Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Lack of probity; dishonesty.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Lack of probity; want of integrity or rectitude of principle; dishonesty.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. Lack of probity; lack of integrity or rectitude; dishonesty.
Etymologies
- im- + probity (Wiktionary)
- Middle English improbite, shameless persistence, from Old French, dishonesty, from Latin improbitās, from improbus, dishonest : in-, not; see in-1 + probus, honest, good; see per1 in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“It had a peculiar sensitivity to certain stimuli, and he felt a sensation in its roots whenever he encountered prevarication, deception, or any degree of improbity.”
“We are pressed by our very nature into the service of virtue; our souls are up in arms against vice and improbity, and thus we receive lasting impressions, which, when our hearts are not very corrupt, must forever after have a favourable influence on our moral conduct.”
“Howat was hot and cold, and possessed by a subtle sense of improbity, a feeling resembling that of a doubtful advance through the dark, for a questionable end.”
“Persons generally who were under no incapacity could make a will; those prohibited were such as had some defect of status, some vice or defect of mind, or even some sufficient defect of body, and those guilty of crime or improbity.”
“On the part of those on whom they operate, they are indicative either of improbity or intellectual weakness, or of a contempt for the understanding of those on whose minds they are indicative of intellectual weakness; and on the part of those in and by whom they are pretended to operate, they are indicative of improbity, viz., in the shape of insincerity.”
“Beelzebub" had been floundering in the sea of improbity, holding by a slender life-line to the respectable world that had cast him overboard.”
“Yet here too there is the stain of intellectual improbity, and it is perhaps all the more mischievous for being partly hidden under the mien of spiritual exaltation.”
“Apart, however, from the immorality of such reasoned hypocrisy, which no man with a particle of honesty will attempt to blink, there is the intellectual improbity which it brings in its train, the infidelity to truth, the disloyalty to one's own intelligence.”
“Briefly, in this man of culture and refinement, in whose own mysterious life one might perhaps have found various crimes but not a single act of base improbity, one could divine an implacable, obstinate theoretician, who was resolved to set the world ablaze for the triumph of his ideas.”
“Would there be some fatal weakness, some insidious improbity, in the nature of those descending from Roland Sefton?”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘improbity’.
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Carlos' Words
monstropolous, absquatulate
triffid, calque, pinguid, refulgent, monstropolous, Seanchaí, clinquant, Chryselephantine ..., peavey, milium, swage, Burtillon, Burtil... and 215 more...
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NTDW1
template, modal, sublingual, tandem, polycentric, septuagenarian, token, irrevocable, denotive, augural, aberrant, phlebotomy and 1188 more...
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for words
based upon per- indo-european root
turnverein, veer, frump, far, per, paramount, paramour, parget, parterre, parvenu, perissodactyl, palanquin and 133 more...
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List 16
Derivatives from Chapter 16 of Part One of English Words from Latin and Greek Elements
predilection, acumen, conjunction, animadversion, improbity, accretion, sedition, transient, capacity, resolute, admonition, soliloquy and 8 more...
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