fetching

adjective

fetch·​ing ˈfe-chiŋ 

: attractive, appealing

a fetching smile

… actress Melanie Griffith, looking very fetching in a light-green silk dress and double diamond stud earrings.

—Robert Goldberg

If you tune your clock-radio to station 1540 in Charlotte, North Carolina, you wake up with a fetching female voice at your ear.

—Arline Brecher

There is something sweet and fetching about the episode.

—Newgate Callendar

From Ukrainian borscht to Vietnamese crab omelette, there is much to choose from, and all in all it's a fetching collection …

—Publishers Weekly

fetchingly

ˈfe-chiŋ-lē 

adverb

fetchingly dressed

Tasting plates generally consist of four to six bites of food, often lined up fetchingly on long, narrow white plates that curl at the edges.

—Harvey Steiman

Synonyms

• alluring
• appealing
• attractive
• bewitching
• captivating
• charismatic
• charming
• elfin
• enchanting
• engaging
• entrancing
• fascinating
• glamorous
• glamourous
• luring
• magnetic
• seductive

Examples of fetching in a Sentence

You look very fetching in that outfit.

the woman's fetching smile has long made the painting a favorite with visitors to the museum

Recent Examples on the Web

This process of programmatically fetching data — through API calls or requests — is commonly used to update other dashboards and maps set up by the city. —Nami Sumida, San Francisco Chronicle, 10 Feb. 2023

The unlikely progress through the story of Gussie Carnegie — the producer’s secretary, then wife, then star, then ex, but in reverse — suddenly seems clear and, in Krystal Joy Brown’s fetching performance, charming if not credible. —Jesse Green, New York Times, 12 Dec. 2022

Visit the burial site of Ham the Astrochimp, a fetching primate who uneventfully but quite involuntarily plunged through the mesopause himself in 1961. —John Phillips, Car and Driver, 9 Jan. 2023

Each is rubbed with a fetching assortment of spices before being slowly coaxed to tenderness by pitmaster Brad Hudetz in the restaurant’s massive Oyler smoker from J&R Manufacturing. —Nick Kindelsperger, Chicago Tribune, 28 Dec. 2022

Word History

First Known Use

1880, in the meaning defined above

Kids Definition

fetching

adjective

fetch·​ing ˈfech-iŋ 

: attractive, pleasing

a fetching smile

fetchingly adverb