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modesty

nounattested in dialogue

  • //ˈmɒd.ə.sti//

The quality of being modest; having a limited and not overly high opinion of oneself and one's abilities.

noun

  1. 1

    The quality of being modest; having a limited and not overly high opinion of oneself and one's abilities.

    At her invitation he outlined for her the succeeding chapters with terse military accuracy ; and what she liked best and best understood was avoidance of that false modesty which condescends, turning technicality into pabulum.

  2. 2

    Moderate behaviour; reserve.

  3. 3

    Pudency, avoidance of sexual explicitness.

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle French modestie, from Latin modestia; equivalent to modest + -y.

Forms

plural
modesties
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).