elegant

Pluralelegants

1. 1
   adjective

   Displaying grace, refinement, and tasteful style in appearance, manner, or design.

   The ambassador greeted each guest with an elegant bow.

   Their apartment was furnished in an elegant, understated style.

   Similargraceful, refined, stylish, sophisticated, tasteful

   Oppositeinelegant, clumsy, tasteless

   Note

   The oldest English form is elegaunt, carried into Late Middle English through Middle French from Latin ēlegāns. The praise is not only for the eye. Writing about kecap manis in 2015, Matt Preston says a homemade batch has "a far more elegant fragrance," praising a smell for its refinement rather than its strength. The word compares in the usual way for long adjectives: more elegant, most elegant.

2. 2
   adjective

   Marked by minimalism and intuitive simplicity while preserving exactness and precision.

   The mathematician admired the elegant proof, which fit on a single page yet settled the whole question.

   Reviewers praised the software's elegant interface, which made complex tasks feel obvious without sacrificing accuracy.

   Similarneat, simple, clean, ingenious

   Oppositeclumsy, convoluted, cumbersome

   Note

   Grace turned into economy. Where the sense of refined style praises appearance, this one praises how little it takes to get something exactly right. Its signature phrase is elegant solution, and it travels beyond technical problems into public argument. In Paul Clifton's 2025 article on railway reform, "the elegant solution" is to take operations back into the public sector. Used this way, the word judges the idea, not its looks.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A small Australian grass parakeet, Neophema elegans, with olive-yellow plumage and a blue band across its forehead.

   Birdwatchers traveled to South Australia hoping to photograph an elegant in the open scrub.

   A pair of elegants nested in a hollow eucalyptus branch near the creek.

   Note

   A bird-keeper's name made by turning the adjective into a noun. It takes an ordinary plural, elegants. The Avicultural Magazine of 1895 capitalizes it like a breed name, Elegants. It pairs them with the Turquoisines as weak-billed parakeets that would spare an aviary's shrubs and trees. The species name, Neophema elegans, carries the same Latin adjective.

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