"penny dreadful" meaning in English

See penny dreadful in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: penny dreadfuls [plural]
Etymology: From their low price and the lower-class British use of dreadful (“sensationalized crime reporting”). Etymology templates: {{m|en|dreadful||sensationalized crime reporting}} dreadful (“sensationalized crime reporting”) Head templates: {{en-noun}} penny dreadful (plural penny dreadfuls)
  1. (originally derogatory, now usually historical) A cheap paperback book, particularly those concerning lurid depictions of crime in the Victorian era. Tags: historical, usually
    Sense id: en-penny_dreadful-en-noun-uMrOnohV
  2. (originally derogatory, now usually historical) Pulp fiction: stories written in the lurid style of the penny dreadfuls. Tags: historical, usually Derived forms: penny-dreadfulish Related terms: dime novel, gazette, pulp fiction
    Sense id: en-penny_dreadful-en-noun-0cif0yjp Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 28 72

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for penny dreadful meaning in English (2.3kB)

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        "3": "",
        "4": "sensationalized crime reporting"
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      "expansion": "dreadful (“sensationalized crime reporting”)",
      "name": "m"
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  "etymology_text": "From their low price and the lower-class British use of dreadful (“sensationalized crime reporting”).",
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      "tags": [
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        {
          "ref": "1861 July 29, North American Review",
          "text": "They can read the ‘penny dreadful’, but they cannot darn their stockings or mend their shoes."
        }
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      "glosses": [
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        "(originally derogatory, now usually historical) A cheap paperback book, particularly those concerning lurid depictions of crime in the Victorian era."
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    },
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          "source": "w+disamb"
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          "_dis1": "22 78",
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        "(originally derogatory, now usually historical) Pulp fiction: stories written in the lurid style of the penny dreadfuls."
      ],
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          "_dis1": "22 78",
          "word": "dime novel"
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          "_dis1": "22 78",
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          "word": "pulp fiction"
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{
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  "forms": [
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  "head_templates": [
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  "pos": "noun",
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        {
          "ref": "1861 July 29, North American Review",
          "text": "They can read the ‘penny dreadful’, but they cannot darn their stockings or mend their shoes."
        }
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        "A cheap paperback book, particularly those concerning lurid depictions of crime in the Victorian era."
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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 2024-05-10 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (a644e18 and edd475d). 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.