Definitions

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

  • noun self-indulgent sexual desire (personified as one of the deadly sins).

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

  • noun self-indulgent sexual desire (personified as one of the deadly sins)

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Writing in the second century AD, the biographer Suetonius employed the word luxuria to characterize the degenerate behavior of Emperor Nero, whose habits he said included traveling with a thousand carriages pulled by mules shod with silver, and entertaining in his wildly extravagant palace, which he had overlaid with gold and fitted with pipes to spray perfume on his guests.

    The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010

  • Writing in the second century AD, the biographer Suetonius employed the word luxuria to characterize the degenerate behavior of Emperor Nero, whose habits he said included traveling with a thousand carriages pulled by mules shod with silver, and entertaining in his wildly extravagant palace, which he had overlaid with gold and fitted with pipes to spray perfume on his guests.

    The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010

  • French had borrowed the word from Medieval Latin, in which luxuria was sometimes personified as Lust or Gluttony or Greed.

    The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010

  • But even before the Christian era, luxuria had been a favorite term to describe despicable excesses, notably of certain Roman emperors.

    The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010

  • French had borrowed the word from Medieval Latin, in which luxuria was sometimes personified as Lust or Gluttony or Greed.

    The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010

  • But even before the Christian era, luxuria had been a favorite term to describe despicable excesses, notably of certain Roman emperors.

    The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010

  • Crescunt tamen feminini doli, crudelitas, vitia et insatiabilis luxuria.

    Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah 2003

  • Augustus's attempts to curb public aristocratic display were successful, but his programs to put an end to private luxuria failed utterly.

    3. Civil War and Renewal, 70 B.C.E.-14 C.E 2001

  • Viewed as luxuria, such conduct raised opposition expressed in the form of censorial reprimands, sumptuary laws (in 215, 181, 161, and 115), and numerous speeches.

    b. Economy, Society, and Culture 2001

  • Cicero's speeches employ laudatio and vituperatio, in which, among the four virtues, temperantia (with its antitheses) receives by far the greatest attention, not only because accusations of luxuria and avaritia had long proved most effective in arousing indignatio and odium, but also because Cicero sincerely believed that these were the vices most typical of Rome and most dangerous to the welfare of the Republic.

    Dictionary of the History of Ideas HELEN F. NORTH 1968

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