gauche - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Adjective
gauche (comparativemore gauche or gaucher, superlativemost gauche or gauchest)
- Awkward or lacking in social graces; bumbling; apt to make gaffes.
- ✤ Seeking by vulgar pomp and gauche display
In ‘good society’, to make her way1- ✤ She looked a trifle gauche, it struck me; more like a country girl with the hoyden taming in her than the well-bred creature she is.2
- ✤ “He’s a trifle gauche” said Lady Hammergallow, jumping upon the Vicar’s attention. “He neither bows nor smiles. He must cultivate oddities like that. Every successful executant is more or less gauche.”3
- ✤ What was once a multi-million-dollar fantasy of womanhood – exclusively svelte, athletic models in lace-trimmed thongs or diamante push-up bras, each framed by a pair of 12-foot-high angel wings – quickly became a parody so gauche it’s hard to imagine it was ever taken seriously.4
- (mathematics, archaic) Skewed, not plane.
- (chemistry, not comparable) Having a torsion angle of 60°.
Etymology
Borrowed from French gauche (“left, awkward”), from gauchir (“to veer, turn”), from Old French gaucher (“to trample, walk clumsily”), from Frankish ﹡walkan (“to full, trample”), from Proto-Germanic ﹡walkaną (“to full, roll up”). Akin to Old High German walchan (“to knead”), Old English wealcian (“to roll up, curl”) and English walk, Old Norse valka (“to drag about”). More at walk.
Pronunciation
Printed 2026-07-08.
(echo:: @ ⌗)
Footnotes
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1836, Samuel Griswold Goodrich, The Outcast and Other Poems , The Spirit Court of Practice and Pretence, page 102: ↩
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1879, George Meredith, “chapter XLVI”, in The Egoist: ↩
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1895, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, “Chapter 18”, in The Wonderful Visit (Macmillan’s Colonial Library), London; New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC: ↩
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2022 July 25, Leah Dolan, “New documentary unearths troubling links between Victoria’s Secret and Jeffrey Epstein”, in CNN , archived from the original on 30 August 2022: ↩