Popular Definitions

Overview of adjective beautiful

The adjective beautiful has 3 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)

1. beautiful -- (delighting the senses or exciting intellectual or emotional admiration; "a beautiful child"; "beautiful country"; "a beautiful painting"; "a beautiful theory"; "a beautiful party")
2. beautiful -- (aesthetically pleasing)
3. beautiful, fine -- ((of weather) highly enjoyable; very pleasant; "a beautiful evening"

Poems: America the Beautiful by Katharine Lee Bates

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Beauty is a characteristic of a person, place, object or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology and culture. As a cultural creation, beauty has been extremely commercialized. An "ideal beauty" is a person who is admired, or possesses features widely attributed to beauty in a particular culture. A number of historical individuals have become icons of beauty, including Cleopatra VII, Helen of Troy, and Marilyn Monroe.

The subjective experience of "beauty" often involves the interpretation of some entity as being in balance and harmony with nature, which may lead to feelings of attraction and emotional well-being. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is a common phrase that expresses this concept. In its most profound sense, beauty may engender a salient experience of positive reflection about the meaning of one's own existence. An "object of beauty" is anything that reveals or resonates with personal meaning.

The classical Greek adjective beautiful was καλλός. The Koine Greek word for beautiful was "ὡραῖος", an adjective etymologically coming from the word "ὥρα" meaning hour. In Koine Greek, beauty was thus associated with "being of one's hour". A ripe fruit (of its time) was considered beautiful, whereas a young woman trying to appear older or an older woman trying to appear younger would not be considered beautiful. ὡραῖος in Attic Greek had many meanings, including youthful and ripe old age.

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Physical attractiveness is the perception of the physical traits of an individual human person as pleasing or beautiful. It can include various implications, such as sexual attractiveness and physique. Judgment of attractiveness of physical traits is partly universal to all human cultures, partly dependent on culture or society or time period, and partly a matter of individual subjective preference.

Despite the existence of universally agreed upon signs of beauty in both genders, both heterosexual and homosexual men tend to place significantly higher value on physical appearance in a partner than women do. This can be explained by evolutionary psychology as a consequence of ancestral humans who selected partners based on secondary sexual characteristics, as well as general indicators of fitness (for example, symmetrical features) enjoying greater reproductive success as a result of higher fertility in those partners, although a male's ability to provide resources for offspring was probably signaled less by physical features. There appear to be universal standards regarding attractiveness, such that raters agree who is and isn't attractive both within and across cultures and ethnicity.

Physical attractiveness can have a significant effect on how people are judged, in terms of employment or social opportunities, friendship, sexual behavior, and marriage. In many cases, humans attribute positive characteristics, such as intelligence and honesty, to attractive people without consciously realizing it. Physical attractiveness is distinct from sexual attraction; humans often regard children and young individuals—both human and animal—as being highly attractive for various reasons, but without sexual attraction.