"handsome is as handsome does" meaning in English

See handsome is as handsome does in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Proverb

Head templates: {{head|en|proverb|head=}} handsome is as handsome does, {{en-proverb}} handsome is as handsome does
  1. A person's good actions, rather than outward appeal, define his or her handsomeness in the eyes of others. Synonyms: handsome is that handsome does Related terms: stupid is as stupid does
    Sense id: en-handsome_is_as_handsome_does-en-proverb-LL8DOBoF Categories (other): English proverbs

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for handsome is as handsome does meaning in English (1.3kB)

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          "ref": "1869, Dickens, David Copperfield",
          "text": "Miss Trotwood, or Miss Betsey, as my poor mother always called her, when she sufficiently overcame her dread of this formidable personage to mention her at all (which was seldom), had been married to a husband younger than herself, who was very handsome, except in the sense of the homely adage, ‘handsome is, that handsome does’ - for he was strongly suspected of having beaten Miss Betsey, and even of having once, on a disputed question of supplies, made some hasty but determined arrangements to throw her out of a two pair of stairs’ window.",
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        "A person's good actions, rather than outward appeal, define his or her handsomeness in the eyes of others."
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      "id": "en-handsome_is_as_handsome_does-en-proverb-LL8DOBoF",
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          "word": "handsome is that handsome does"
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        "Quotation templates to be cleaned"
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          "text": "Miss Trotwood, or Miss Betsey, as my poor mother always called her, when she sufficiently overcame her dread of this formidable personage to mention her at all (which was seldom), had been married to a husband younger than herself, who was very handsome, except in the sense of the homely adage, ‘handsome is, that handsome does’ - for he was strongly suspected of having beaten Miss Betsey, and even of having once, on a disputed question of supplies, made some hasty but determined arrangements to throw her out of a two pair of stairs’ window.",
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      "word": "handsome is that handsome does"
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  "word": "handsome is as handsome does"
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-03-12 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-03-01 using wiktextract (68773ab and 5f6ddbb). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.