Elegance
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Elegance is the attribute of being tastefully designed, decorated and maintaining refined grace and dignified propriety.
Some westerners associate elegance with simplicity and consistency of design, focusing on the main or basic features of an object; its dignified gracefulness or restrained beauty of style. Decoration and features are often minimalistic "the essay is marked by lucidity, wit, and elegance."
Others, understand the word in an opulent light as in tasteful richness of design or ornamentation "the sumptuous elegance of the furnishings."
The proof of a mathematical theorem is considered elegant if it is surprisingly simple yet effective and constructive; similarly, a computer program or algorithm is elegant if it uses a small amount of intuitive code to great effect. Visual stimuli are frequently considered elegant if a small number of colors and stimuli are used, emphasizing the remainder. The color white is often associated with elegance, usually along with blue or black.
Words related to elegance
- quality - an essential and distinguishing attribute of something or someone "the quality of mercy is not strained" — Shakespeare.
- dash, panache, elan, flair, style - distinctive and stylish elegance; "he wooed her with the confident dash of a cavalry officer."
- daintiness, delicacy, fineness - the quality of being beautiful and delicate in appearance; "the daintiness of her touch"; "the fineness of her features."
- courtliness - elegance suggestive of a royal court
- tastefulness - elegance indicated by good taste
- breeding, genteelness, gentility - elegance by virtue of fineness of manner and expression
- chic, chicness, modishness, stylishness, swank, smartness, last word - elegance by virtue of being fashionable
- pomp, eclat - ceremonial elegance and splendor; "entered with much eclat in a coach drawn by eight white horses."
- class - elegance in dress or behavior; "her class at dinner parties never ceased to amaze her father's guests."
Elegance in classic literature
Dashwood was upon the whole well satisfied; for though her former style of life rendered many additions to the latter indispensable, yet to add and improve was a delight to her; and she had at this time ready money enough to supply all that was wanted of greater elegance to the apartments — Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
View in Context (http://austen.thefreelibrary.com/Sense-and-Sensibility/1-6)
It was a style of beauty, of which elegance was the reigning character, and as such, she must, in honour, by all her principles, admire it: elegance, which, whether of person or of mind, she saw so little in Highbury — Emma by Jane Austen
View in Context (http://www.online-literature.com/austen/emma/2/)
The living in incessant noise was, to a frame and temper delicate and nervous like Fanny's, an evil which no superadded elegance or harmony could have entirely atoned for — Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
View in Context (http://www.online-literature.com/austen/mansfield_park/39/)