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''apropos'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250719002525-00-⌔

apropos - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

apropos (comparative more apropos, superlative most apropos)

  • Of an appropriate or pertinent nature.
    • ✤ Nothing easier. I received not long ago a map from my friend, Augustus Petermann, at Leipzig. Nothing could be more apropos.1
    • ✤ A particularly apropos line many will remember from this film was the closing shot of a Times editorial reading “Is There No Sense of Decency?”2
    • ✤ Served outside the shell and sliced in bite-sized pieces, it’s as apropos for a first date as a business dinner.3
  • By the way, incidental.
    • ✤ Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. “No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to [C. Auguste] Dupin,” he observed. “Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as [Edgar Allan] Poe appeared to imagine.”4

Preposition

apropos

  • Regarding, concerning, in regard to, on the subject of.
    • ✤ “Go on, Uncle Max,” said Nora pleasantly. “I like to watch your exceptional mind at work. Apropos the disappearance of Geoffrey, and that big old lonely house, you were saying—?”5
    • ✤ Few have the same root and branch obsession with the recent past or the avenger’s recall (‘the necessity for long memory and sarcasm in argument’, as he wrote apropos the old left intelligentsia in New York).6

Adverb

apropos

  • By the way.
  • Timely; at a good time.
  • To the purpose; appropriately.

Noun

apropos (uncountable)

  • (obsolete) Fittingness, pertinence.

Etymology

Borrowed from French à propos (“on that subject”).

Similar in meaning and form, and to some extent etymology, to appropriate, but not a doublet of it.

Pronunciation

  • (UK) IPA: /ˌæp.ɹəˈpəʊ/
  • (US) IPA: /ˌæp.ɹəˈpoʊ/
  • Audio (US): 🔊
  • Audio (Australian): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -əʊ

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1877, Jules Verne, translated by Frederick Amadeus Malleson, Journey into the Interior of the Earth, Chapter VI: ↩

  2. 1974 February 9, “Tufts Porno”, in Gay Community News, volume 1, number 33, page 2: ↩

  3. 2008 December, Anne Valdespino, “Mr. Stox”, in Orange Coast, volume 34, number 12, →ISSN, page 139: ↩

  4. 1887, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet”, in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, London; New York, N.Y.: Ward, Lock & Co., part I (Being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., […]), chapter II (The Science of Deduction), page 14: ↩

  5. 1934, Ernest Bramah, The Bravo of London: ↩

  6. 2011, Jeremy Harding, “Diary”, in London Review of Books, 33.VII: ↩

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