Decadent means luxuriously rich to the point of excess. A decadent chocolate cake, decadent luxury, feeling decadent.
In food writing it is pure praise, which is a complete reversal — the word means falling away, and it was an accusation about societies in decline before it became a way of selling pudding. The Decadents were a nineteenth-century literary movement who took the insult as a name.
1adjectivedecadentLuxuriously rich to the point of excess.
“We finished the meal with a decadent chocolate cake covered in cream.”
decadent is a quality of luxury.
French decadent comes from Latin decadere, to fall away — de plus cadere, to fall. Decay and cadence are relatives.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱh₂d-
Latin
dēcadēns
Medieval Latin
dēcadentia
French
décadent
English, today
decadent
Built from
From French décadent, a back-formation from décadence (see -ent), from Medieval Latin dēcadentia, from Latin dēcadēns, present participle of dēcadō, dēcidō (“sink, fall; perish”), from Latin dē- + cadō (“fall”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA