DECENCY • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Decency

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/dˈisənsi/ Listen

noun

Decency n. (pl. decencies)

The quality or state of being decent, suitable, or becoming, in words or behavior; propriety of form in social intercourse, in actions, or in discourse; proper formality; becoming ceremony; seemliness; hence, freedom from obscenity or indecorum; modesty. "Observances of time, place, and of decency in general." "Immodest words admit of no defense, For want of decency is want of sense."

That which is proper or becoming. "The external decencies of worship." "Those thousand decencies, that daily flow From all her words and actions."

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Etymology of 'Decency'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Decency" Quotes from Famous Books

... same rank were pitted against each other; the accounts of each were kept separately, and every man lived in terror of losing his job, if another made a better record than he. So from top to bottom the place was simply a seething caldron of jealousies and hatreds; there was no loyalty or decency anywhere about it, there was no place in it where a man counted for anything against a dollar. And worse than there being no decency, there was not even any honesty. The reason for that? Who could say? It must have been old Durham in the beginning; it was a heritage which the self-made merchant ...

— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... by that, you impertinent young man?" said Mrs Tomkins, her blood rising to her face, herself rising from her chair. "I should have thought that a man who had been so recently expelled from his church would have had more decency. A pretty person you must be, to bring a charge of this kind against so ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various

... transient—the progress of corruption was checked, but the disease still lurked in the heart, and tainted the life-blood of the community. The orgies of Medmenham Abbey, the triumphs of Wilkes, and the loss of America, bear fatal testimony to the want of decency and disregard of merit in private as well as public life which infected Great Britain, polluting the sources of her domestic virtues, and bringing disgrace upon her arms and councils during the greater part of the eighteenth century. It is with a masterly ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various

... weeks at Grange Heath, and felt that he could not, in common decency, stay any longer; so he had packed his portmanteau one pleasant May morning, ...

— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon

... would be the greatest comfort to him. To the old people, whose one solace of a cup of tea would be gone unless I gave it them; to the boys who were learning to read, who wanted testaments; to the bed-ridden and sick, who wanted blankets; to the young and well, who wanted gowns (not indeed for decency, but for the natural pleasure of looking neat and smart)—and to Margaret, first and last, who was nearest to me, and who, I began to think, might want some other trifles besides a cloak. The girl come in ...

— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell

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