effete
Other forms: effetely
Effete is a disapproving term meaning decadent and self-indulgent, even useless. The stereotype of the rugged Westerner is just as false as the one of the effete East Coast liberal.
The origin of the word effete is a little unexpected. Coming from the Latin effetus "out of, past childbearing," effete meant "exhausted, spent" long before it acquired the sense of morally exhausted and overly refined. This is the main use of the word today. Do you ever wonder why some effete party girls are considered celebrities? Star athletes run the risk of losing their edge and becoming effete posterboys for their sports.
-
excessively self-indulgent, affected, or decadent
- MLA
- APA
- Chicago
Vocabulary lists containing effete
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
In this essay collection, David Foster Wallace muses on everything crustaceans to Franz Kafka.
This anthology of short stories is used for the Cambridge Literature in English courses.