English

Adjective

penny-dreadfulish ‎(comparative more penny-dreadfulish, superlative most penny-dreadfulish)

1. Resembling or characteristic of a penny dreadful.
   • 1913, Doris Egerton Jones, Pied Piper, George W. Jacobs & Company, page 254:

     She has been quite penny-dreadfulish-sword-and-mask mysterious lately; she goes about with her lips pursed up and a sparkle in her eye.

   • 1936, Barnaby Ross, Drury Lane's Last Case, republished, March 1946, as by Ellery Queen, Little, Brown, page 250:

     But if Sedlar and Ales aren't the same, then there's only one conclusion to come to: they bear an uncanny resemblance to each other! We've been evading that conclusion because it seems—er—pulpy and penny-dreadfulish; but you can't get around it.

   • 2009, Jan Stuart, "Fiction Chronicle", The New York Times, 22 October 2009:

     "Dracula the Un-Dead” forsakes the epistolary format of its forebear in favor of a penny-dreadfulish narrative pitting the first book’s surviving characters against a monomaniacal vampire countess.