What is "utilitarian"

Usage examples of "utilitarian".

Lafayette-Constant wing of French liberalism by no means denies the existence of utilitarian themes in their advocacy of human rights.

Most of his journeys were local or to one of the airports, but he had some customers who went further afield for various reasons, though they travelled in his Vauxhall saloon, not this utilitarian van.

Rooms at the Skein of Geese were given infuriatingly anserine names rather than mere utilitarian numbers.

Suddenly he saw that some half-hearted attempt had been made to embellish the bleaky utilitarian structure with climbing plants, and that up the wall on one side of the door ran a scrap of denuded wooden trellis.

Then, Miss Demeanor suggests that you search for a boy whose father is an orthodontist, for financial as well as utilitarian concerns.

Like most ritualistic practices this habit has a utilitarian origin: it serves to keep the dust of grooming from entering the lungs.

Humans were creative enough to have come up with just about every possible design that would still be spaceworthy, and the visitor was rather utilitarian.

Even such utilitarian buildings, however, had ivy growing up over them, and flowers blossoming in niches.

His inclinations were pragmatic and utilitarian, and in that scheme of things the Church had a distinctive social role, ministering to the needs of the credulous, giving them spiritual succor and keeping them in orderly relation with the state.

The Panopticon was a design for a circular prison conceived by the eighteenth-century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham: the design consisted of tiered ranks of cells which could all be surveyed by a single warder positioned at the centre of the circle.

Behind the first closed door was a windowless office, almost bare but for a utilitarian desk on which stood a printer and small photocopier, and, against the wall, a self-contained video playback unit and a stack of tapes.

By the middle of the nineteenth century pyrotechny had reached a peak of technical perfection and was capable of transporting vast multitudes of spectators towards the visionary antipodes of minds which, consciously, were respectable Methodist, Puseyites, Utilitarians, disciples of Mill or Marx, of Newman, or Bradlaugh, or Samuel Smiles.

The lonely horseman riding between the moonlight and the day sees vast shadows creeping across the shelterless and silent plains, hears strange noises in the primeval forest, where flourishes a vegetation long dead in other lands, and feels, despite his fortune, that the trim utilitarian civilisation which bred him shrinks into insignificance beside the contemptuous grandeur of forest and ranges coeval with an age in which European scientists have cradled his own race.

To the left of the big harbour there was the switchy sway of palms yielding in soft compliance to the suasion of the wind, but to their right the sun glinting iron roofs of the town crawled halfway up a bare brown hill, utilitarian and ugly.

The snow had started falling again and in the mid-morning light it tended to soften the harsh, utilitarian landscape of the broad thruway stretching ahead to infinity and spreading out in a mile of speeding traffic on either hand.