Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Immodesty   Listen
Immodesty

noun
1.
The trait of being vain and conceited.
2.
The perverse act of exposing and attracting attention to your own genitals.  Synonym: exhibitionism.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Immodesty" Quotes from Famous Books



... collectivism is plainly noticeable in certain races of primitive folks which are yet in existence, notably the autochthons of the Aleutian Islands. Huddled together in their communal kachims, naked, without any thought of immodesty, men, women, and children share the same fire and eat from the same pot. They recognize no immorality in the fact of the father cohabiting with his daughter—one of them naively remarking to Langsdorf, who reproached him for having committed ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... king many years ago, one of the conditions being the prohibition of clothes above the waist, both for men and women. The latter are noted for their beauty, and excel as singers and dancers, but they suffer under the stigma of immodesty for the ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck

... thought, that he might cause to be repeated. The idea was broached to Overbury. That shrewd individual, of course, saw through the suggestion to the intention behind it, but he was at a loss for an outlet for his talents, having left Rochester's employ, and he believed without immodesty that he could do useful ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure

... miracle of love is solemnized and celebrated. I thought that of all miracles, the miracle which had occurred that night, and was even then occurring, might be counted among the most wondrous. What occult forces, what secret influences of soul on soul, what courage on his part, what sublime immodesty and unworldliness on mine had brought it about! In what dreadful disaster would it not end! ... I cared not in that marvellous hectic hour how it would end. I knew I had been blessed beyond the common lot ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett

... Sanction are created duties on such points as the following:—(1) The Etiquette of small societies or coteries. (2) Religious orthodoxy; Sabbath observance. (3) Unchastity; violations of the etiquette of the sexes, Immodesty, and whatever endangers chastity, especially in women. (4) Duties of parents to children, and of children to parents, beyond the requirements of the law. (5) Suicide: when only attempted, the individual is punished, when carried out, ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... uncleanness &c. (filth) 653; immodesty; grossness &c. adj.; indelicacy, indecency; impudicity[obs3]; obscenity, ribaldry, Fescennine, smut, bawdry[obs3], double entente, equivoque[Fr]. concupiscence, lust, carnality, flesh, salacity; pruriency, lechery, lasciviency[obs3], lubricity; Sadism, sapphism[obs3]. incontinence, intrigue, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... was never performed except at the end of the ball, when the municipal guards had retired. Among the depraved couples who figured in the revel, the Slasher remarked two who won applause above all by the disgusting immodesty of their postures, gestures, and words. The first couple were composed of a man nearly disguised as a bear, by means of a waistcoat and trousers of black sheepskin. The head of the animal, doubtless too heavy to carry, ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue

... Jesus and Mary, whose names were of course the first words he learned to utter. She checked in him by grave looks, and slight punishments fitted to his age, every ebullition of self-will, obstinacy, and anger; and later, of deceit, envy, and immodesty. Though she had the most tender mother's heart, she seldom indulged in passionate caresses, and never left unchastised any of his faults, or gave way in any instance to his tears and impatience. When others objected that it was absurd to expect self-command from a creature whose ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton

... it was a joke, made his appearance, she could hardly utter a word, for evil pleasure is as intoxicating as adulterated liquor, so face to face with this immediate surrender, and this unconstrained immodesty, he at first thought that he had to do with a ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... that this was so as regards his bare chest, arms and waist, and to convince us that he had nothing hidden in his dhotie he showed us one bare leg at a time, avoiding barely any immodesty. Concealing our blushes, we felt satisfied that his dhotie was the only worldly possession that he had with him at the moment. He picked up his chanter and continued to circle round and round our orderly, gradually closing into him. Suddenly he ran towards the outstretched ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson

... angel might, and all the time I was making use of God's truth and recommendation, as it were, to gratify and shield my own selfishness and—" here her voice sank, and her lips quivered, and grew dry, but she waited, and struggled, and finally went on—"and immodesty. I don't know why I should tell you this—except that I've told you every thing else, and this may save you from some of the wrong the rest has done you. But the most of it must remain irreparable." A long sigh quivered up from Sophie's heart, and ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne

... fruits of the Spirit, the first place is given to charity, joy, and peace: to which, fornication, uncleanness, and immodesty, which are the first of the works of the flesh, are not opposed. Therefore the fruits of the Spirit are not contrary to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas

... against his sleeve, and clung to him, that her trembling might not cast her to the floor. Kano, at first, was unable to speak. He grew slowly the hue of death. His brief words, when at last they came, were in convulsive spasms of sound. "Go to your rooms,—both. Are you mad, indeed,—this immodesty, this disrespect to me. Mata was right,—a Tengu, a barbarian. Go, go, ere I rise ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa

... the Papal church." "Consistent with modesty," "sicut decet verecundiam sexus;" nothing can beat that bare-faced hypocrisy. So when afterwards the sex shortened their petticoats, other Simon Pures start up and put them in the stocks for immodesty. Poor women! Here was a wrong, Eusebius. Long or short, they were equally immodest. Immodest, indeed! Nature has clad them with modesty and temperance—their natural habit—other garment is conventional. I admire what Oelian says of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... to be modest without pother, to chat with those about me during my ablutions without concern for the false vanities of screens or even the shelter of rocks as in the river in Atuona. In such scenes one perceives that immodesty is in the false shame that makes one cling to clothes, rather than in the simple virtues that walk naked ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... am sure, without immodesty, say was thorough and complete. On the 7th of May I presented my report. The facts which I found were such that only one conclusion was possible—the line was not in good condition; was not and had not been efficiently worked, ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow

... into some sacred, heroic form. If a man could paint the woman he loves a thousand times as the Stella Marts to put courage into the sailors on board a thousand ships, so much the more honor to her. Isn't that better than painting a piece of staring immodesty and calling it by ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... the normal state woman is naturally full of delicacy and sentiments of modesty, nothing is easier than to make these disappear completely by training her systematically to sexual immodesty or to prostitution. Here we observe the effects of the routine and suggestible character of feminine psychology, of the tendency of woman to become the slave of habit and custom, as well as of her perseverance when her determined ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... acquire that dignified grace of manners "which adds as it were a lustre to our lives". They should avoid affectation and eccentricity; "not to care a farthing what people think of us is a sign not so much of pride as of immodesty". The want of tact—the saying and doing things at the wrong time and place—produces the same discord in society as a false note in music; and harmony of character is of more consequence than harmony of sounds. There ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins

... which at that hour usually brought the father and mother home, was only occupied that evening by the son and daughter, Hyacinthe and Camille. Returning from the Princess de Harn's matinee, they were chatting freely, with that calm immodesty by which they sought to astonish one another. Hyacinthe, influenced by his perverted ideas, was attacking women, whilst Camille openly counselled him to respond to the Princess's advances. However, she was visibly ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... increased the safety of good women and diminished immorality among men. A higher moral tone was imparted to society everywhere. Faithful preachers cried out against the traffic in shame, the snaring of young girls and the immodesty and immorality which were found in convents, and even in churches. In the reign of Louis XI., about 1475, Father Maillard, a bold preacher of the time, excoriated the whole company of traffickers in girls, especially procuresses and citizens who let their property for houses of shame. The procuresses, ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various

... to. "He had the immodesty to compare himself with Shakespeare." Nothing necessarily immodest in that. Comparison with may be for observing a difference; comparison to ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce

... essential in the dress of a Filipino is a jacket cut low, the decolette feature being obscured to some extent by pulling out one shoulder and covering the other, taking the chances of the lines that mark the concealment and disclosure of breast and back. There is no expression of immodesty. The woman of the Philippines is sad as she is swarthy, and her melancholy eyes are almost always introspective, or glancing far away, and revising the disappointed dreams of long ago. Profounder grief than is read in the faces of bronze and ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... and then refers to the indecencies of Horace and Ovid as an example of the reverse in a republic—as if Ovid and Horace had not lived under a monarchy! and throughout the whole of this theory he is as thoroughly in the wrong. By refined taste he signifies an avoidance of immodesty of style. Beaumont and Fletcher, Rochester, Dean Swift, wrote under monarchies—their pruriencies are not excelled by any republican authors of ancient times. What ancient authors equal in indelicacy the French ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... another. "Why, when I was young thar warn't nothin' in the way of meanness that a good woman wouldn't put up with. They'd shut thar eyes to Hagars, white or black, rather than lose the respect of men by seemin' to be aware of any immodesty." ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... be confused with self-conceit; for it implies no immodesty or egotism. Even if the faithful study of one's self reveals a high order of natural gifts, it is not needful to imitate the son of the Emerald Isle who always lifted his hat and made an obsequious bow when he ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.

