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Threadbare   /θrˈɛdbˌɛr/   Listen
Threadbare

adjective
1.
Repeated too often; overfamiliar through overuse.  Synonyms: banal, commonplace, hackneyed, old-hat, shopworn, stock, timeworn, tired, trite, well-worn.  "His remarks were trite and commonplace" , "Hackneyed phrases" , "A stock answer" , "Repeating threadbare jokes" , "Parroting some timeworn axiom" , "The trite metaphor 'hard as nails'"
2.
Having the nap worn away so that the threads show through.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Threadbare" Quotes from Famous Books



... who saw him then, and listened entranced to his clear, well-trained voice, thought not of Harold's threadbare coat and shining old-fashioned pants, which were so conspicuous as he pursued his studies in the class-room, but which were now concealed by the gown he wore over them. They saw only the large, dark eyes, the finely chiseled features, and the manly form. But as they ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes

... ordinary tradesman, he saw, on the dark background of books in the long narrow shop, a figure that was somewhat startling in its unusualness. A man in threadbare clothing, whose age was difficult to guess—from the dead yellowish flatness of the flesh, something like an old ivory carving—was seated on a stool against some bookshelves that projected beyond the short counter, doing nothing more remarkable than reading yesterday's Times; but when ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... of Jallianwala and all that followed in the Punjab scattered to the winds Mr. Gandhi's threadbare penitence for the horrible violence of Indian mobs, and he poured out henceforth all the vials of his wrath on the violence of the repression, far more unpardonable, he declared, because they were not the outcome of ignorant fanaticism, but of a definite policy adopted by European officers high ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... can't always earn enough to marry on; and when well-to-do men get married they seem to get worse instead of better, generally. So upon the hungry, the weary, the hopeless, girls who have to patch their own boots and go threadbare and shabby while others have pretty things, and who are despised for their shabbiness by the very hypocrites who cant about love of dress, and who have folks at home whom they love, and who are penniless as well and in that abject misery which comes when there isn't any money to buy the ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller


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