0 (of a person's behaviour or way of speaking or writing) too formal and not smooth or natural:
1 (of behavior, speech, or writing) too formal and not smooth or natural:
The language is stilted, typical 'translatorese', so much so that some sentences are virtually incomprehensible.
The text, in traditional number-opera format, is indeed stilted and dreary.
As a kind of diary, in parts it is written in the stilted, abbreviated manner of that genre.
Too much emphasis on any one element would lead to the production of narratives which were stilted and not naturalistic.
The rhetoric of his speeches is also somewhat stilted and archaic, probably by design.
The lines, spoken staccato by the actors, are choppy, stilted fragments rather than smooth streams of input.
Besides, the mensural interpretation was artificial and yielded stilted transcriptions.
In his serenade, for example, the rhymes are obvious and stilted; more grotesque still are the violations of metre and the misplaced accents.
