new-fangled

A form of newfangled — New and often needlessly novel or gratuitously different; recently devised or fashionable, especially when not an improvement.

Meanings

adjectivenew-fangled (comparative more new-fangled or newer-fangled, superlative most new-fangled or newest-fangled)

comparative more new-fangled · comparative newer-fangled · superlative most new-fangled · superlative newest-fangled

  1. alternativeAlternative spelling of newfangled.

    Well, I'm an old man, you know. I've got old-fashioned ways. And I'm afraid of all this progress, and these new-fangled ideas.

    c. 1921 (date written), Karel Čapek, translated by Paul Selver, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama […], Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1923, →OCLC, Act 2
    1 more example

    All we need to know is that, in Shakespeare’s time, an apostrophe indicated omitted letters, which meant Hamlet could say with supreme apostrophic confidence: […] “I am too much i’ the sun” – […] incidentally, a clear case of a writer employing a new-fangled punctuation mark entirely for the sake of it, and condemning countless generations of serious long-haired actors to adopt a knowing expression and say i’ – as if this actually added anything to the meaning.

    2003 November 6, Lynne Truss, “The Tractable Apostrophe”, in Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, London: Profile Books Ltd, →ISBN, page 38

Synonyms & antonyms

adjective(of a new kind or fashion) gratuitously new

Also see

Synonym sets from Open English WordNet, CC BY 4.0.

Cite this entry
APA

new-fangled. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/new-fangled

MLA

“new-fangled.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/new-fangled. Accessed November 4, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “new-fangled,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/new-fangled.

Source: new-fangled on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.