Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The state or quality of being detestable; detestableness.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun rare Capacity of being odious.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The state or quality of being
detestable .
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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Benjamin Latrobe, the “Father of American Architecture” who designed the U.S. Capitol, saw whites performing the Virginia Jig and called it “the excess of detestability.”
A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010
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Oh, well I'm certainly not suggesting an objective standard of detestability.
Was RapeLay 'Asking For It'? SVGL 2009
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_Keeling's_ wife is worthy of a place in the author's long gallery of woolly-witted matrons; while in _Silverdale_ he has given a study of clerical futility and egotism almost savage in its detestability, a portrait at which one laughs and shudders together.
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 153, November 28, 1917 Various
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Welsh Wales to English London, and gives us in _My Neighbours_ (MELROSE) a further collection of sketches pleasantly calculated to prove that the general detestability of his compatriots remains unchanged by their migration from a whitewashed cottage to a villa in Suburbia.
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, March 3rd, 1920 Various
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These horrors were mentioned in the order of their detestability, and with a rising accent.
An Algonquin Maiden A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada A. Ethelwyn Wetherald 1898
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Nevertheless it is plausibly urged that, as young ladies (_Mädchen_) are, to mankind, precisely the most delightful in those years; so young gentlemen (_Bübchen_) do then attain their maximum of detestability.
Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History Thomas Carlyle 1838
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No glory discernable; not even terror: at best, detestability, ill-matched with despicability!
The French Revolution Thomas Carlyle 1838
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All the King's Men let its protagonist, a charismatic and power hungry politician who loses all restraint, grow into his detestability, and Willy Stark devolves into the mire of corruption gracelessly.
DVD Times 2008
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All the King's Men let its protagonist, a charismatic and power hungry politician who loses all restraint, grow into his detestability, and Willy Stark devolves into the mire of corruption gracelessly.
DVD Times 2008
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With Bush and company in the Nixonian zone of detestability, the Bushies tell us really it’s God, history, or Gen. David Petraeus — anything that will keep the Bush regime from being cast as the voice of its own administration — that now decides.
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