hoity-toity

Meanings

1. Behaviour adopted to demonstrate one's superiority; pretentious or snobbish behaviour; airs and graces.
2. Flighty, giddy, or silly behaviour; also, noisy merriment.
3. A young woman regarded as flighty, giddy, or silly.

1. Affected or pretentious, sometimes with the implication of displaying an air of excessive fanciness or ostentation; pompous, self-important, snobbish; often displaying a feeling of patronizing self-aggrandizing or arrogant class superiority.
2. Flighty, giddy, silly; also, merry in a noisy manner.

1. Flightily, giddily.
2. Merrily, in a noisy manner.

1. Expressing disapprobation or surprise at acts or words that are pompous or snobbish, or flighty.

Etymology

Probably from hoit (“to behave frivolously and thoughtlessly; to play the fool”) + -y (suffix forming adjectives with the sense ‘having the quality of’), reduplicated with a change of the initial consonant. The noun is attested earlier than the adjective.

Translations