Word Woman

Welcome to another weird and wonderful installment of Word Woman's Weekly Work-Out! Keep your brain in tip-top shape by doing sudoku, crossword puzzles and (my personal favorite) expanding your vocabulary. Let's get a jump on things with the Word of the Week:

Dime novel: A short piece of adventure fiction published in the latter half of the 19th century, usually set in the West or on the frontier and written with stereotypical characters and formulaic plots.
Erastus Beadle brought out the first series of dime novels starting in 1860, and some were hugely successful with the mass audience. Typical dime-novel characters were Deadwood Dick and Hurricane Nell. Buffalo Bill and Calamity Jane were actual Westerners used as characters in these adventure stories. Perhaps the best-known dime novelist was Edward Z. C. Judson, who wrote under the pen name Ned Buntline.
The term came to be used as descriptive of an improbable heroic fantasy -- dime-novel hero, dime-novel rescue. It also yielded the forms dime novelist, dime-novelism, dime-novelish and even dime-novelly. There were also half-dime novels, which sold for a nickel. Not a Westernism, but an Eastern term for a pseudo-Western product. -- "Dictionary of the American West", Winfred Blevins, Facts on File, Inc., New York, 1993.

Example: Edgar played the role of the hero to dime-novelish excess, much to the dismay of the rest of the cast.