Meaning of Contumely | Babel Free

Definitions

Offensive and abusive language or behaviour; scorn, insult.

countable, uncountable

Equivalents

Examples

“For who would beare the Whips and Scornes of time, / The Oppressors wrong, the poore mans Contumely, [...]”

“Think of the insults, wrongs, and contumelies, / Ye bear from your proud lords—that your hard toil / Manures their fertile fields—you plow the earth, / You sow the corn, you reap the ripen'd harvest,— / They riot on the produce!— [...]”

“She had been subjected to contumely and cross-questoning and ill-usage through the whole evening.”

“Every one who has ever tried to set the affairs of his neighbors straight for them must be aware that those who pursue this course lay themselves open not only to ingratitude, but to positive contumely.”

“Even the comfort of the bottle might conceivably fail him in this supreme crisis. At such an age nothing but a halter could cure the pangs of an unquenchable passion. And, besides, there was the wild exasperation aroused by the unjust aspersions and the contumely of the house, with the maddening impossibility to account for that mysterious thrashing, added to these simple and bitter sorrows.”

“What scorn, what contumely, would be his!”

“If this picture of the two psychical agencies and their relation to the consciousness is accepted, there is a complete analogy in political life to the extraordinary affection which I felt in my dream for my friend R., who was treated with such contumely during the dream's interpretation.”

“ignoring the outcry, Harvey Warrender continued heatedly, 'If this government had been guilty of a breach of law, we would deserve the contumely of the House.'”

“I could think of no words adequate to the occasion. So I belched. Not out of contumely, you understand. It was a sympathetic belch, a belch of brotherhood.”

CEFR level