DECENCY • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Decency

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/dˈisənsi/ Listen

noun

Decency n. (pl. decencies)

The quality or state of being decent, suitable, or becoming, in words or behavior; propriety of form in social intercourse, in actions, or in discourse; proper formality; becoming ceremony; seemliness; hence, freedom from obscenity or indecorum; modesty. "Observances of time, place, and of decency in general." "Immodest words admit of no defense, For want of decency is want of sense."

That which is proper or becoming. "The external decencies of worship." "Those thousand decencies, that daily flow From all her words and actions."

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Etymology of 'Decency'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Decency" Quotes from Famous Books

... CORELLI telegraphs: "I am all for anonymity and everything that tends to the avoidance of advertisement. If people must ride in motors, let them have the decency to disguise themselves as effectually as possible, and shun all contact with ...

— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton

... These conditions are, that the walls and ceilings be whitewashed; that the floors, stairs, beds, and bed clothes are clean; that there be some mode of ventilating every room; that each house be provided with every accommodation for promoting decency and neatness; that the drains and cesspools are perfect; the yards properly paved, so as to run dry; and that each house has a supply of water, with conveniences for cooking and washing; and finally, that no person ...

— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... pulsing ambitions to this act of charity, had not in itself appeared an act of wickedness. Nor had it seemed wholly intolerable from his own point of view that, after a struggle prolonged beyond the needs of decency, he should have run away from the contaminations which belonged inevitably to a life spent in the society of an incurable dipsomaniac. Nor could he as yet blame himself overmuch if he had at last yielded to the claims ...

— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... wretch denounced her. They allowed her seven minutes and took her away bare-headed, just as she was, to the Colonel who commanded this noble battle and who also ordered her to go, against the advice of a physician. Only on account of her tireless energy and the sense of decency of one who was less ferocious than the rest, did she obtain permission, at five o'clock in the afternoon, to be discharged, after a day which had been a veritable Calvary. The poor wretches at whose door a sentry watched, were ...

— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne

... days of Eichhorn's pietistical absolutism, with its ecclesia militans of obscurantism, there survived so much of a sense of decency regarding the ancient traditions as to exempt the liberty of scientific teaching from the indignity of that preventive censure which in those days rendered repressive legislation superfluous. In their search for some tenable ...

— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

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