Usage examples (5)

• He was a singularly interesting-looking man, home from India on sick leave, and the maidens, and wives, and widows, of this polyglot assemblage at the Hotel were all inclined...
• Barnabe Barnes asks the lady celebrated in his sonnets, from whose 'proud disdainfulness' he suffered,
• Joan turn'd, and the two women stood looking at each other; -- the one with dark wonder, the other with cold disdainfulness -- and I between them scarce lifting my eyes.
• While coyness has the various meanings of shyness, modest reserve, bashfulness, shrinking from advances or familiarity, disdainfulness, the verb "to coy" may mean the...