cheerful

cheerful, cheery

For the ordinary meanings ‘full of cheer, cheering, gladdening’, cheerful is the usual word, and can be applied to a person or a person's appearance or disposition, as well as to utterances and activities (e.g. cheerful banter / cheerful cries / a cheerful greeting / a cheerful time) and occasionally places (a cheerful room). It also occurs in the informal fixed expression cheap and cheerful, meaning ‘simple but practical’, and is used more generally with the notion of tolerant good humour (e.g a cheerful acceptance of the inevitable). Cheery, which Dr Johnson called ‘a ludicrous word’, is more colloquial, is suggestive of high spirits, and is used to describe a person, mood, demeanour, voice, etc.