chocolate-box [chaw-kuh-lit-boks, chok-uh-, chawk-lit-, chok-] ExamplesWord Origin adjective
- excessively decorative and sentimental, as the pictures or designs on some boxes of chocolate candy; prettified: decorous, chocolate-box paintings of Victorian garden parties.
Origin of chocolate-box First recorded in 1900–05 Examples from the Web for chocolate-box Historical Examples of chocolate-box
Like that, like that, at any rate, she no longer looked like the picture on a chocolate-box.
Louis Couperus
No, mark you, he’d take jolly good care that his sentimentality didn’t make him see her as a chocolate-box picture!
Louis Couperus
My romance was not in the things of glitter and chocolate-box gaiety, but rather in the dolours and silences of the East.
Thomas Burke
Not strictly beautiful, perhaps; but then I don’t like the chocolate-box sort of woman.
Plays: Lady Frederick, The Explorer, A Man of Honor
William Somerset Maugham
British Dictionary definitions for chocolate-box chocolate-box noun
- (modifier) informal sentimentally pretty or appealing