respectability

This last-minute legitimization would later allow Sand to legally inherit her father’s estate; it also established the uneasy balance between respectability and impropriety that would come to dominate her life.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 7, 2026

Noah Cross, the archvillain of the movie “Chinatown,” had the definitive line on how old age brings respectability.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 25, 2026

One of Christianity’s deepest convictions is that social standing, respectability and material recognition are not the measures of a life.

From Salon ● Jun. 5, 2026

Gautam Mukhopadhaya, another former Indian ambassador to Myanmar, said Min Aung Hlaing "is trying to acquire greater regional and international respectability as an elected president".

From BBC ● Jun. 2, 2026

I saw her in a black gown and widow’s cap; frigid, perhaps, but not uncivil: a model of elderly English respectability.

From "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë

His neuroticism, although he learned to control it. left him with a lifelong terror of going beyond the "cleanly respectabilities."

From Time Magazine Archive

Your eyes betrayed it, and the corners of your mouth went up the least little bit, as if they'd go further up before they went down—as if you'd laugh away many solemn respectabilities.

From The Seeker by Harry Leon Wilson

One great source of perplexity in the case, is the excessive urbanity of the imperfect respectabilities themselves.

From Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 by William Chambers

He must be first endorsed, by a banker, clergyman, or some other of the noted respectabilities of the land!

From The Child Wife by Mayne Reid

The Anti-slavery question is not one which the Tract Society can exclude by triumphant majorities, nor put to shame by a comparison of respectabilities.

From The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V Political Essays by James Russell Lowell