Loading page
say it: STIL-tid
stilted is an adjective meaning "artificially formal". It carries one recorded sense.
artificially formal
“that artificial humility that her husband hated”
“contrived coyness”
“a stilted letter of acknowledgment”
“when people try to correct their speech they develop a stilted pronunciation”
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 stilted 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.