What is another word for venal?

Pronunciation: [vˈiːnə͡l] (IPA)

The word 'venal' means to be easily bribed or corrupt. Some synonyms for the term include greedy, corruptible, avaricious, and mercenary. Other words that may be used in place of 'venal' are bribeable, corrupt, dishonest, and unprincipled. These terms can be used to describe individuals who are willing to put their morals and values aside in exchange for material gain. When seeking to describe the behavior of someone who is venal, one could use terms such as crooked, dishonorable, unethical, and immoral. It is important to bear in mind that the use of any synonym for the term 'venal' depends on the context in which it is being used.

What are the hypernyms for Venal?

A hypernym is a word with a broad meaning that encompasses more specific words called hyponyms.

What are the opposite words for venal?

Venal refers to someone who is susceptible to bribery or is motivated by money over morals. Therefore, antonyms for the word venal include words that describe someone who upholds moral principles and values, such as principled, honest, ethical, upright, and honorable. Other antonyms may include words like incorruptible, virtuous, righteous, and honest. These words denote characteristics such as integrity, honesty, and sincerity, which are the opposite of someone who is venal. Using these antonyms, we can describe individuals who are guided by good intentions and the desire to do what is right, rather than those who can be bought with money or other material gains.

What are the antonyms for Venal?

Usage examples for Venal

Our venal politicians would do well to profit by the example of China.
"The Story of Malta"
Maturin M. Ballou
These venal impostors, in the words of Tacitus, were always being banished, but they always returned.
"Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius"
Samuel Dill
Large sums of money had been sometimes offered him for his good offices, but he steadily refused to accept any presents whatever, or to mingle in the affairs of others, except in very occasional cases, where it seemed to him that those who sought his aid had been cruelly and unfairly dealt with by officials or venal magistrates.
"Beric the Briton A Story of the Roman Invasion"
G. A. Henty

Famous quotes with Venal

  • Scientists are just as vulnerable to wishful thinking, just as likely to be tempted by base motives, just as venal and gullible and forgetful as the rest of humankind. Scientists don't consider themselves to be saints; they don't even pretend to be priests (who according to tradition are supposed to do a better job than the rest of us at fighting off human temptation and frailty). Scientists take themselves to be just as weak and fallible as anybody else, but recognizing those very sources of error in themselves and in the groups to which they belong, they have devised elaborate systems to tie their own hands, forcibly preventing their frailties and prejudices from infecting their results.
    Daniel Dennett
  • My country is at present spoiled by prosperity, stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war, noble sentiment much forgotten even by individuals, the aims of politicians selfish or petty, the literature frivolous and venal.
    Margaret Fuller
  • It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close…
    Hunter S. Thompson
  • A new danger now beset himthe danger of becoming simply a venal pleader, a creature who grinds out arguments on this or that side, for this or that client:—a mere legal beast of prey.
    Andrew Dickson White
  • Of greater importance than this regulation of African clientship were the political consequences of the Jugurthine war or rather of the Jugurthine insurrection, although these have been frequently estimated too highly. Certainly all the evils of the government were therein brought to light in all their nakedness; it was now not merely notorious but, so to speak, judicially established, that among the governing lords of Rome everything was treated as venal--the treaty of peace and the right of intercession, the rampart of the camp and the life of the soldier; the African had said no more than the simple truth, when on his departure from Rome he declared that, if he had only gold enough, he would undertake to buy the city itself. But the whole external and internal government of this period bore the same stamp of miserable baseness. In our case the accidental fact, that the war in Africa is brought nearer to us by means of better accounts than the other contemporary military and political events, shifts the true perspective; contemporaries learned by these revelations nothing but what everybody knew long before and every intrepid patriot had long been in a position to support by facts. The circumstance, however, that they were now furnished with some fresh, still stronger and still more irrefutable, proofs of the baseness of the restored senatorial government--a baseness only surpassed by its incapacity--might have been of importance, had there been an opposition and a public opinion with which the government would have found it necessary to come to terms. But this war had in fact exposed the corruption of the government no less than it had revealed the utter nullity of the opposition. It was not possible to govern worse than the restoration governed in the years 637-645; it was not possible to stand forth more defenceless and forlorn than was the Roman senate in 645: had there been in Rome a real opposition, that is to say, a party which wished and urged a fundamental alteration of the constitution, it must necessarily have now made at least an attempt to overturn the restored senate. No such attempt took place; the political question was converted into a personal one, the generals were changed, and one or two useless and unimportant people were banished. It was thus settled, that the so-called popular party as such neither could nor would govern; that only two forms of government were at all possible in Rome, a -tyrannis- or an oligarchy; that, so long as there happened to be nobody sufficiently well known, if not sufficiently important, to usurp the regency of the state, the worst mismanagement endangered at the most individual oligarchs, but never the oligarchy; that on the other hand, so soon as such a pretender appeared, nothing was easier than to shake the rotten curule chairs. In this respect the coming forward of Marius was significant, just because it was in itself so utterly unwarranted. If the burgesses had stormed the senate-house after the defeat of Albinus, it would have been a natural, not to say a proper course; but after the turn which Metellus had given to the Numidian war, nothing more could be said of mismanagement, and still less of danger to the commonwealth, at least in this respect; and yet the first ambitious officer who turned up succeeded in doing that with which the older Africanus had once threatened the government,(16) and procured for himself one of the principal military commands against the distinctly- expressed will of the governing body. Public opinion, unavailing in the hands of the so-called popular party, became an irresistible weapon in the hands of the future king of Rome. We do not mean to say
    Theodor Mommsen

Related words: venal people, venal politics, venal government, venal society, venal nature, venal motives

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