penny dreadful
Meanings
noun
- A cheap paperback book, particularly those concerning lurid depictions of crime in the Victorian era.
- Pulp fiction: stories written in the lurid style of the penny dreadfuls.
Word forms
Etymology
From its low price and the lower-class British use of dreadful (“sensationalized crime reporting”).
Related words
Derived words
This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.