svelte

comparative svelter · superlative sveltest

1. Attractively thin; gracefully slender.First known use 1810s

   My first priority was to help Trumps lose her pudgy look and gain a healthier, svelter size.

   2009, Kim Bloomer, Animals Taught Me That, page 73

   4 more examples

   Psychoanalytic theory[…]seemed to promise to introduce a certain becoming amplitude into discussions of what different people are like — only to turn, in its streamlined trajectory across so many institutional boundaries, into the sveltest of metatheoretical disciplines, sleeked down to such elegant operational entities as the mother, the father, the preoedipal, the oedipal, the other or Other.

   1990, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, published 2008, page 24

   Clearly the producers of “The Producers” were so little inclined to tinker with a winning formula that they chose not to excise a few lines of dialogue to accommodate the svelter physique of their new leading man, preposterous though it is that anyone in a fit of pique would deride a fellow as “once-husky.”

   2007 January 19, Charles Isherwood, “Welterweight Bialystock Treads Softly on Big Shtick”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 26 Nov 2022

   If her dream of being naked in front of Simon were to come true – and she knew, somehow, that it would – she needed to be the sveltest version of herself that had ever existed. Fries wouldn't help peel away those pounds.

   2010, M. S. Simpson, Kabuki in a G-String, page 158

   What was once a multi-million-dollar fantasy of womanhood – exclusively svelte, athletic models in lace-trimmed thongs or diamante push-up bras, each framed by a pair of 12-foot-high angel wings – quickly became a parody so gauche it’s hard to imagine it was ever taken seriously.

   2022 July 25, Leah Dolan, “New documentary unearths troubling links between Victoria’s Secret and Jeffrey Epstein”, in CNN, archived from the original on 30 Aug 2022

   Synonyms: lithe

2. Refined, delicate.

   At 61, Bryant looks good – smart and svelte in an electric blue suit, youthful, a full head of hair except for a white scar at the back that looks like a side door into his brain.

   2023 August 5, Simon Hattenstone, “Labour MP Chris Bryant on cleaning up parliament, and why he’s not afraid to pick a fight: ‘I’ve got in more scrapes than most people’”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 09 Aug 2023

   1 more example

   Peering down from the cockpit at grazing elephant, you have the feeling that what you are beholding is wonderful, but not authentic. It is not only incongruous in the sense that animals simply are not as big as trees, but also in the sense that the twentieth century, tidy and svelte with stainless steel as it is, would not possibly permit such prehistoric monsters to wander in its garden.

   1942, Beryl Markham, West with the Night

   Synonyms: elegant, gentle