Abject or cringing submissiveness

Usage examples of servility.

I myself can barely look back on those twenty years of amatory servility with a full comprehension of the part I have been playing in them.

These effusions of impotent rage against a dead emperor, whom the senate had flattered when alive with the most abject servility, betrayed a just but ungenerous spirit of revenge.

His father tries to express his love, but the furniture is still hideous, false Louis Quinze or whatever was the equivalent in those days, the same pictures of good living are on the walls, he is shocked more than ever by the servility of the servants and the luxury of the food, and he begins to remember the companionship he found in the poverty of the pig farm.

Fitzgerald or not, however, it must be allowed that the vulgarity, servility, and gross absurdity of the newspaper scribblers is well rendered.

Such are the circumstances of this ostentatious and improbable relation, dictated, as it too plainly appears, by the vanity of the monarch, adorned by the unblushing servility of his flatterers, and received without contradiction by a distant and obsequious senate.

At the elbow of every famishing passenger stood a beneficent coal-black glossy fairy, in a white linen apron and jacket, serving him with that alacrity and kindliness and grace which make the negro waiter the master, not the slave of his calling, which disenthrall it of servility, and constitute him your eager host, not your menial, for the moment.

He motioned to an aproned individual, who came to the table and assumed an attitude of servility.

This state of things led to servility on the part of the clerks and to endless intrigues within the various departments, where the humbler clerks struggled vainly against degenerate members of the aristocracy, who sought positions in the government bureaus for their ruined sons.

It emboldens the wicked by impunity, debases the virtuous by servility, delivers up the world to despotism and tyranny, and dissolves all society.

Like earlier British writers and artists, Lawrence believed that industrialism doomed the worker to a life of dehumanizing ugliness and servility.

I thought back to what I had seen of the barbarism of the countryside beyond the London Dome, and I tried to imagine permanent life in an underground Bomb Shelter: I conjured up images of hollow-eyed children scurrying through darkened tunnels, and a population reduced by fear to servility and near-savagery.

Helen drew his attention to the massive Dutch-gabled residence, with its attendant outbuildings grouped in servility behind it.

It was not uncommon for quite, senior officers, let alone aspiring first lieutenants, to be impressed to the point of servility with a subordinate who might have influence at Court or in Parliament, and who could perhaps be the means of quick advancement.

Another grand determining principle of the rules of conduct, both in act and forbearance which have been enforced by law or opinion, has been the servility of mankind towards the supposed preferences or aversions of their temporal masters, or of their gods.

In the slight and purified specimen of the 'table talk' of a Roman mob which we have here ventured to exhibit, the reader will perceive that extraordinary mixture of servility and insolence which characterised not only the conversation but the actions of the lower orders of society at the period of which we write.