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