profligate
/profligate/
Học thuậtThân thiện
Definition
Adjective:
- Recklessly extravagant or wasteful: Characterized by spending money or resources in a wildly excessive and irresponsible manner.
- Licentious, dissolute: Morally unrestrained, given to vice and debauchery; lacking moral restraint.
Noun:
- A recklessly extravagant person: Someone who spends money or uses resources in a wildly wasteful way.
- A dissolute, debauched person: An individual who leads a life of unrestrained indulgence in pleasure, often of a sensual nature.
Usage Examples
- Adjective:
- The profligate heir squandered the family fortune on lavish parties and gambling.
- The king's profligate lifestyle and disregard for his subjects led to revolution.
- Noun:
- He was known as a profligate, more concerned with pleasure than with his duties.
- The novel's antagonist is a charming but dangerous profligate.
Advanced Usage
- "Profligate with": Used to indicate what is being wasted or used excessively.
- The government has been profligate with public funds.
- "Profligate in": Used to describe the area or manner of wastefulness.
- He was profligate in his spending and profligate in his affections.
Variants and Related Words
- Profligacy (n): The quality or state of being profligate; reckless extravagance or wastefulness.
- The profligacy of the regime was its ultimate downfall.
- Profligately (adv): In a profligate manner.
- He lived profligately, with no thought for the future.
Synonyms
- Adjective (wasteful): Extravagant, spendthrift, prodigal, wasteful, improvident.
- Adjective (dissolute): Dissipated, debauched, decadent, licentious, libertine.
- Noun (spendthrift): Wastrel, spendthrift, squanderer.
- Noun (debauched person): Libertine, rake, debauchee, roué.
Antonyms
- Adjective (wasteful): Frugal, thrifty, economical, prudent, parsimonious.
- Adjective (dissolute): Abstinent, ascetic, moral, upright, virtuous.
- Noun: Miser, ascetic.
Related Idioms and Phrases
- "A profligate son": A common literary archetype referring to a son who wastes his inheritance.
- In the parable, the profligate son returns home after wasting his fortune.
- "Profligate habits": A phrase describing a pattern of wasteful or dissolute behavior.
- His profligate habits left him destitute by the age of forty.
Adjective
- unrestrained by convention or morality
- Congreve draws a debauched aristocratic society
- deplorably dissipated and degraded
- riotous living
- fast women
- recklessly wasteful
- prodigal in their expenditures
Noun
- a recklessly extravagant consumer
- a dissolute man in fashionable society