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sleaze

sleaze

28 7.9
Bad or dishonest behaviour that seems cheap and shameful
  • noun
  • /sliːz/
  • Literature
translation icon : sordidez
  • Far from being a fresh start, this is a return to the sleaze and scandal and ghosts of Cabinet's past.
  • sleaze bag
  • sleaze ball
  • sleaze bucket

And so I saw the penny stock business and saw like the sleaze factor in that.

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Examples

  • People want to secede from Washington, DC and its sleaze and corruption.

    Blog text (1)
  • What about the sleaze and the depravity?

  • But I sure as hell can tell the world the kind of sleaze you stand for.

    Fiction book (1992)
  • It's time for a real change in Washington and to send the sleaze back to Chicago!

    Blog text (5)
  • You don't look like your average sleaze.

  • I don't want her to think of me as a sleaze.

    Fiction book (1995)
  • Perhaps, Sandbrook suggests, this was because a degree of sleaze seemed already to have infected every aspect of society.

    Academic text (2011)
  • Call it modern business practice, call it sleaze, call it whatever you like—that's the reality.

    Blog text (4)
  • But at the time, their rhetoric was they were going to make society more inclusive and more caring, an antidote to the greed and sleaze of the Tories.

  • The film was criticized for its sleaze, which turned many viewers away from the theater.

Synonyms

cheapness
vssleaze
1 3.5

A quality that makes something look showy and not stylish

focuses more on moral sordidness and vulgarity than on price or value
tackiness
vssleaze
  • Informal
1 6.6

A quality of looking cheap and in bad taste

includes moral wrongdoing and disrepute beyond mere bad taste
sleaziness
vssleaze
7.7

Being dirty and shabby in appearance because of old or untidy clothes

covers broader low morals and disreputable conduct beyond physical dirtiness

Antonyms

2.1

How good something is

Being seen by other people as proper and having a good name

How Sleazy

sleaze
  • Literature
28 7.9
corruption
355 4.8
shadiness
1 6.9

Surface Forms

sleaze singular
sleazes plural

Etymology

The word sleaze is related to the adjective sleazy, which once described cheap, thin cloth, so a helpful image is a dirty, low-quality fabric. That's why sleaze now means 'low quality' or 'morally dirty' behaviour or things.