simper

Like all the best confidence tricksters, Ripley reads people, each nervous twitch, each self-regarding simper, using every moment of weakness for his own gain.

From The Guardian ● Apr. 28, 2018

He tweeted: "*blush* *giggle* *simper* - thank you very much, nice Golden Rose people."

From BBC ● Nov. 19, 2015

Soon she and Vinny have established a playful rapport that causes Edgar to whimper and simper in jealousy.

From New York Times ● Oct. 28, 2011

Even party ballet Elite Syncopations, MacMillan's 1974 setting of Scott Joplin rags, has an acidic aftertaste: the girls simper and the men strut with an unnerving edge of desperation.

From The Guardian ● Mar. 24, 2010

He couldn’t simper around these fools and still be what he was becoming for Naomi.

From "Out of Darkness" by Ashley Hope Pérez

“I love him for the man that he almost is,” simpers Dorothy, the kindly bookkeeper and single mother who improbably snags Jerry Maguire’s semifreddo heart after he’s let go from his high-powered sports agency.

From The Guardian ● Dec. 13, 2016

“They say I’m too young to love you,” she simpers on “Brooklyn Baby”.

From Time ● Jun. 17, 2014

A British boy band, the Wanted, simpers through “Have Some Fun,” while Usher sounds downright miserable that “The Party Ain’t Over.”

From New York Times ● Nov. 19, 2012

"Hoyt was kind of shy about it, I think because of my fangs," she simpers.

From Salon ● Sep. 12, 2011

He was sick of sitting here listening to Mr. Reardon bully his family with all these “hypotheticals,” all these simpers and smirks, cruel smiles and humorless laughs.

From "Found" by Margaret Peterson Haddix

He also simpered that he was “belied and stared at, as if I was a Rhinoceros,” escalating his bath of self-pity to exclamations that “I am in danger of being murdered without doors.”

From Slate ● Aug. 9, 2016

He just simpered and whined ineffectually, then fell under the sway of the Faith Militant’s leader – whom he should be opposing.

From The Guardian ● May 16, 2016

"At least this wee fella loves me," he simpered, nanoseconds before the cur sank its gnashers into the hand of the Souness-shunning sadsack.

From The Guardian ● Nov. 14, 2012

Nature in them is not idealized; she is at best played for pratfalls and at worst she is simpered over and over-sanitized.

From Time Magazine Archive

At the council table, Queen Cersei shimmered in a cloth-of-gold gown slashed in burgundy velvet, while beside her Varys fussed and simpered in a lilac brocade.

From "A Clash of Kings" by George R.R. Martin

Geoffrey’s simpering, emotional stuntedness may make it difficult for, say, the village’s priest or barkeep to see much of themselves in him.

From The Verge ● May 9, 2022

Davies was a gifted comedienne whose career was, if anything, hampered by her lover-producer’s insistence that she play only the simpering heroines of historical melodramas.

From Slate ● Nov. 12, 2020

Michael Urie puts the character of Bud Frump, the boss’s simpering nephew, in a joyful comic headlock, and John Michael Higgins is a suitably button-down J.B.

From Washington Post ● Jun. 8, 2018

Matt Ingebretson and Jake Weisman’s boundlessly cynical new series marks a new extreme of pure, unleaded contempt for the indignities of office life, from boorish bosses to simpering middle managers to byzantine bureaucracies.

From The Guardian ● Jan. 23, 2018

I yet recall his simpering Face as he offered us Tea.

From "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves" by M.T. Anderson