What is "sordid"

Usage examples of "sordid".

After the endless months of paperwork of audit trails and expenditure profiles, of asset calculations and restraint preparations it had come to this: the sordid little drama played out across dozens of cities, hundreds of estates, thousands of similar patches of urban wasteland.

In three days Cayle would be initiated into the sordid life of the houses of illusion.

Of unbelief parading as belief, and sordid earthliness blowing the horn of blissful paradise?

He certainly came to the public service with patriotic and not with sordid motives, surrendering a most brilliant position at the bar, and with it the emolument of which in the absence of accumulated wealth his family was in daily need.

Thus enfeebling the dominion of the senses and the passions over the soul, and as it were freeing the latter from a sordid slavery, and by the steady practice of all the virtues, active and contemplative, our ancient brethren strove to fit themselves to return to the bosom of the Deity.

Many of the lamas and trapas flagrantly flaunted their amorousness toward each other, to leave no doubt that they had forsworn sordid, ordinary, normal sex.

For a street boasting the best view, as it runs out its sordid line longer than the rest, is proudly called Gasometer Street.

Kerner, not being a Southerner, did not comprehend, so he sat, sentimental, figuring on his flat in his sordid, artistic way, while I gazed into the green eyes of the sophisticated Spirit of Wormwood.

Sophie Neveu seemed far too solid of character to be mixed up in something that sordid.

Bassam Little Popo, names that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister backcloth.

Laurens was one of those brave and ardent spirits, generous, high-souled, and immaculate, which, in times of sordid calculation and drilled soldiership, recall to our minds the better days of chivalry.

The tomb in the daytime, and when wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough, but now, some days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns, when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance, when the time-discoloured stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass, and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined.

Now I had a reason to despise its humpy back, its sordid beach, the smell of peaches.

When the forces of lovelessness and greed had built up our own sordid capitalist systems, driven by invisible proprietorship, robbing the poor, defacing the earth, and forcing themselves as a universal curse even on the generous and humane, then religion and law and intellect, which would never themselves have discovered such systems, their natural bent being towards welfare, economy, and life instead of towards corruption, waste, and death, nevertheless did not scruple to seize by fraud and force these powers of evil on presence of using them for good.

Moore has a long and sordid history of posting screeds that make anyone with the smallest capacity for empathy immediately cringe.