Skip to content
OneKitly

indulge

verbattested in dialogue

  • //ɪnˈdʌld͡ʒ//

To yield to a temptation or desire.

verb

  1. 1

    To yield to a temptation or desire.

    He looked at the chocolate but didn't indulge.

    I indulged in drinking on the weekend.

    Richardson took over, and Mitchell proceeded to the refreshment room in his turn, but when he came back some ten minutes later, it was evident that he had been indulging in something more potent than coffee, and he was in a very muddled state.

    How can the unions - or more specifically the RMT - possibly think this is a good time to exert a bit of industrial muscle and indulge in strikes both on the national railway and the London Underground?

  2. 2

    To satisfy the wishes or whims of.

    Grandma indulges the kids with sweets.

    I love to indulge myself with beautiful clothes.

    August 30, 1706, Francis Atterbury, a sermon preach'd in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, at the funeral of Mr. Tho. Bennet Hope in another life implies that we indulge ourselves in the gratifications of this very sparingly.

    "She constantly faked being sick, and perhaps mistakenly, I indulged her more than I should have, pretending I couldn't tell. But I AM a teacher myself, so it's kind of hard to just let this slide."

  3. 3

    To give way to (a habit or temptation); to not oppose or restrain.

    to indulge sloth, pride, selfishness, or inclinations

  4. 4

    To grant an extension to the deadline of a payment.

  5. 5

    To grant as by favour; to bestow in concession, or in compliance with a wish or request.

    persuading us that something must be indulged to public manners

    Yet, yet a moment, one dim ray of light / Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night!

Etymology

From Latin indulgeō (“to indulge”).

Forms

past tense
indulged
past participle
indulged
present participle
indulging
third person singular
indulges
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).