Decadent
adj, noun ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A person affected by moral decay.
"L. Douglas He had the fastidiousness, the preciosity, the love of archaisms, of your true decadent."
- 2 a person who has fallen into a decadent state (morally or artistically) wordnet
- 1 Characterized by moral or cultural decline.
"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."
- 2 Luxuriously self-indulgent.
"2003, Hedonismbot in the Futurama episode "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings" Surgery in an opera? How wonderfully decadent! And just as I was beginning to lose interest!"
- 1 luxuriously self-indulgent wordnet
- 2 marked by excessive self-indulgence and moral decay wordnet
Example
More examples"All acts against nature are decadence. The most decadent of men are priests: they teach that which is against nature. Debating isn't effective against priests, only prison is."
Etymology
From French décadent, a back-formation from décadence (see -ent), from Medieval Latin dēcadentia, from Late Latin dēcadēns, present participle of dēcadō, dēcidō (“sink, fall; perish”), from Latin dē- + cadō (“fall”).
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.