DISSOLUTE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Dissolute

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adjective

Dissolute adj.

With nerves unstrung; weak. (Obs.)

Loosed from restraint; recklessly abandoned to sensual pleasures; esp., loose in morals and conduct; profligate; wanton; lewd; debauched. "A wild and dissolute soldier."

Specifically: Engaging in excessive drinking, or promiscuous sexual activity.

Synonyms: Uncurbed; unbridled; disorderly; unrestrained; reckless; wild; wanton; vicious; lax; licentious; lewd; rakish; debauched; profligate.

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Etymology of 'Dissolute'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Dissolute" Quotes from Famous Books

... which Jeff meant was not to be so easily done. Lynde had not grown up in dissolute idleness without acquiring some of the arts of self-defence which are called manly. He met Jeff's onset with remembered skill and with the strength which he had gained in three months of the wholesome regimen of the Brooker Institute. ...

— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... made. Another, it is believed, was instructed to remove Grant, but the general unexpectedly left Washington, and no direct threat was offered to him. The task of making away with the President was assigned to John Wilkes Booth, a dissolute and crack-brained actor. Lincoln and his wife were present that night at a gala performance of a popular English comedy called "Our American Cousin." Booth obtained access to the Presidential box and shot his victim behind the ear, causing instant loss of consciousness, which was followed ...

— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton

... success of one adventurous sally gives him spirits to undertake another; he deals always in round numbers, and his exaggerations and excuses are "open, palpable, monstrous as the father that begets them." His dissolute carelessness of what he says discovers itself in the ...

— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... are perhaps a little too religious, and what we would nowadays call "pi". In part that was the way people wrote in those days, but more important was the fact that in his days at the Red River Settlement, in the wilds of Canada, he had been a little dissolute, and he did not want his young readers to be unmindful of how they ought to behave, as he ...

— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne

... of dissatisfaction with their own condition, apparently worse, because of the coercion to labor which it imposes; but essentially better, because of the comforts which that labor procures, and of which the idle and dissolute habits of the free negro almost invariably deprive him. The slave, however, is not capable of reasoning correctly, if he reasons at all, on these truths. He envies the free negro his idleness, and his freedom ...

— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison

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