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Decorous Got Its Start With Etiquette
One of the earliest recorded uses of decorous appears in a book titled The Rules of Civility (1671): “It is not decorous to look in the glass, to comb, brush, or do any thing of that nature to ourselves, whilst the said person be in the Room.” This rule of thumb may be a bit outdated; like many behaviors once deemed unbecoming, public primping is unlikely to offend in modern times. Though mores shift, decorous lives on to describe timeless courtesies like polite speech, proper attire, and (ahem) covering one’s cough.
Examples of decorous in a Sentence
Guillermo Perez, Miami Herald, 9 Dec. 2025
The affair grows less decorous in farcical scenes of upstairs and downstairs life — kitchen staff toiling away on blunts, a trigger-happy shooting party, and cockney pub patrons breaking out in song — and the various side plots.
—Elaina Patton, IndieWire, 3 Dec. 2025
Al-Akkad reserves his harshest criticism not for the obvious warmongers of American empire, explicit in their jingoism and nationalist fervor, but for the decorous liberal centrists, complacent in their institutional comfort, their birthright virtue too easily claimed.
—Literary Hub, 2 Dec. 2025
Who decides what’s decorous and what’s vulgar?
—Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, 25 Oct. 2025
See All Example Sentences for decorous
Cite this Entry
“Decorous.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decorous. Accessed 27 Dec. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
decorous
adjective
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