Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun An immoral or dissolute man.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Dissolute; base; profligate.
- noun An abandoned fellow; a wicked wretch; especially, a dissolute fellow; a rake.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective obsolete Dissolute; wild; lewd; rakish.
- noun A lewd, dissolute fellow; a debauchee; a rake.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective obsolete
dissolute - noun A
lewd orwanton person.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a dissolute man in fashionable society
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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Rake originated from the old English term 'rakehell' and was coined because of the belief that one could only find such a horrible person after scouring through hell with a rake.
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Her brothers were rogues—or had been—and her father had been the worst rakehell ever, but to her knowledge none of them had ever trifled with the servants, not even Oliver when he was in his wild phase and had lived in a bachelor house of his own.
How to Woo a Reluctant Lady Deborah Gonzales 2011
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I took my half-day on Wednesday, and naturally on that day the king and his bosom friend, the known rakehell George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, attended the early performance.
Exit the Actress Priya Parmar 2011
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He read out: ‘This known bon viveur, Wit, rakehell, and royal intimate, has abducted Mistress Elizabeth Malet, the great heiress of the North, who is only sixteen years old!’
Exit the Actress Priya Parmar 2011
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He read out: ‘This known bon viveur, Wit, rakehell, and royal intimate, has abducted Mistress Elizabeth Malet, the great heiress of the North, who is only sixteen years old!’
Exit the Actress Priya Parmar 2011
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Posted December 19, 2004 10: 48 PM rakehell writes:
Friedman on the Battle of Ideas, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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Her brothers were rogues—or had been—and her father had been the worst rakehell ever, but to her knowledge none of them had ever trifled with the servants, not even Oliver when he was in his wild phase and had lived in a bachelor house of his own.
How to Woo a Reluctant Lady Deborah Gonzales 2011
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I took my half-day on Wednesday, and naturally on that day the king and his bosom friend, the known rakehell George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, attended the early performance.
Exit the Actress Priya Parmar 2011
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A young rakehell who frequented too many unsavory taverns?
Johanna Lindsey That Perfect Someone 2010
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The first section of Eyre's memoir, Utopia and Other Places (1993), is titled "Long Shadows", and describes how nearly every member of the family seems in thrall to half-remembered stories about its past, not least its Irish ancestry (a roofless country house in the west of Ireland; rakehell tales of carousing and bankruptcy).
A life in theatre: Richard Eyre Andrew Dickson 2010
yarb commented on the word rakehell
He approached Baryba and stared at him with his glassy eyes, booming away: 'Well, and we never hoped to see you again, my boy. People were saying you got to be a regular rakehell. We thought the woman would ride you to death. That Chebotarikha, she's a glutton, she could gobble a man, bones and all.'
- Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Provincial Tale, in The Dragon & Other Stories (tr. Mirra Ginsburg)
July 4, 2009