Sample sentences for DEGENERATE

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Definition

to grow worse; or describing a person or situation that is worse in the sense of deviating from what is socially acceptable

How then could he have begotten a son like Nwoye, degenerate and effeminate?
Chinua Achebe -- Things Fall Apart

degenerate = different from what is socially acceptable

Brother, cease, And don't degenerate to indignities.
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere -- Tartuffe
Tutsis had degenerated through long contact with the inferior race of native blacks, the Hutus.
Tracy Kidder -- Strength in What Remains
Their first session degenerated into the kind of argument they'd been having for months.
Nicholas Sparks -- The Best of Me
The more degenerate and base art thou To make such means for her as thou hast done, And leave her on such slight conditions.
William Shakespeare -- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Calling people perverts and degenerates.
Truman Capote -- In Cold Blood
He had been so gentle, so disciplined, and poetic up till then; but now he was degenerating into a low practical jokester.
Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain
But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate.
John Steinbeck -- Travels with Charley
"He says that you are a petty bourgeois degenerate," I was told.
Richard Wright -- Black Boy
Did you come to see the degenerate?
Libba Bray -- Sweet Far Thing
The risk is that we who keep wild will go savage—degenerate into a sort of big, savage rat....
H.G. Wells -- The War of the Worlds
Half a dozen squatters from a degenerate colony in a brush-hidden hollow, planters of potatoes, suspected thieves, came in noisily drunk.
Sinclair Lewis -- Main Street
Life had degenerated for Snow Flower.
Lisa See -- Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
The Director thinks I'm a degenerate.
Henry H. Neff -- The Maelstrom
They might continue to evolve, they might degenerate, they might conflict to the point of destruction or gross modification of any or all of them.
Roger Zelazny -- My Name is Legion
And that's disfigured, degenerate, dark mankind—mere humanity.
Saul Bellow -- The Adventures of Augie March
It is in order to avoid the misleading term "primitive" that I am calling the undeveloped or degenerate traditions "folk mythologies."
Joseph Campbell -- The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Thousands of scowling priests keeping the degenerate Italians and illiterate Irish repentant with gabble-gabble about the sixth and ninth commandments.
F. Scott Fitzgerald -- This Side of Paradise
Whoremongers and degenerates!
Eugene O'Neill -- Long Day's Journey into Night
Old New York scrupulously observed the etiquette of hospitality, and no discussion with a guest was ever allowed to degenerate into a disagreement.
Edith Wharton -- The Age of Innocence

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