Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb Present participle of dilapidate.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word dilapidating.

Examples

  • PHILLIPS: Tell me how that would help a dilapidating motel turn into a better motel by asking employees that have worked there for a long time not to speak Spanish and to Anglicize their names?

    CNN Transcript Oct 26, 2009 2009

  • It is paramount in revitalizing struggling urban centers and dilapidating historic districts.

    Howie Klein: Bobby Jindal Don't Like No Science And Don't Like No Art -- So That Makes Him A Bona Fide Redneck? 2009

  • As we debate in our streets the need for peace, and a healthy environment, we see daily our governments and corporations pushing forth a rhetoric of “justified” aggression, and we watch with arms crossed, our corporations dilapidating the remains of our environmental heritage without a strong enough collective of concerned citizens saying stop.

    Reality Check 2008

  • The reckoning of systemic debt presents regulators with a choice of facing the cancer frontally and honestly by excising the invasive malignancy immediately or let it metastasize through the entire financial system over the painful course of several quarters or even years and decades by feeding it with more dilapidating debt.

    A DIARY OF THE ONSET OF THE GREATER DEPRESSION 2007

  • The lamp, standing alone in the midst of confusion, suffered a partial eclipse; and my favourite Dublin meerschaum successfully resisted the dilapidating effect of a fall of several feet.

    Canada for Gentlemen James Seaton Cockburn

  • Winnepeg, the much talked of Capital of the West, is simply dilapidating, and as far west as

    Canada for Gentlemen James Seaton Cockburn

  • The managers seek to maximize their short-term utility by securing enormous pay packages and other forms of company-dilapidating compensation.

    Capitalistic Musings Samuel Vaknin

  • As science, however, truly considered, is the art of dilapidating and merging into confused ruin the theories of your predecessors, I was somewhat more precise with the destructive than the constructive part of my plan.

    Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 12, No. 28, July, 1873 Various

  • One book, and that the most read of all, was hedged by a sort of divinity which protected it, so far as that was practicable, from the dilapidating effects of use.

    The Book-Hunter A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author John Hill Burton

  • Ah, madam, Providence labors with quaint instruments, dilapidating Troy by means of a wood rocking-horse, and loosing sin into the universe through a half-eaten apple.

    The Cream of the Jest: A Comedy of Evasions 1917

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.