Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

impiety

nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Impiety is a lack of proper reverence for what is sacred. An act of impiety, accused of impiety, sheer impiety.

It was a capital charge in the ancient world, and Socrates was executed for it. The piety it negates first meant duty to family and country as much as to the gods.

Definitions of impiety

  1. 1nounimpietyA lack of proper reverence for what is sacred.C2

    “The priest scolded the boys for their impiety when they laughed during the prayers.”

impiety is an irreverence.

Where it comes from

Latin impietas is in-, not, plus pietas, dutifulness or piety.

  1. Latin

    impietas

  2. Old French

    impieté

  3. English, today

    impiety

Built from

  • in- · Latin — not
  • pietas · Latin — piety
  • pius · Latin — pious, devout
  • -tas · Latin — -ty, -dom

From Old French impieté, from Latin impietas, from in- (“not”) + pietas (“piety”), from pius (“pious, devout”) + -tas (“-ty, -dom”). by surface analysis, impious + -ety.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

impiety in the wild

  • The Trial of Socrates was held to determine the philosopher's guilt of two charges against the city of Athens: asebeia (impiety) and corruption of the youth.

    Trial of Socrates

  • The death sentence of Socrates was the legal consequence of asking politico-philosophic questions of his students, which resulted in the two accusations of moral corruption and impiety.

    Trial of Socrates

  • However, Byron took some delight in Southey's description of him as an author of "monstrous combinations of horrors and mockery, lewdness and impiety".

    Satanic School

  • Together with Demophilus he reportedly brought a charge of impiety against Aristotle after Alexander the Great's death in 323 BC.

    Eurymedon the Hierophant

  • In Greek mythology, Dyssebeia was the caco-daimon (evil goddess, spirit) and personification of impiety and ungodliness, as opposed to Eusebeia.

    Dyssebeia

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the pius family

pious

impiety — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others