... compressed, defined the outlines of the form as distinctly as the lightest wet drapery of the studio. Her dress, in short, achieved in its pure simplicity all at which the artistic skill of matrons, milliners, and maidens aims in a Parisian ball costume, without a shadow of that suggestive immodesty from which ball costumes are seldom wholly free. Exactly reversing Terrestrial practice, a Martial wife reserves for strictest domestic privacy that undressed full-dress, that frank revelation of her beauty, which the matrons of London, Paris, or New York think exclusively appropriate to the most ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... earlier than the second century B.C. However this may be, the statue is justly one of the most famous in the world. It represents an ideal of purity and sweetness. There is not a trace of coarseness or immodesty in the half-naked woman who stands perfect in the maidenly dignity of her own conquering fairness. Her serious yet smiling face, her graceful form, the delicacy of feeling in attitude and gaze, the tender moulding of breast and limbs, make ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR

... you were hiding from me! This secret has not killed you all. Oh! I shall not live under its shame so long as you have. Chateau of Beaurepaire—nest of treason, ingratitude, and immodesty—I loathe you as much as once I loved you. I will go and hide my head, ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade

... an honest fashion, and men who married could not well complain that they had been deceived by concealment. But that tells nothing against the modesty of our grandmothers. What is modest in dress depends entirely on what is customary; and there is an immodesty that hides, as well as one that exposes. Unconsciousness is modesty's triple shelter against shame. See here, the dissolute Marguerite of Navarre, visible only at head and hands; the former from the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... publish family secrets, also to quarrel, to strike, to take revenge, to do evil, to steal, to tell lies, to deceive, to blaspheme; carelessness about the children, intemperance, luxury, excessive prodigality, drunkenness, uncleanness, immodesty, application to magic and witchcraft, impiety, with several other causes. By legitimate causes we do not here mean judicial causes, but such as are legitimate in regard to the other married partner; separation ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... character. They would have given the world to prevent my remaining there an hour. When I arrived they sent me immediately two girls very showily dressed; the eldest could not be more than eleven years of age and the other seven, and both exhibited so much immodesty, that more could not be expected from public women; they carried concealed about them a magic powder; when they came I gave them some articles to dress themselves out with, and directly sent them back to the shore.[409-4] I saw here, built ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various

... Egyptians, the Greeks added other ceremonies replete with abominable licentiousness, and repulsive to common decency. These were often suppressed by public enactment, but were as often re-established by the votaries of lewdness and immodesty, and such as found in these festivals a pretext and opportunity for the commission ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso

... good poet, that they will not allow me so much as to be a Christian, or a moral man); may I have leave, I say, to inform my reader, that I have confined my choice to such tales of Chaucer as savour nothing of immodesty. If I had desired more to please than to instruct, the Reeve, the Miller, the Shipman, the Merchants, the Sumner, and above all the Wife of Bath, in the prologue to her tale, would have procured me as many friends and readers as there are beaux and ladies of pleasure in the town. But I will no more ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... knowest to be the mirror wherein he is reflected on whom thou shouldst look to see how unworthily thou him? But, woe is me, I now comprehend what has made thee give so little heed to what thou owest to thyself; it must have been some freedom of mine, for I will not call it immodesty, as it did not proceed from any deliberate intention, but from some heedlessness such as women are guilty of through inadvertence when they think they have no occasion for reserve. But tell me, traitor, when did I by word or sign give a reply to thy prayers that could awaken ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... our way around. I must have seen you on the beach at that very time— one of the kiddies that swam like fishes. Why, merciful me, the women here were all riding cross-saddle, and that was long before the rest of the social female world outgrew its immodesty and came around to sitting simultaneously on both sides of a horse. I learned to swim on the beach here at that time myself. You and I may even have tried body-surfing on the same waves, or I may have splashed a handful of water into your mouth and been rewarded by ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London

... because of flexible, incisive, or brilliant minds. Quite the contrary. The basic test of a successful colonist was endurance—the endurance of hardship, privation, the stoic indifference to conditions of discomfort, monotony, pain, uncleanliness, immodesty—conditions which would send a more imaginative or sensitive temperament into a downward-spiraling syndrome of failure. They were the kind of men and women who, on Earth in an earlier time, had been able to endure ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton

... unlike the honest simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never unmixed with physic. There will be the dose within it, either curative or poisonous. The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or falsehood; the lad will be taught honour or dishonour, simplicity or affectation. Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There are novels which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither can they amuse ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope

