unadorned
Britishadjective
Explanation
Something unadorned has no decorations or frills. It's plain, like a room with nothing on the walls or a person wearing purely functional clothes and no accessories. To adorn something is to decorate it or to dress it up. If something is unadorned, it lacks decorations. An unadorned Christmas tree is just a plain old pine tree. If a woman’s face is unadorned, she’s not wearing makeup. The unadorned truth is the plain truth, with no nonsense. This word means about the same as undecorated, and it can often mean dull. But that’s a matter of taste.
Vocabulary lists containing unadorned
The Devil's Arithmetic
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The Joy Luck Club
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Gathering Blue
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Private-label merchandise no longer means generic, unadorned products sitting on the shelf, but rather filling a hole in the assortment at a decent price point.
From Barron's • Apr. 9, 2026
Joseph navigated those years in the wake with unadorned reverence, while starting a family of his own and directing some of the most transcendent music videos of the 2010s.
From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 4, 2026
His direct, unadorned vocals on 1961’s “You Better Move On” started an explosion of gospel-inflected Muscle Shoals pop, from Jimmy Hughes’s “Steal Away” to his cousin Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
From The Wall Street Journal • Dec. 20, 2025
I ended up going pretty retro and unadorned, ordering a grilled cheese and fries, but the grilled cheese happened to have a bacon jam on it.
From Salon • May 21, 2024
While the scythe’s house was modest and unadorned, it had one impressive feature: the weapons den.
From "Scythe" by Neal Shusterman
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
