songish

comparative more songish · superlative most songish

1. obsoleteConsisting of or containing songs.

   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, […]

   1680, John Dryden, Albion and Albanius

2. rareCharacteristic of a song; songlike

   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.

   1872, Baroness Carolina Oliphant Nairne Nairne, Caroline Oliphant, Charles Rogers, Life and Songs of the Baroness Nairne

   2 more examples

   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.

   2007, Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World

   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.

   2013, Martin Clayton, The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction