DEGENERATE • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Degenerate

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/dɪdʒˈɛnərət/ /dɪdʒˈɛnərˌeɪt/ Listen

adjective

Degenerate adj. Having become worse than one's kind, or one's former state; having declined in worth; having lost in goodness; deteriorated; degraded; unworthy; base; low. "Faint-hearted and degenerate king." "A degenerate and degraded state." "Degenerate from their ancient blood." "These degenerate days." "I had planted thee a noble vine...: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?"

verb

Degenerate v. i. (past & past part. degenerated; pres. part. degenerating)

To be or grow worse than one's kind, or than one was originally; hence, to be inferior; to grow poorer, meaner, or more vicious; to decline in good qualities; to deteriorate. "When wit transgresseth decency, it degenerates into insolence and impiety."

(Biol.) To fall off from the normal quality or the healthy structure of its kind; to become of a lower type.

noun

degenerate n.

A person who has declined from a high standard, especially a sexual deviate; usually used disparagingly or opprobriously of persons whose sexual behavior does not conform to the norms of accepted morals.

A person or thing that has fallen from a higher to a lower state, or reverted to an earlier type or stage of development or culture.

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Etymology of 'Degenerate'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Degenerate" Quotes from Famous Books

... great purpose of their preservation and enforcement. That which was experimental in our plan of government was the question whether democratic rule could be so organized and conducted that it would not degenerate into license and result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the power so often found necessary of representing or destroying their enemy, when he was found in the person of ...

— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson

... of memory, enabling of judgment, and enlarging of conceit, which commonly we call learning, under what name soever it come forth or to what immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay ...

— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... assimilate the shells of knowledge along with the oysters, others instinctively use their powers of secretion to better purpose. Remember also that in Elizabethan times school-boy study was a far more strenuous matter than it is in these degenerate days, and that it was ...

— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... been a decline in public interest for some years before 1691, when the abuses which had grown round the celebration led to its reduction from fourteen to four days: but the fair lingered on in a degenerate state till it was last proclaimed by the Lord Mayor in 1850, and finally ceased in 1855. The live cattle market, so vividly described, with its attendant nuisances, in the twenty-first chapter of "Oliver Twist," was closed at the same time, and the business transferred to the new ...

— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley

... would have sounded absurd, but, to-day, some forms of heart disease are known to be the regular sequences of some particular form of kidney disease, just as some form of pneumonia attends an affected heart and that some forms of pneumonia degenerate into phthisis. When the blood change is an established fact, it is only a question as to which is the weak organ, and the organism of the individual will decide whether it will be a simple sick-headache or the beginning of ...

— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

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