felicitous

Etymology

From felicity + -ous.

adj

1. Characterized by felicity.
   1. Appropriate, apt, fitting.
      The recommendations of the experts, however, have not proved very felicitous. […] [S]cant regard has been paid to Albania's much stronger claims, both on ethnographical and on strategical grounds, in the North, […] 29 September 1921, “Pertrella” [pseudonym], “Albania. The Birth of a Nation.”, in The Near East: A Weekly Review of the Politics and Commerce of the Balkan Peninsula, Egypt and the Sudan, Morocco, Asia Minor, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and India, volume XX, number 542, London: [s.n.], →OCLC, page 383, column 2
      […] Sykewar was not conceived, in [P. M. A.] Linebarger's felicitous phrase, as "warfare psychologically waged." 1949, Daniel Lerner, “Organization for Sykewar”, in Sykewar: Psychological Warfare against Germany, D-Day to VE-Day (A Policy Sciences Book), New York, N.Y.: George W. Stewart, Publisher, →OCLC, footnote 16, page 63
   2. Auspicious, fortunate, lucky.
      There are a variety of charms, of various kinds, for which there are no names and no particular uses; but they are considered felicitous, and are therefore worn by the poorer classes, who cannot buy the more valuable charms. 2 July 1831, John Robert Morrison, “XIV.—Some Account of Charms, Talismans, and Felicitous Appendages Worn about the Person, or Hung up in Houses, &c., Used by the Chinese”, in Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, volume III, London: J[ohn] Murray,[…]; and Parbury, Allen, & Co.,[…], publishers to the Society; […], published 1835, →OCLC, page 288; republished London: Printed by J. L. Cox and Son, printers to the Royal Asiatic Society,[…], 1832, →OCLC, paragraph 18, page 6
   3. Causing happiness or pleasure.
      The same chronicler John Capgrave] makes Henry of Agincourt die a day earlier than he really did, apparently only for the purpose of manufacturing a sort of coincidence. 'His end fell well on the feast of Saint Felix, for he was felicitous in all things—felicitous in endowing the church, felicitous in ordering more clearly the divine offices, felicitous in the administration of justice, and in fine, felicitous in all his life.['] 31 December 1870, “Coincidences”, in William, Robert Chambers, editors, Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Art, volume VII, number 366 (Fourth Series), London, Edinburgh: Printed and published by W. & R. Chambers[…], →OCLC, pages 841–842, column 1
      He is looking the very picture of health, and on the whole his dreams are felicitous. For instance, last night he dreamt that he had been buying strawberries as large as gourds. It proves the magnificent vitality of his dreams. 8 July 1920, Rabindranath Tagore, edited by C[harles] F[reer] A[ndrews]], Letters from Abroad, Triplicane, Madras, Tamil Nadu: S. Ganesan, publisher, published 1924, →OCLC, page 5
2. (linguistics) Of a sentence or utterance: semantically and pragmatically coherent; fitting in the context.
   This sentence is grammatical; it is just not felicitous.
   The aim of this paper is to compare rst rhetorical structure theory], sdrt [segmented discourse representation theory] and discourse dependency dags directed acyclic graphs] with respect to the following question: do these formalisms allow the representation of all the discourse structures which correspond to felicitous discourses and exclude those which correspond to infelicitous discourses? 2008, Laurence Danlos, “Strong Generative Capacity of rst, sdrt and discourse dependency dags”, in Anton Benz, Peter Kühnlein, editors, Constraints in Discourse (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series; 172), Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Pa.: John Benjamins Publishing Company, →ISSN, part II (Comparing Frameworks), page 70