decadent
decadent Lexical Profile
decadent Game Scores & Validity
• adjective
Luxuriously self-indulgent, rich, or sumptuously appealing (especially of food, desserts, or leisure activities).
"For dessert, the bakery served a decadent triple-layer chocolate mousse cake topped with raspberry glaze."
Characterized by or reflecting a state of moral or cultural decline, especially through excessive self-indulgence.
"Historians often debate whether the empire collapsed due to external invasions or an increasingly decadent ruling class."
• noun
A person who is luxuriously self-indulgent or in a state of moral and cultural decline.
"The novel portrays the wealthy aristocrats as idle decadents detached from the struggles of ordinary citizens."
A writer or artist belonging to a late 19th-century French and English aesthetic movement that valued artifice, unconventional themes, and refined sensuality over bourgeois morality.
"Literary critics of the 1890s frequently grouped the young poet with the French decadents."
Word Nuance & Usage
In modern everyday usage, particularly regarding food or luxury goods (such as a "decadent chocolate cake"), the word has lost its harsh moral condemnation and is often used playfully or approvingly to mean "richly indulgent."
• Rhymes for decadent
• Nearby Words
Word Origin & Etymology
Borrowed in the mid-19th century from French décadent, from Medieval Latin decadentem, the present participle of decadere ("to decay" or "to fall down"), formed from de- ("down") and cadere ("to fall").