1Done in accordance with rules of convention or etiquette; suitable for or constituting an official or important situation or occasion.

正式宴会。

1. 1.1 (of a person or their manner) prim or stiff.
   （人，态度）刻板的，拘谨的
   Example sentencesExamples

   • Now he was formal and unreadable, the commander, once more.
   • Whoever said that Germans were a formal people?
   • I had to laugh, he was so formal, but I took the arm he offered.
   • We were very formal with each other but it got to the stage where I even took my dad round to see her.
   • A ponderous and formal man, he succeeded Walpole as first minister in 1742, but old, unwell, and with little taste for leadership, he merely presided for a year until his death.
   • When I go to a meeting, I have to decide ahead of time what to bring, and I'm never sure about the weather or how formal people will be.
   • I am a moderately formal person who works as an art educator, and I am a Virgo.
   • In my experience as an architect, a house in which every space is designed for everyday living is far more satisfying than one with unused formal spaces for formal guests who never show up.
   • But he was obsessively formal and had about as much liveliness as a salted cod, and Bahzell simply couldn't warm to him as he had to Charrow or Sir Terrian.
   • And if I ever see him in passing, I'll treat him in a strictly formal manner.
   • He was more formal, stuck to facts and figures, for the most part, as is his habit, but they're important facts and figures.
   • How did a formal woman end up with her for a daughter?
   • They were excessively formal when speaking to each other, they spent no more time than they had to with each other, and even seemed to have staked out territories in and around the palace.
   • Don't tell me I'm not formal enough for whatever this is.
   • An austere and formal man, his affection for his wife and seven living children (three died in childbirth and one drowned at the age of 10) was minimal.
   • They're quite formal and arch so they go against my grain.
   • They are greeted in a traditional and formal manner by the people of Parihaka.
   • Even the closest personal relationships with men were more formal and task-oriented than those with women, and proceeded along hierarchical lines.
   • For all the mystery surrounding him, he had a very formal personality, especially in the presence of his colleagues and superiors.
   • Even if someone was formal with him, they would have to be familiar with biochemical jargon and terminology, or Edward would act condescendingly to them.

   Synonyms

   aloof, reserved, remote, detached, unapproachable, stand-offish, keeping people at arm's length
2. 1.2 Of or denoting a style of writing or public speaking characterized by more elaborate grammatical structures and more conservative and technical vocabulary.
   （写作，演讲）正式的，庄重的
   Example sentencesExamples

   • It was written by her husband, yet its style was rigidly formal, consistently using her surname alone.
   • Eventually she achieved an almost purely formal vocabulary using elements drawn from everyday life.
   • Authors Courter and Marquis wrote the book using a fairly friendly and slightly formal style.
   • This is why communities of practice adopt formal vocabularies, so that ambiguity can be reduced and clarity improved.
   • Her writing style was more formal than that of her peers.
   • You have a definite formal vocabulary that you carry from film to film.
   • Such writings were highly formal exercises in style and rhetoric, often delighting in dialectically arguing for and against a particular topic.
   • New variants often appear first in casual speech, while older ones remain in more emphatic formal styles.
   • Here are a few of the letters, interesting to modern readers for their content and the formal style of writing.
   • But I don't think so: I think he just thinks it's a more archaic, formal or quaint style of speaking than we use nowadays.
   • I haven't had time to look at any other Roosevelt speeches to see if this was a consistent property of his formal style.
   • The latter is normal Standard English, acceptable either spoken or written, in either informal or formal style.
   • Other corpora, such as the North American News Text Corpus, are bigger, but contain only formal writing and speech.
   • The major changes were from features of spoken English to those more typical of formal writing, both in surface detail and in more fundamental characteristics.
   • Filipinos generally speak the way they write, in a formal style based on Victorian prose models.
   • The highlighted words and phrases are ones that will not be used in formal writing and they even contain grammar mistakes.
   • The techniques, formal vocabulary and imagination that this book highlights leave us eager to learn much more.
   • This makes the diction simple and easy to understand with humorous differences between this writing style and other more formal ones.
   • The writing is pathetic, but there is simply nothing wrong with its grammar or the formal aspects of its style.
   • In fact, in the context of American journalism, they are seen as using a formal, conservative, and prestigious style.

