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  1. improbity love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. Lack of probity; dishonesty.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. Lack of probity; want of integrity or rectitude of principle; dishonesty.

Wiktionary

  1. n. A lack of probity, honesty or integrity

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. Lack of probity; lack of integrity or rectitude; dishonesty.

Etymologies

  1. im- +‎ probity (Wiktionary)
  2. 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.”

    The Cat Who Moved A Mountain

  • “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.”

    The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor Volume I, Number 1

  • “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.”

    The Three Black Pennys A Novel

  • “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.”

    The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 9: Laprade-Mass Liturgy

  • “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.”

    Fallacies of Anti-Reformers

  • “Beelzebub" had been floundering in the sea of improbity, holding by a slender life-line to the respectable world that had cast him overboard.”

    Cabbages and Kings

  • “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.”

    On Compromise

  • “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.”

    On Compromise

  • “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.”

    The Three Cities Trilogy: Paris, Complete

  • “Would there be some fatal weakness, some insidious improbity, in the nature of those descending from Roland Sefton?”

    Cobwebs and Cables

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‘improbity’ has been looked up 965 times, loved by 2 people, added to 4 lists, and has a Scrabble score of 18.