These words refer to what is highly fashionable or formal in style and is costly, detailed or lavish, as well. Elegant is the most general but least concrete of these, being an approving word that refers to what is striking for its taste and value: a set of books with elegant bindings. It may suggest rarity as well as refinement, but may or may not suggest a piling up of great or costly masses of detail: the heavy gold scrolls of the elegant picture frame; a room elegant in its bareness, being sparsely furnished with a few pieces of modern furniture.

Elaborate and ornate both specifically indicate great detailing, but neither necessarily carries the built-in approving tone of elegant. Elaborate indicates a full-scale working out of something with painstaking care and thought: an elaborate epic poem with an amazing amount of themes and interrelated strands of imagery; elaborate costume balls that bored him silly; an elaborate hoax. The word can also apply to argument or reasoning that is methodical, lengthy and abstruse: an elaborate hypothesis. Ornate is more restricted to decoration, suggesting a denseness that is not so much orderly as sensual: ornate verbal imagery. The word stresses the finished effect more than the care of work that went into it. Sometimes richness or costliness of the result is implied: an ornate piece of jewellery studded with several different kinds of precious stones.

Luxurious and sumptuous specifically stress the sparing of no expense to create something fashionably lavish. These words may or may not point to the tastefulness suggested by elegant or the amassing of detail emphasized by the previous pair but they do point to a showiness of general effect. Luxurious often suggests, as well, a setting arranged for comfort and convenience: the luxurious hotel; a luxurious car complete with air conditioning, telephone and bar. The word need not be approving; a luxurious airport that was in the most garish and banal taste possible. Often, however, the word is applied approvingly to things in nature, eliminating any notion of costliness but emphasizing denseness, beauty or richness, as of visual effect: the luxurious plumage of the peacock; a luxurious forest floor of interlaced pine needles. Sumptuous is more likely to be restricted to man-made things; its root refers to expenditure and this emphasis on costliness is frequently present in the word’s use: a sumptuous Gbelin tapestry; critics who judged the sumptuous new opera house to be a aesthetic disaster. In its most common use, food is usually the subject: A delightful cognac rounded off this most sumptuous meal. Used more loosely, the word may indicate something well turned out, tasteful or lavish, without necessarily implying expenditure: the only woman on the beach with a really sumptuous figure.

De luxe comes from the French phrase that means of luxury. Thus it might function identically with luxurious . De luxe , however, very often refers to special accommodation: a de luxe compartment on the train: a de luxe hotel suite. In these and other cases, it can refer to added benefits, comforts or value that costs more than the ordinary version: a de luxe leather-bound edition of the encyclopaedia. Since the word has become chiefly a merchandising term, it is often used to be deliberately deceptive: proof that the tinned mushrooms labelled de luxe were not significantly different in quality from the regular grade.

Grandiose is the one word here that specifically and exclusively stresses a pretentious, inflated or pompous striving for the elegant or sumptuous : a grandiose speech filled with empty rhetoric. In this sense, it has a wider, more general range of applications than other words here: a grandiose symphony that ran on for more than two hours; the grandiose delusions of some schizophrenics.