Mawkish — Treacly SAT Vocabulary
This is pretty advanced. Give it a try: MAWKISH most nearly means: A) bitter; B) overly cautious; C) sickeningly sentimental; D) ambiguous. Answer inside.
📚️ Definition of Mawkish
Mawkish (adjective): Excessively and weakly sentimental in a way that feels forced, overdone, or nauseating rather than genuine; sickeningly emotional. Example: a mawkish love poem.
🗣️ Pronunciation of Mawkish
IPA: /ˈmɔː.kɪʃ/ (See IPA key)
Respelling: MAW-kish
📰 Examples of Mawkish
Here are some examples of the word mawkish:
Greeting cards are famously mawkish, though they’re less so today than in previous generations.
That speech was too mawkish for my tastes; the coach was literally bawling about the team’s difficult “journey” for three minutes straight.
✅ Quiz answer: The correct answer is C) sickeningly sentimental. How’d you do? By the way, treacly also means overly sentimental, and it comes from the noun treacle, which is basically molasses.
💘 Is This Poem Mawkish Enough for You?
A famous poem in English goes:
Roses are red
Violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet
And so are you.
What do you think? Is that overly sentimental?
Okay, just for fun I’m going to attempt to write a mawkish poem; of course, it will have to rhyme:
The tender gaze from your cotton ball eyes
Wafts to my presence with splendorous surprise.
With soft breaths I await your arrival
Dreaming of the moonbeams that sprout our survival.
Thanks for bearing with me in this little experiment!