depravity
/dɪˈpravɪti
/noun (plural depravities) [mass noun]
1Moral corruption; wickedness: a tale of depravity hard to credit [count noun]: I wondered what depravities had occurred in that place...
- His work of this time conveyed disgust at the horrors of war and the depravities of a decadent society with unerring psychological insight and devastating emotional effect.
- Set in a surrealist netherworld where eccentricities meet anarchy, the play plummets the audience into a landscape of Dali's well known paintings and into the depths and depravities of the artist's own subconscious.
- The neighborhood's ‘infamy was so well known, that out-of-town visitors went there to see its depravities.’
Synonyms
corruption, corruptness, vice, perversion, pervertedness, deviance, degeneracy, degradation, immorality, shamelessness, debauchery, dissipation, dissoluteness, turpitude, loucheness, profligacy, licentiousness, lewdness, lasciviousness, salaciousness, lechery, lecherousness, prurience, obscenity, indecency, libertinism, sordidness;
wickedness, sinfulness, vileness, baseness, iniquity, nefariousness, criminality, viciousness, brutality, brutishness
informal perviness
rare vitiation
1.1 Christian Theology The innate corruption of human nature, due to original sin.Therefore a God-given moral absolute is necessarily applied and essential to the well being of the human species, given the depravity of human nature as it presently stands....
- His highlighting of the paradoxes arising from human free will, creativity and depravity made me keen to read on.
- The author, opposing any doctrine of natural depravity, argued that all children are born ‘innocent,’ that is, equally capable of vice or virtue.
Origin
Mid 17th century: alteration (influenced by deprave) of obsolete pravity, from Latin pravitas, from pravus 'crooked, perverse'.