Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of enervating, or the state of being enervated; reduction or weakening of strength; effeminacy.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act of weakening, or reducing strength.
  • noun The state of being weakened; effeminacy.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Act of enervating; debilitation.
  • noun State of being enervated; debility.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun serious weakening and loss of energy
  • noun surgical removal of a nerve
  • noun lack of vitality

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word enervation.

Examples

  • But after a couple of hours, in the neighbourhood of eleven, when it may be anything from 110 to 120 degrees in the shade, a kind of enervation sets in.

    In Mesopotamia Maurice Nicoll 1918

  • She does not see, of course, that the new movement among women is a spiritual movement – that women, whose work has been taken away from them, are now beating at new doors, crying to be let in that they may take part in new labors, and thus save womanhood from the enervation which is threatening it.

    In Times Like These 1915

  • You seem to think that it is purposely unsatisfactory, or rather dissatisfactory: but it seems to me to proceed from a kind of enervation in De Quincey.

    Letters of Edward FitzGerald in two volumes, Vol. 1 Edward FitzGerald 1846

  • Under surrealism, price determination will be based on the toss of a two-headed cloud during the hours of 3:00am to eleventy-never, while money will be different kinds of soup, ranging from New England barbed wire to cream of enervation.

    Spencer Green: Capitalism to Be Replaced By Surrealism Spencer Green 2011

  • Under surrealism, price determination will be based on the toss of a two-headed cloud during the hours of 3:00am to eleventy-never, while money will be different kinds of soup, ranging from New England barbed wire to cream of enervation.

    Spencer Green: Capitalism to Be Replaced By Surrealism Spencer Green 2011

  • Here is a climate where a man can work three hundred and sixty-five days in the year without the slightest hint of enervation, and where for three hundred and sixty-five nights he must perforce sleep under blankets.

    FOUR HORSES AND A SAILOR 2010

  • There must be a reason for all this enervation, and it is not the Aintree course, which has been eased over the years.

    Tiger Woods goes into new era as same old charmless man 2011

  • They had been warned by Mark Hall of the enervation of the south, and were bound north for their blanket climate.

    CHAPTER XI 2010

  • Jabri's concepts could well be stifled by the enervation of seeking relevant permissions.

    Hisham Wyne: Opportunity in Disguise: Why Urban Spaces Don't Need to Remain Vacant 2010

  • Jabri's concepts could well be stifled by the enervation of seeking relevant permissions.

    Hisham Wyne: Opportunity in Disguise: Why Urban Spaces Don't Need to Remain Vacant 2010

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.

    (Arthur Rimbaud)

    March 12, 2008