Desecrate
adj, verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 To profane or violate the sacredness or sanctity of something. transitive
"It's reform -- reform! You're going to 'turn over a new leaf,' and all that, and sign the pledge, and quit cigars, and go to work, and pay your debts, and gravitate back into Sunday-school, where you can make love to the preacher's daughter under the guise of religion, and desecrate the sanctity of the innermost pale of the church by confessions at Class of your 'thorough conversion'!"
- 2 remove the consecration from a person or an object wordnet
- 3 To remove the consecration from someone or something; to deconsecrate. transitive
- 4 violate the sacred character of a place or language wordnet
- 5 To change in an inappropriate and destructive manner. transitive
"A subsequent owner has desecrated the main hall and robbed it of its grandeur by putting in a floor just beneath the circular windows in order to make an upper room over the hall."
- 1 Desecrated. rare
"Here are the very nooks where the unwashed most abound—here are the temples most desecrate."
Example
More examples"A private security company released attack dogs against hundreds of Native Americans trying to prevent an oil pipeline company from using bulldozers to desecrate the graves of their ancestors."
Etymology
From de- + stem of consecrate.
More for "desecrate"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.