (source)
  • The hay-trusser, which he obviously was, nodded with some superciliousness.†   (source)
  • The superciliousness that lurked in her manner told Venn that thus far he had utterly failed.†   (source)
  • "Well, who did found it?" asked Kolya, turning to him with haughty superciliousness.†   (source)
  • As he limped along the high street of Blackstable he looked with a tinge of superciliousness at the people he passed.†   (source)
  • His little eyes glittered like mica discs—with curiosity,—though he tried to keep up a bit of superciliousness.†   (source)
  • Life had not taught her domination—superciliousness of grace, which is the lordly power of some women.†   (source)
  • The sons resented this; they felt themselves cut away underneath, and they answered with brutality and also with a sneering superciliousness.†   (source)
  • He was a cross-grained man, oppressed by a large family, and he resented the superciliousness which he fancied he saw in Philip.†   (source)
  • Young Jasper smiled, for he was not averse to fun, and had been a little touched by Cap's superciliousness; but Mabel's fair face, light, agile form, and winning smiles, stood like a shield between her uncle and the intended experiment.†   (source)
  • A certain superciliousness of look, coolness of manner, nonchalance of tone, express fully their sentiments on the point, without committing them by any positive rudeness in word or deed.†   (source)
  • By Jane, this attention was received with the greatest pleasure, but Elizabeth still saw superciliousness in their treatment of everybody, hardly excepting even her sister, and could not like them; though their kindness to Jane, such as it was, had a value as arising in all probability from the influence of their brother's admiration.†   (source)
  • Really very good!" said Nicholas with some unintentional superciliousness, as if ashamed to confess that the sounds pleased him very much.†   (source)
  • "You must admit," he went on, addressing Razumihin with a shade of triumph and superciliousness—he almost added "young man"—"that there is an advance, or, as they say now, progress in the name of science and economic truth..."†   (source)
  • It is even observed that the wives who quote him to their self-willed husbands as a shining example in reality look down upon him and that nobody does so with greater superciliousness than one particular lady whose lord is more than suspected of laying his umbrella on her as an instrument of correction.†   (source)
  • Let him open that book and begin reading it without grand words or superciliousness, without condescension to them, but gently and kindly, being glad that he is reading to them and that they are listening with attention, loving the words himself, only stopping from time to time to explain words that are not understood by the peasants.†   (source)
  • To behave to her guest with such superciliousness!†   (source)
  • But it was not so bad as that, Isabella; there was no superciliousness; she was very civil.†   (source)
  • She smilesmirked supercilious (wept!†   (source)
  • Heard the continuous thunder as it bellow'd after the lightning,
    Noted the slender and jagged threads of lightning as sudden and
    fast amid the din they chased each other across the sky;
    These, and such as these, I, elate, saw—saw with wonder, yet pensive
    and masterful,
    All the menacing might of the globe uprisen around me,
    Yet there with my soul I fed, I fed content, supercilious.†   (source)
  • He has been seated on a throne surrounded with minions and mistresses, giving audience to the envoys of foreign potentates, in all the supercilious pomp of majesty.†   (source)
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