... girl should be carefully trained to look with disgust on everything that is indecent in word or action. Let them be taught a sense of shame in doing shameful things, and teach them that modesty is honorable, and that immodesty is indecent and dishonorable. Careful training at the proper age may save many a ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... his disciples like leaving out the salt from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole classes of facts. Hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the divisions in Leaves of Grass, particularly that entitled Children of Adam, which gave great offense by its immodesty, or its outspokenness, Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; that all the functions of the body in healthy exercise are equally clean; that all, in fact, are divine, and that matter is as divine ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... mean to charge the girl with immodesty (after the style "Come to my arms, my slight acquaintance!") but to show how powerfully Fate and Fortune wrought upon her. Hence also she so readily allowed the King's son to ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... the benevolent atheist stands alone upon his own good will, without a reference, without a standard, trusting to his own impulse to goodness, relying upon his own moral strength. A certain immodesty, a certain self-righteousness, hangs like a precipice above him; incalculable temptations open like gulfs beneath his feet. He has not really given himself or got away from himself. He has no one to whom he can give himself. He is still a masterless man. His exaltation ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... looks, full of light and life, were first bent upon me. I love you still, sire; it is a crime of high treason, I know, that a poor girl like myself should love her sovereign and should presume to tell him so. Punish me for my audacity, despise me for my shameless immodesty; but do not ever say, do not ever think, that I have jested with or deceived you. I belong to a family whose loyalty has been proved, sire; and ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... and the city of Mourzuk, have become too much vitiated by contact with The Coast and the Turks for affording fair specimens of Saharan tribes. Let us then compare what has been said to those hideous scenes of crime, of immodesty, and drunkenness, which abound in the great cities of Europe—the ever-present, ever-during stigma on our boasted civilization!—and ask the paradoxical question, What do we gain by European and Christian civilization? We have Chambers of Legislature, infallible and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... are chaste; nor does one ever hear any talk of their immodesty," says Carpini;—no Boccaccian ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... Captain Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "an immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work on a ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson

... down, it was not long before Jim met Allan Roscoe and Guy, whom he immediately recognized. Not being troubled with immodesty, he at once walked up to Mr. Roscoe ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger

... character, Captain Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "An immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work on a species of chronicle ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson

... her doubly attractive to other admirers. She was powerfully fascinated by the presence of Sanine, whose broad shoulders, calm eyes, and deliberate manner won her regard. When Sina became aware of his effect upon her, she accused herself of want of self-control if not of immodesty; nevertheless she always continued to observe him ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef

... women have always been notorious for their immodesty; and notwithstanding the past labours of English missionaries, the island continues to be the Polynesian Paphos. The moral standard of the population has not been raised since they came under the shadow of a ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... the League, and Mr. Waddington couldn't see himself doing all the work and handing over all the glory to Sir John. Still, between Mr. Waddington and the glory there was only this supine figure of Sir John, and Sir John once out of the running he could count without immodesty on the unanimous vote of any committee he formed ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair

... again, analysis of character is precluded; but the narrator may delineate the leading actor directly, through descriptive and expository comment. In stories where the hero is an extraordinary person, and could not without immodesty descant upon his own unusual capabilities, it is of obvious advantage to represent him from the point of view of an admiring friend. Thus when Poe invented the detective story, he wisely decided to exhibit the extraordinary analytic power of Dupin through a narrative told not by the detective ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... dislike. Their books often repelled him, yet their way of doing things seemed to him just the way things should be done; and done before almost any one else. He often read Madame Gervaisais, and he spoke of Cherie (for all its 'immodesty') as an admirable thing, and a model for ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... objectionable manners, who was in a bad set at home and made herself cheap after the manner of a garrison hack, the terms being nearly equivalent. There was no pretence of impossible innocence among the elder girls, but neither was there any impropriety of language or immodesty of conduct. Certain subjects were avoided, and if a girl made any allusion to them by chance, she was promptly silenced; if she recurred to them persistently, she was set down at once as a dockyard girl and an outsider. The consequence of this high standard was an extremely ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... her lips but quickly closed them again. She realized there was something inconsistent in her explanation. Mother had accused her of immodesty: riding astride and wearing those scandalous pepper-and-salts and showing her legs. If mother was right, if she WAS brazen, somehow it didn't tie up ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin

... his glance which darted flames at every word, there was, in this explosion of an evil nature disclosing everything, in that mixture of braggadocio and abjectness, of pride and pettiness, of rage and folly, in that chaos of real griefs and false sentiments, in that immodesty of a malicious man tasting the voluptuous delights of violence, in that shameless nudity of a repulsive soul, in that conflagration of all sufferings combined with all hatreds, something which was as hideous as evil, and as heart-rending ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo



Words linked to "Immodesty" :   indecency, paraphilia, modesty, exhibitionism



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com