WordWealth: winsome

win·some , adj.

The first  time I met Diana, she was a winsome little girl full of energy and mischief. —— Annabel Goldsmith, 'I Will  Miss Her Smile'; Daily Telegraph, Sept 3, 1997

Willard R. Espy ... had such a winsome way with words, such an elegant ear for rhyme and such a sure sense of the absurd that he once began a poem with the words 'I do not roister with an oyster'. —— "Willard R. Espy, 88, Scholar  and Practitioner of Wordplay"; New York Times, Feb 25, 1999

That was another thing. You would turn up at 9 p.m. for a show that was supposed to start at 8:30, have a couple of passion fruit cocktails (there are always free drinks), flip through a magazine, wonder about that manicure you never got -- and finally, at 10:20, the hot lights would come on to bake you to a crisp. The other night at Ms. Temperley's show (furry vests over winsome skirts), the photographers actually started to moan for the show to stop. But, by then, it was nearly 11. —— Kathy Horyn, 'Review/Fashion; London's Rebels, Pausing to Shop; The New York Times; Feb 23, 2003

The action begins on the morning of 9/11, and initially Wendy's youthful perspective is off-putting. Although ''Diary of a Young Girl'' pops up in the narrative as an influential book, Wendy is no Anne Frank. Like most other American teenage girls, she broods about her weight: ''Later, she would consider what she was doing at the exact second it happened. Walking up to the pencil sharpener in front of the room and wondering, as she sharpened her pencil, if anyone was thinking she looked fat.'' At first, it seems that Maynard (author of the winsome satirical novel ''To Die For'') has made a disastrous choice. After the second tower falls, one of Wendy's classmates says, ''Oh my God. . . . This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.'' —— Karen Karbo; 'Lost Girl'; The New York Times; Feb 16, 2003

Synonyms: charming, engaging, winning

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