-ītfəl adjective
1. : highly pleasing : affording great pleasure and satisfaction
a delightful day in the country
2. obsolete : experiencing delight
Synonyms:
delicious , delectable , luscious : delightful , very wide in its applications, may describe anything that gives keen lively pleasure to mind, heart, or senses
this is the most charming and delightful book I have read in many a day — H.S.Canby
he was a high-spirited ornamental youth with soft melting eyes, as good as he was beautiful, and so delightful to women that it was said they all longed to bite him — J.A.Froude
for rest and recreation a warm, equable climate is doubtless most delightful — Ellsworth Huntington
sex must be treated from the first as natural, delightful and decent — Bertrand Russell
delicious commonly refers to that which is tasted, smelled, or otherwise savored with maximum pleasure and keenest appreciation
the fish was delicious; the manner of cooking them in the ground preserving all the juices and rendering them exceeding sweet and tender — Herman Melville
among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac … snuffing in … the delicious scent — Virginia Woolf
her gestures delicious in their modest and sensitive grace — Arnold Bennett
delectable , a rather literary word, is close to delicious but may apply to what enraptures a refined or discriminating taste
it was spicy sherry, and we drank out of the halves of fresh citron melons. Delectable goblets — Herman Melville
the sweet cloister, with its walls of silver, surrounded by silvery herbage, all delectable beyond conception — H.O.Taylor
its scoring is delectable, with the subtlest of balances, mixed colors and shifting sonorities — Musical America
luscious suggests a lush richness of taste, flavor, fragrance, or coloring
the luscious figs, the grapes, oozy with southern juice — Nathaniel Hawthorne
Renoir, whose appetizing La Source — an amply bosomed nude sitting beside a running fountain — showed the luscious tints and easy symbolism — Time
the quatrains of wine and flowers translated for us in luscious, seductive rhyme — Donn Byrne
luscious may suggest overtones of excess or extravagance, as of coloring, fleshy ripeness, full-blown luxuriance, or voluptuousness
others amuse themselves with luscious sonnets to Bessies and Jessies — Publ's Mod. Lang. Association of America
she was a blonde, who must once have been quite luscious and who was by no means even now undesirable — smooth and round, with a pink complexion that sometimes looked like strawberries and cream, sometimes a little blowsy — Edmund Wilson
delectable and luscious are more common in humorous and ironic uses than delightful and delicious
one of the most delectable bees that ever buzzed in a bonnet — C.E.Montague
a droll and luscious nasality — Thomas Wolfe