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EXTRAVAGANCE
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I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Excessive spending
Synonyms:
extravagance; high life; highlife; lavishness; prodigality
Classified under:
Nouns denoting acts or actions
Hypernyms ("extravagance" is a kind of...):
dissipation; waste; wastefulness (useless or profitless activity; using or expending or consuming thoughtlessly or carelessly)
Derivation:
extravagant (recklessly wasteful)
Sense 2
Meaning:
The trait of spending extravagantly
Synonyms:
extravagance; prodigality; profligacy
Classified under:
Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects
Hypernyms ("extravagance" is a kind of...):
improvidence; shortsightedness (a lack of prudence and care by someone in the management of resources)
Derivation:
extravagant (recklessly wasteful)
Sense 3
Meaning:
The quality of exceeding the appropriate limits of decorum or probability or truth
Example:
we were surprised by the extravagance of his description
Synonyms:
extravagance; extravagancy
Classified under:
Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects
Hypernyms ("extravagance" is a kind of...):
excess; excessiveness; inordinateness (immoderation as a consequence of going beyond sufficient or permitted limits)
Derivation:
extravagant (unrestrained, especially with regard to feelings)
Context examples:
She felt all the honest pride and complacency which her alliance with the present and future proprietor could fairly warrant, as she viewed the respectable size and style of the building, its suitable, becoming, characteristic situation, low and sheltered—its ample gardens stretching down to meadows washed by a stream, of which the Abbey, with all the old neglect of prospect, had scarcely a sight—and its abundance of timber in rows and avenues, which neither fashion nor extravagance had rooted up.
(Emma, by Jane Austen)
Mrs Smith did not want to take blame to herself, and was most tender of throwing any on her husband; but Anne could collect that their income had never been equal to their style of living, and that from the first there had been a great deal of general and joint extravagance.
(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)
Their eyes burned in their heads; their feet grew speedier and lighter; their whole soul was bound up in that fortune, that whole lifetime of extravagance and pleasure, that lay waiting there for each of them.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
I have grown so desperate that five and a half hours of sleep is an extravagance.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
“Quite right,” said my uncle, who seemed to have made up his mind to outdo Brummell in extravagance.
(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Jo frowned upon that piece of extravagance, and asked why he didn't buy a frail of dates, a cask of raisins, and a bag of almonds, and be done with it?
(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)
He imagined, and calmly could he imagine it, that her extravagance, and consequent distress, had obliged her to dispose of it for some immediate relief.
(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)
What extravagances she committed; what laughing and crying over me; what pride she showed, what joy, what sorrow that she whose pride and joy I might have been, could never hold me in a fond embrace; I have not the heart to tell.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
Just at sunset, the air turned cold and the sky cloudy: I went in, Sophie called me upstairs to look at my wedding-dress, which they had just brought; and under it in the box I found your present—the veil which, in your princely extravagance, you sent for from London: resolved, I suppose, since I would not have jewels, to cheat me into accepting something as costly.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
My father supported him at school, and afterwards at Cambridge—most important assistance, as his own father, always poor from the extravagance of his wife, would have been unable to give him a gentleman's education.
(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)