   Synonyms

   literary, scholarly, learned, intellectual, erudite, bookish, highbrow, academic, cultivated
3. 1.3 (especially of a house or garden) arranged in a regular, classical, and symmetrical manner.
   （尤指房子或花园）整齐的，布置井然的；古典的；匀称的
   Example sentencesExamples

   • We briefly stopped at his home, the Eastman House, an elegant 50-room Colonial Revival Mansion surrounded by formal gardens.
   • Inspired by the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome, classic rooms have clean, simple lines and formal symmetry.
   • The project has included the replanting of the formal garden in front of the house using boxwood, roses, catmint, lavender and clematis.
   • To tempt the tourists in, Ford Park's house, its formal gardens and grounds would be restored to their former glory while an access-route to the monument on Hoad Hill from the park would be reopened.
   • The formal gardens include collections of roses, rhododendrons and magnolias.
   • If you have a formal garden, in a classic or minimalist style, then you can skip the rest of this article because rustic furniture would look out of place in your back yard.
   • A scattering of red pillows with white roses on the couch alludes to the formal gardens just beyond the window, while keeping Paul's favorite color in the mix.
   • There is a productive kitchen garden, a quarry garden, a waterfowl garden and a formal area in front of the house appropriately named the Best Garden.
   • The form of that building is unknown but a drawing which survives in the Headfort archive suggests a large house surrounded by formal gardens designed by Robert Stevenson.
   • Dawa and Wheatcroft have created a lovely, peaceful garden, with formal areas in front of the house.
   • The exhibition, in storyboard form, explores the history of the Whitton Dean estate, recreating the house and what was once the most exquisite formal garden in the Twickenham area.
   • Carefully planted in extremely diverse sections, there were formal gardens, as well as fruit groves of mangoes, guavas and citrus trees.
   • Unlike a more rigid formal garden, the resulting prairie component ‘is not at all a static environment,’ according to Hyams.
   • To the front of the house, there is a formal garden enclosed by boxwood hedging while beyond there is a woodland garden and a paddock bisected by the Corrie Burn.
   • The garden to the rear of the house is more formal.
   • Near the house there are formal terraces which were made in the 19th century and inspired by those at the Villa Aloupka on the shores of the Black Sea.
   • But my personal favourite was Ballyvolane, a six bedroomed Italianate house with a lovely formal walled garden with dovecote behind, and its own fishing lakes in front.
   • Gone are the stuccoed Classical and mock Egyptian facades that addressed the formal gardens.
   • Beyond the main building are a series of 17 formal exhibition gardens with rectangular flower beds edged in boxwood, one of the oldest features of the garden.
   • Characterized by spatial fluidity and interpenetration, the house has a rich formal complexity and intimacy.

2Officially sanctioned or recognized.

正式申诉。

1. 2.1 Having a conventionally recognized form, structure, or set of rules.
   正规的
   he had little formal education

   他没受过多少正规教育。

   Example sentencesExamples

   • Increasingly, however, companies are demanding some kind of formal education in interior design, whether it's an evening class programme or a three year degree.
   • Additionally, the man himself is an inspiration due to his own lack of formal design education.
   • His first formal graphic design education was at a vocational school the year before he graduated high school.
   • Some would say that the caliber of work we do demonstrates a formal education in Graphic Design.
   • Do you make the distinction between a formal hypnotic state and the everyday trance state?
   • Her idea was to connect formal, structured education with real-world learning opportunities.
   • Only recently have we seen large numbers of people come straight into Web design from formal education programs.
   • Since I hadn't received a formal graphic design education, I did not have the rudimentary skills required to develop a mature design style.
   • By age 5, children become interested in formal games with rules or two or more sides, and explicit activities.
   • Nowadays, however, more Tuareg recognize the importance of formal education.
   • I would look at him and feel really proud that we were going out, even though it never really felt like a formal boyfriend/girlfriend relationship.
   • That is why the development of formal education designed for blind people is now facing great constraints.
   • I have no real formal music training, like every other punk who gets a keyboard for his bar mitzvah.
   • Have you ever had any formal education in design or new media?
   • Western schooling crowds out other forms of formal education like initiation rituals that were designed to bring an entire age group to the same level rather than to weed out students.
   • Traditionally, formal education was under the authority of the Ethiopian Coptic Christian Church.
   • From that initial drawing, a more formal design for the structure evolved.
   • Is there some formal expression of etiquette that is appropriate here?
   • By combining formal knowledge with real world experience and new ideas or perspectives, the construction of new knowledge occurs.
   • As a singer, did you have any formal training or did you just begin knowing that you wanted to sing?

