All 9 Uses
servile
in
Look Homeward, Angel
(Auto-generated)
- Cheaply and flashily dressed, with peg-top yellow shoes, flaring striped trousers, and a broadbrimmed straw hat with a colored band, he would walk down the avenue with a preposterous lurch, and a smile of strained assurance on his face, saluting with servile cordiality all who would notice him.†
Chpt 1
- "Doctor," said Harry Tugman with servile medicine-man respect, "what do you charge to operate?"†
Chpt 2 *
- The rags of obedience, servility, reverential awe dropped in a belt around him.†
Chpt 2servility = submissiveness -- often an attitude of someone who is so submissive or eager to serve and please that they seem to lack self-respect
- And in the presence of any members of Jim or Will Pentland's family their manner was not only friendly, it was even touched slightly with servility.†
Chpt 2
- His complacent smile, hard-lipped, loosened into servility.†
Chpt 2
- Benevolently but distantly she smiled down upon him: the white parchment of his hard Polish face was broken by a grin of cruel servility curving up around the wings of his immense putty-colored nose.†
Chpt 2
- Mrs. Bradley's student son answered to his initial letters—"G. T. G. T. Bradley, a member of the sophomore class, was a surly scowling youth of nineteen—a mixture, in equal parts, of servility and insolence.†
Chpt 3
- Below, benched in rapt servility, they waited for his first husky word.†
Chpt 3
- White, bewildered, servile, the patient slave's face.†
Chpt 3
Definitions:
-
(1)
(servile) too eager to serve or obey others -- often in a way that seems overly submissive, weak, or lacking self-respect
or:
related to low-status tasks -
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) You might want to remember this as sounding similar to servant. Both words come from the Latin word for slave (servus).