Synonyms:
aloof, distant, upstage
Meaning: remote in manner; "stood apart with aloof dignity"; "a distant smile"; "he was upstage with strangers"
r
meaning of the word
Synonyms:
aloof
Meaning: in an aloof manner; "the local gentry and professional classes had held aloof for the school had accepted their sons readily enough"
Usage examples
Manners as fine as Mrs. McLane's, but too aloof and sensitive to care for leadership.
Now morose and brooding, now loudly profane, now laughing or now aloof, his errand in these unknown hills was plain.
In these matters which once would have engaged all Captain Blood's attention, he now took no part. He continued listless and aloof.
He had the power of standing aloof from himself, of arresting the flight of his own sensations, and criticising his own actions as a disinterested spectator.
It was by no means wonderful, then, that, after becoming possessor of the united fortunes of his father and his uncle, Henry Dunbar should keep aloof from a place that had always been obnoxious to him.
If he displeases us, we may express our distaste, and we may stand aloof from a person as well as from a thing that displeases us; but we shall not therefore feel called on to make his life uncomfortable.
But for an active being, a being who partakes of the consequences instead of standing aloof from them, there is at the same time a personal response. The difference imaginatively foreseen makes a present difference, which finds expression in solicitude and effort.
Persons whose interests have been enlarged and intelligence trained by dealing with things and facts in active occupations having a purpose (whether in play or work) will be those most likely to escape the alternatives of an academic and aloof knowledge and a hard, narrow, and merely "practical" practice.
They look upon all those whom this state of society has made their equals as oppressors, whose destiny can excite no sympathy; they have lost sight of their former equals, and feel no longer bound by a common interest to their fate: each of them, standing aloof, thinks that he is reduced to care for himself alone.