   Synonyms

   symmetrical, regular, orderly, arranged, methodical, systematic, in straight lines, regimented

   conventional, mainstream, rigid

3Of or concerned with outward form or appearance, especially as distinct from content or matter.

我对艺术懂得不多，不会欣赏纯形式上的艺术特性。

1. 3.1 Having the form or appearance without the spirit.
   表面化的，徒有形式的
   his sacrifice will be more formal than real

   Example sentencesExamples

   • Courtesy is the formal manifestation of the spirit of respect.
   • Genuine democracy presupposes that broad layers of the population can satisfy their elementary interests not only in a formal sense but in real life.
   • He claims that society must ensure both formal and real freedom.
   • From the perspective of the liturgy of the Church this understanding of spirit has created a very formal and lifeless kind of worship.
2. 3.2 Relating to linguistic or logical form as opposed to function or meaning.
   （语言，逻辑）形式的，与形式有关的
   Example sentencesExamples

   • After all, we may know many things that have nothing to do with formal logical systems.
   • It says that no consistent formal logical system can prove its own consistency.
   • One can have rigorous, logically sound formal systems based on diagrams.
   • These words which might be supposed to be vague in meaning in fact perform a very precise formal function.
   • The contradistinction of the two logics, formal logical and dialectical, is equally unjustified.
   • In fact, the viewer should be able to inspect a visual representation and a traditional logical formal proof with the same rigor.
   • In the logical formal mode, proof is provided in linearly connected sentences composed of words that are carefully selected to convey unambiguous meaning.
   • In a formal proof, all the intermediate logical steps are supplied.
   • A mathematical proof is a formal and logical line of reasoning that begins with a set of axioms and moves through logical steps to a conclusion.
   • There have been a lot of ‘proofs’, some aided by kinds of formal or symbolic logic.
   • First, modern mathematical methods were to be represented in formal deductive systems.

1An evening gown.

1. 1.1 An occasion on which evening dress is worn.
   需穿晚礼服的场合
   Example sentencesExamples

   • So anyway, Kelly wants Kevin to ask her to the formal.
   • I went to my winter formal with a girl I liked and had no fun.
   • I went to the winter formal when I was a freshman.
   • ‘I didn't know there was a winter formal,’ Noella said, examining the sweater in the mirror.
   • When students are in the twelfth grade they attend a senior school dance called the formal.
   • Harry, Piper's brother, had left for college two years ago but had left me his tuxedo for formals, in the event that I ever attended one.
   • The 007 look-alike competition took place over the weekend with our youngsters embarking on a night to remember at the formal.
   • It seems the only things going on there anymore are Thursday night residence parties and high school formals.
   • She looked absolutely beautiful, and it was more than the usual overly styled hair and huge puffy dress that girls usually wore to the spring formal.
   • The Bosco Drama Group will also be holding a Summer School daily for two weeks during August and are also in the process of organising their annual formal which is planned for early October.
   • Any parent who has a child in the latter years of high school is only too familiar with formals.
   • I remember my mother wearing this dress when she attended a business formal with my dad.
   • Everywhere she went, the girls talked of dresses, hair, make-up, and most of all, dates for the formal.
   • They both just said, ‘So, are you going to the formal with anyone yet?’
   • It was Friday, the day before the winter formal, and his tuxedo still wasn't ready.
   • He was my guide post for everything before the formal.
   • Our daughter has worked hard for this moment, tackling her studies with an intensity that can only come from trying to get everything done before the spring formal.
   • Why couldn't he have just invited a different girl to the winter formal?
   • When I had told him that I was going to be doing stats for the wrestling team, he just chuckled and mentioned something about me also wanting to get a date to the winter formal.