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indignity

UK/ɪnˈdɪɡ.nɪ.ti/US/ɪnˈdɪɡ.nɪ.ti/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,320 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: indignities

An indignity is treatment that robs somebody of their dignity. Suffer the indignity of it, the final indignity, spared that indignity.

It is usually small and public rather than cruel and private: being searched, being talked over, being helped when you did not need it. The phrase the final indignity is how people mark the last of a run of them.

Definitions of indignity

  1. 1nounindignityTreatment that robs somebody of their dignity.C1

    “He suffered the indignity of being searched in front of his colleagues.”

indignity is a treatment.

Where it comes from

Latin indignitas comes from indignus, unworthy, from in-, not, plus dignus, worthy.

  1. Latin

    indignitās

  2. English, today

    indignity

Borrowed from Latin indignitās, indignitātem. Equivalent to indign + ity.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

indignity in the wild

  • By that time Iollas was already dead, but she instructed that his grave be opened and desecrated with every mark of indignity.

    Iollas

  • The cover features the Princeton Similkameen Funeral Services home - the owner of which was charged in 2007 with fraud and offering an indignity to human remains.

    Volume 1 (The Besnard Lakes album)

  • However, he again failed to qualify for the Indy 500, an indignity that continued in 1980.

    Tom Frantz

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.