Word.ws English Dictionary

semidecent

semidecent adjective: having a small amount of decency.

Adjective

semidecent (comparative more semidecent, superlative most semidecent)

  1. Having a small amount of decency.
    • They talked a sales tax and large armies and large navies, but these farmers and the 6,000,000 women on the farms, who are doing an awful lot of thinking and will vote accordingly, believe that when we won the war to end war, if we had a semidecent, honest Government, there was no need and there is...1922, War Department Appropriation Bill, 1923, page 648
    • The semidecent ones always get the initial guilty look, like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar; then they get the embarrassed look (as they should); then they bow out gently and leave.1998, Gracie Cornish, 10 Bad Choices that Ruin Black Women's Lives, →ISBN, page 161
  2. Of reasonable but not excellent quality.
    • You would have been proud of the vets, turning the Patton into a museum, and then into a semidecent fighting ship.2007, Mike Shepherd, Kris Longknife: Audacious, →ISBN
    • If you live with a decent (even a semidecent) system at your disposal and choose not to use it, the joke's on you.2009, Rosalyn Hoffman, Bitches on a Budget: Sage Advice for Surviving Tough Times in Style, →ISBN

Examples of semidecent in a sentence

  • How in the hell did I ever think he was a semidecent guy?2013, Robyn Peterman, Size Matters, →ISBN:
  • Rylann struggled to pull at least one semidecent retort out of the pounding fog that was her brain . . . but came up dry as a bone.2012, Julie James, About That Night, →ISBN, page 227:

Forms of semidecent

comparativemore semidecent
superlativemost semidecent
alternative formsemi-decent

Origin of semidecent

From semi- + decent.

Questions about semidecent

What does semidecent mean?
Semidecent means having a small amount of decency.
How do you use semidecent in a sentence?
How in the hell did I ever think he was a semidecent guy?
What part of speech is semidecent?
Semidecent is an adjective.

Words near semidecent in the dictionary

  1. semidecade
  2. semidecades
  3. semidecay
  4. semidecayed
  5. semidecaying
  6. semidecent
  7. semidecentralized
  8. semidecidability
  9. semidecidable
  10. semideciduous
  11. semidecision

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: semidecent (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.

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