décadent

See also: decadent

English

Adjective

décadent (comparative more décadent, superlative most décadent)

1. Alternative spelling of decadent
   • 1894 June 1, “The Yellow Bookmaker”, in The Chap-Book: […], volume I, number 2, Chicago, Ill., Cambridge, Mass.: Stone & Kimball, page 42:

     Now this is the tale of A. B. / The grotesque black and white devotee, / The décadent fakir, / The Yellow Bookmaker, / The funny-man over the sea.

   • 1895, “The Lay Figure in Paris”, in The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art, volume five, London, page xvi, column 2:

     “Is it not that we shall all prize classic simplicity, in phrase or form, more than any jewelled splendour of décadent luxury?” said the Lay Figure.

   • 1900 September, C. H. A. Bjerregaard, “Décadents, Color and Sounds”, in Leander Edmund Whipple, editor, The Ideal Review: […], volume XIII, number 3, New York, N.Y.: The Metaphysical Publishing Co., […]; Paris: Brentano’s, […], page 196:

     It is not always easy for the uninitiated to discover the inner connections between proper names and their Décadent meaning.

   • 1916, Alexandre Benois, “The Contemporary State of Russian Painting”, in Abraham Yarmolinsky, transl., The Russian School of Painting, New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, page 188:

     Nowadays—O irony of fate!—Moscow is enthusiastic over the Russian “Empire,” the “décadent style,” and Somov, as she was, yesterday, over Vasnetzov, Old-Russian palaces, cupboards, fairy-tales, and “bylinas” (old hero ballads).

   • 1980, D. B. Douglas, “The Humanist Gambit: A Study of Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle”, in AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Language Association, page 18:

     The chalky pallor of his skin remarked upon by the narrator suggests, if not the décadent, at least the intellectual: he does indeed possess highly developed intellectual faculties, main evidence of which are his brilliant chess achievements.

Noun

décadent (plural décadents)

1. Alternative spelling of decadent
   • 1892, Richard Le Gallienne, “The Décadent to His Soul”, in English Poems, London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane at The Bodley Head; New York: The Cassell Publishing Company, […], page 106:

     The Décadent was speaking to his soul— / Poor useless thing, he said, / Why did God burden me with such as thou? / The body were enough, / The body gives me all.

   • 1900 September, C. H. A. Bjerregaard, “Décadents, Color and Sounds”, in Leander Edmund Whipple, editor, The Ideal Review: […], volume XIII, number 3, New York, N.Y.: The Metaphysical Publishing Co., […]; Paris: Brentano’s, […], page 193:

     It is true, that the senses have by the Décadents been declared the only purveyors, the only intermediaries, between ourselves and Universal Nature. But that charge, which to some would be a most terrible one, loses much of its character when we come to see what the Décadents understand by senses and discover that they mean something quite different from what our pseudo-philosophers ever thought; in fact there is nothing in their dictionaries that approaches what the Décadents mean.

   • 1906, James Huneker, “Richard Strauss”, in Philip Hale, editor, Famous Composers and Their Works, volume 5, Boston, Mass.: J. B. Millet Company, section I, page 165, column 1:

     The décadent, as he is now called, decomposes the page into the paragraph, the paragraph into the sentence, the word, the letter.

   • 1916, Alexandre Benois, “The Contemporary State of Russian Painting”, in Abraham Yarmolinsky, transl., The Russian School of Painting, New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, page 183:

     Somov is a décadent not only in the philosophic import of his art, but also in his very technique and painting.

Anagrams

• decanted

French

Etymology

From décadence.

Adjective

décadent (feminine décadente, masculine plural décadents, feminine plural décadentes)

1. decaying, deteriorating, in decline
2. decadent (characterized by moral or cultural decline)

Noun

décadent m (plural décadents, feminine décadente)

1. decadent

Further reading

• “décadent”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.