lackluster

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What It Means

Lackluster describes something lacking in sheen, brilliance, or vitality—in other words, something dull or mediocre.

// After a summer of lackluster sales, business is booming at the coffee shop now that students are returning.

Examples

“Layers of texture and pattern can keep a black-and-white bedroom from feeling lackluster.” — Monique Valeris, Good Housekeeping, April 2021

Did You Know?

Lackluster may describe things that are dull, but the word itself is no yawn. In its earliest uses in the early 17th century, lackluster (also spelled lacklustre) usually described eyes that were dull or lacking in brightness, as in “a lackluster stare.” Later, it came to describe other things whose sheen had been removed; Charles Dickens, in his 1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewit, writes of the faded image of the dragon on the sign outside a village alehouse: “many a wintry storm of rain, snow, sleet, and hail, had changed his colour from a gaudy blue to a faint lack-lustre shade of grey.” These days lackluster is broadly used to describe anything blah, from a spiritless sensation to a humdrum hump day.

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