trite

Describing a result as a 'victory for football' might seem like a trite cliche - but you won't find many neutrals disagreeing with that description of Spain's win in the 2026 World Cup final.

From BBC ● Jul. 20, 2026

And while I won’t go so far as to use a trite phrase like, 40s are the new 30s, well…You catch my drift.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 12, 2026

She found its themes trite, and its prose subpar.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 23, 2026

Quoting what may be Russian literature’s most famous line is a little trite, I’ll admit.

From Salon ● Mar. 14, 2026

The only expression more trite than tongue in cheek is tongue firmly in cheek.

From "Woe Is I" by Patricia T. O'Conner

The resultant essay, titled “E Unibus Pluram,” took special pains not to descend into lazy “anti-TV paranoia,” “far cruder and triter than what the critics complain about.”

From Salon ● Jul. 12, 2015

So central to our culture and so often mocked — made the emblem of television at its least imaginative and most imitative, at its tritest and tiredest.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 1, 2021

The “life lessons that our innocent hero learns may sound like the tritest of homilies,” Stephen Holden wrote in his review for The Times.

From New York Times ● Sep. 8, 2018

Maybe every writer is doomed to have their tritest sentence become their most-tweeted, but in Joan Didion’s case, it feels particularly unfair that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” has become so ubiquitous.

From The Guardian ● Aug. 17, 2015

The tritest of all exercises in voyeuristic celebrity worship, that flimsy fold-up guide to the homes of actors and actresses represents the ultimate divide between the “haves” and “have-nots.”

From Washington Times ● Feb. 25, 2015

That the surface of humanity presented an infinite variety was the tritest of facts.

From Gaston de Latour; an unfinished romance by Walter Pater