Definition of "beauty" []

• The quality that gives pleasure to the mind or senses and is associated with such properties as harmony of form or color, excellence of artistry, truthfulness, and originality. (noun)
• One that is beautiful, especially a beautiful woman. (noun)
• A quality or feature that is most effective, gratifying, or telling: The beauty of the venture is that we stand to lose nothing. (noun)
• An outstanding or conspicuous example: "Hammett's gun went off. The shot was a beauty, just slightly behind the eyes” ( Lillian Hellman). (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "In _Othello_, "if virtue lack no delighted beauty," i.e. "_want not the light of beauty_, your son-in-law shows far more fair than black.""
• "Europeans, and it is certainly grand and interesting and in a certain sense beautiful, but not the calm, sweet, warm beauty of our own fields, and there is none of the brightness of our own flowers; a field of buttercups, a hill of gorse or of heather, a bank of foxgloves and a hedge of wild roses and purple vetches surpass in _beauty_ anything I have ever seen in the tropics."
• "To the Greek, in fact, beauty and good had the same meaning -- _beauty was good_, and the good must be beautiful."