DECENCY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does decency mean? 

• DECENCY (noun)
  The noun DECENCY has 2 senses:

1. the quality of conforming to standards of propriety and morality

2. the quality of being polite and respectable

  Familiarity information: DECENCY used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• DECENCY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The quality of conforming to standards of propriety and morality

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Hypernyms ("decency" is a kind of...):

correctitude; properness; propriety (correct or appropriate behavior)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "decency"):

modestness; modesty (freedom from vanity or conceit)

Antonym:

indecency (the quality of being indecent)

Derivation:

decent (conforming to conventions of sexual behavior)

decent (observing conventional sexual mores in speech or behavior or dress)

decent (socially or conventionally correct; refined or virtuous)

Sense 2

Meaning:

The quality of being polite and respectable

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Hypernyms ("decency" is a kind of...):

reputability; respectability (honorableness by virtue of being respectable and having a good reputation)

Derivation:

decent (socially or conventionally correct; refined or virtuous)

 Context examples 

It is really too great a violation of decency, honour, and interest, for him to be guilty of.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

"There are certain bounds of decency, and you had no license to insult anybody."

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

They preserve decency and civility in the highest degrees, but are altogether ignorant of ceremony.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Because he’s comin’! And you’ve got to look out, too! Right of way! Common decency! They don’t know the meanin’ of it!

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

I expect my surveyor from Brockham with his report in the morning; and afterwards I cannot in decency fail attending the club.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

"It proves," he roared, with a sudden blast of fury, "that you are the damnedest imposter in London—a vile, crawling journalist, who has no more science than he has decency in his composition!"

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

"I must indeed," I said; for when just now I repeated the offer of serving him for a deacon, he expressed himself shocked at my want of decency.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

That the manner in which she treated the dreadful crime committed by her brother and my sister (with whom lay the greater seduction I pretended not to say), but the manner in which she spoke of the crime itself, giving it every reproach but the right; considering its ill consequences only as they were to be braved or overborne by a defiance of decency and impudence in wrong; and last of all, and above all, recommending to us a compliance, a compromise, an acquiescence in the continuance of the sin, on the chance of a marriage which, thinking as I now thought of her brother, should rather be prevented than sought; all this together most grievously convinced me that I had never understood her before, and that, as far as related to mind, it had been the creature of my own imagination, not Miss Crawford, that I had been too apt to dwell on for many months past.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

And this world is so ordered that money is necessary to happiness—oh, no, not these swollen fortunes, but enough of money to permit of common comfort and decency.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

It does seem, and it is most shocking indeed, replied Elizabeth, with tears in her eyes, that a sister's sense of decency and virtue in such a point should admit of doubt.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)