Other forms: depraved
To deprave is to corrupt somebody morally. Deprave the young, depraved behaviour, tend to deprave.
Deprave and corrupt is a legal formula: the English obscenity test asked whether material tended to deprave and corrupt those likely to see it. Note that depraved and deprived are constantly confused and mean quite different things. The Latin pravus means crooked.
1verbdepraveTo corrupt somebody morally.
“Some critics claimed that violent films would deprave young viewers.”
deprave is a corrupting.
Latin depravare means to distort — de- plus pravus, crooked or perverse.
Latin
dēprāvō — pervert, distort, corrupt
Old French
depraver
Middle English
depraven
English, today
deprave
Built from
From Middle English depraven, from Old French depraver, from Latin dēprāvō (“pervert, distort, corrupt”), from de- + pravus (“crooked, distorted, perverse, wicked”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA