melodramatic

melodrama (ˈmɛləˌdrɑːmə)

—n
1.	a play, film, etc, characterized by extravagant action and emotion
2.	(formerly) a romantic drama characterized by sensational incident, music, and song
3.	overdramatic emotion or behaviour
4.	a poem or part of a play or opera spoken to a musical accompaniment

[C19: from French mélodrame, from Greek melos song + dramedrama]

melodramatist

—n

melodramatic

—*adj*

melodramatics

—*pl n*

melodra'matically

—*adv*

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Word Origin & History

melodramatic

1816, from melodrama on model of dramatic.

Example sentences

If the plot comes off as manufactured or melodramatic, the emotions of

characters remain genuine and haunting.

No howler by the keeper, no muffed offside call, no melodramatic dive to set it

all up with an unjustified free kick.

Members of white supremacist groups tend to employ melodramatic iconography to

identify their activities.

Against these stereotypes and melodramatic speculations stand a body of

statistics and several studies.

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emocore hokey operatic soap opera

Matching Quote

"The American novel tends to rest in contradictions and among extreme ranges of experience. When it attempts to resolve contradictions, it does so in oblique, morally equivocal ways. As a general rule, it does so either in melodramatic actions or in pastoral idylls, although intermixed with both one may find the stirring instabilities of "American humor." These qualities constitute the uniqueness of that branch of the novelistic tradi tion which has flourished in this country. They help to account for the strong element of "romance" in the American "novel." By contrast, the English novel has followed a middle way. It is notable for its great practical sanity, its powerful, engrossing composition of wide ranges of experience into a moral centrality and equability of judgment. Oddity, distortion of personality, dislocations of normal life, recklessness of behavior—these the English novel has included. Yet the profound poetry of disorder we find in the American novel is missing, with rare exceptions, from the English."

-Richard Chase