If someone's behaviour is stagy, it looks put on — big, showy, and false, the way an actor plays to the back row of a theatre. A stagy sigh is louder than a real sigh. A stagy way of crying has one eye watching to see if you noticed. The word is a small insult: you are saying the feeling is not real, or at least that the showing of it is not. It can also describe a voice, a gesture, a laugh, or even a piece of writing or a film that feels false in this same theatrical way. You will meet it spelled 'stagey' too — both spellings are correct, and 'stagey' is more common now. This is a fairly literary word; in everyday speech people are more likely to say 'over the top', 'fake', or 'dramatic'. Two things worth knowing, though. First, a lot of what looks stagy is not a lie — people who feel a lot really do show a lot, and a shy student may call a warm person stagy when nothing false is happening. Second, in the theatre itself, being 'stagy' is a compliment turned upside down: big acting is correct on a big stage and only becomes stagy when you carry it out into the street, or into a camera close-up.

做作的、演戲般的、誇張造作（台灣口語常說「很浮誇」「很戲劇化」「在演」）