Word.ws English Dictionary

depraved

UK/dɪˈpɹeɪvd/

depraved is the simple past and past participle of deprave.

Adjective

depraved (comparative more depraved, superlative most depraved)

  1. Perverted or extremely wrong in a moral sense.
    • a depraved killer
    • The driver who speeds with reckless disregard for the consequences to others but without any intent to harm the darting child may receive jail time but is often treated far differently from the depraved killer who sets out with a purposeful plan to murder the child.2009, Neil M. Gorsuch, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, page 57
  2. Violating principles of rectitude or given standards of decency.
    • You are an atrocious person! Since the day I met you I have become steadily more depraved.Georgette Heyer, The Nonesuch
    • I want to do what little I can to make my country truly free, to broaden the intellectual horizon of our people, to destroy the prejudices born of ignorance and fear, to do away with the blind worship of the ignoble past, with the idea that all the great and good are dead, that the living are...Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses
  3. (archaic) Distorted out of the normal course; abnormal.
    • The taste and digestion are often depraved, anorexia, nausea, inappetence and vomiting supervene, the woman desires innutritious or disgusting food, such as chalk, cinders, putrescent animal food, […]1836, Michael Ryan, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence
    • There was a constant dripping of urine from the penis, a depraved appetite and meninguria. On examination, two calculi were easily felt, and I advised the owner that an operation was all that would save his animal […]1916, Veterinary Medicine, volume 11, page 759

Meaning of deprave

Verb

deprave (third-person singular simple present depraves, present participle depraving, simple past and past participle depraved)

  1. (transitive) To speak ill of; to depreciate; to malign; to revile
  2. (transitive) To make bad or worse; to vitiate; to corrupt
    • Interpreting humanity in purely zoological categories, he saw the social community as a form of natural co-operation within the species, distorted or depraved by religious prejudice, while in moral speculation he did not advance beyond the eudaemonistic schema of the Enlightenment.1978 [1976], Leszek Kołakowski, translated by P[aul] S[teven] Falla, Main Currents of Marxism, volume I: The Founders, Oxford: Clarendon Press, translation of Główne nurty marksizmu: powstanie (in...

Forms of depraved

comparativemore depraved
superlativemost depraved

Words formed from depraved

Questions about depraved

What does depraved mean?
Depraved means perverted or extremely wrong in a moral sense.
What is depraved the simple past and past participle of?
Depraved is the simple past and past participle of deprave.
What part of speech is depraved?
Depraved is an adjective.
How do you pronounce depraved?
Depraved is pronounced /dɪˈpɹeɪvd/ (UK).

Words near depraved in the dictionary

  1. depr
  2. depramine
  3. depravation
  4. depravations
  5. deprave
  6. depraved
  7. depraved-heart murder
  8. depraved-heart murders
  9. depraved-indifference murder
  10. depraved-indifference murders
  11. depravedly

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: depraved (page history and authors); deprave (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Sapaa-depraved.wav.

Cite this entry: “depraved.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/depraved. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.