Loading page
say it: buh-NAHL
banal is an adjective meaning "repeated too often; overfamiliar through overuse". It is pronounced /bəˈnɑl/ — buh-NAHL. It carries one recorded sense.
repeated too often; overfamiliar through overuse
“bromidic sermons”
“his remarks were trite and commonplace”
“hackneyed phrases”
“a stock answer”
“repeating threadbare jokes”
“parroting some timeworn axiom”
“the trite metaphor `hard as nails'”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for banal come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.