prodigal

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prodigal

adjective careless, dissipated, dissipative, excessive, extravagant, heedless, immoderate, imprudent, intemperate, lavish, liberal, profligate, reckless, spendthrift, squandering, thriftless, unbridled, uneconomical, unrestrained, unthrifty, wanton, wasteful

PRODIGAL, civil law, persons. Prodigals were persons who, though of full age, were incapable of managing their affairs, and of the obligations which attended them, in consequence of their bad conduct, and for whom a curator was therefore appointed.
2. In Pennsylvania, by act of assembly, an habitual drunkard is deprived of the management of his affairs, when he wastes his property, and his estate is placed in the bands of a committee.

References in periodicals archive ?

Wordsworth's sonnet typically begins with an apparent plenitude (conveyed, just as in his sonnet on Westminster Bridge, through negation)--"While not a leaf seems faded; while the fields,/with ripening harvest prodigally fair"--and then reveals that this fullness in fact covers up for death: "this nipping air, / Sent from some distant clime where Winter wields / His icy scimitar, a foretaste yields / Of bitter change.

"In silence like to death": Elizabeth Barrett's sonnet turn

Fundamentalism is prodigally dissipating the Christian culture accretion of centuries, a serious sin," cried Harold Ockenga, a decade ago.

Baptists and neo-evangelical theology

Now, with Soviet ballet no longer even Soviet, the Kirov has proved eager to acquire the repertory of their prodigally gifted son.

KIROV BALLET

Cardozo once delivered a commencement address in which he stated: "The submergence of self in the pursuit of an ideal, the readiness to spend oneself without measure, prodigally, almost ecstatically, for something intuitively apprehended as great and noble, spend oneself one knows not why--some of us like to believe that is what religion means.

Cardozo

In the meantime, Sofia and Esteban are erotically and prodigally attracted to him as an alternative "father" and as a foreign source of their own self-realization.

Oedipal and Prodigal Returns in Alejo Carpentier and William Faulkner(*)

108) The answer to this question is found in accepting the fact of choice, and then choosing, as did Brahe, "[t]he submergence of self in the pursuit of an ideal, the readiness to spend oneself without measure, prodigally, almost ecstatically, for something intuitively apprehended as great and noble, spend oneself one knows not why.

Cardozo

Prodigally, Eric Ormsby has spurned that advice, electing in many instances to use the ten-dollar word where the bargain one might do.

For a Modest God: New and Selected Poems

The one who promised God's wrath on those who do not keep his Commandments is the same who taught that God is a father who loves his children prodigally and without condition.

There are two ways about it

Modigliani retained control of his drawings (some of which were among his best works) which he continued to give prodigally away or to sell for five francs or a drink or two in the cafes of Montparnasse.

Modigliani at the Royal Academy

Petersburg, first as a dancer (1847) and then as a prodigally productive choreographer of over fifty ballets, between 1855 and 1903.