slavish
/ˈsleɪvɪʃ
/adjective
1Servile or submissive: he noted the slavish, feudal respect they had for her...
- Bacon emphasized that this ordeal of experiment was to be heroic testing, not the torture of a slavish and submissive victim.
- Wu Xun, it was argued, had in his slavish dependence on the feudal upper classes helped to perpetuate the old system and had actually helped to propagate its ideology among his fellow peasants.
- It shows a society that, white or red, encourages rapacity, self-deception and slavish respect for authority.
Synonyms
servile, subservient, fawning, obsequious, sycophantic, excessively deferential, toadying, ingratiating, unctuous, grovelling, cringing, toadyish, sycophantish, abject, craven, humble, Uriah Heepish, self-abasing
informal slimy, bootlicking, sucky, soapy, forelock-tugging
North American informal brown-nosing, apple-polishing
British vulgar slang arse-licking, bum-sucking
North American vulgar slang kiss-ass, ass-kissing, suckholing
1.1Showing no attempt at originality: a slavish adherence to protocol...
- Divorcing it of its context would strip away much of that heady period glamour to produce a diluted facsimile - even with slavish adherence to the original scripts.
- Their route to the top 10 was simply via ear-grabbing originality, rather than slavish imitation of current trends.
- Perhaps they don't care, but that is contradicted by their slavish adherence to the latest fashions.
Synonyms
unoriginal, uninspired, unimaginative, uninventive, non-innovative, imitative, derivative
Derivatives
slavishness
- Political free thinkers will call this behaviour a form of slavishness, where the people are conditioned from a very early age to be part of an assembly line.
- Look at this monstrous vanity and stupid slavishness to fashion!
- It's a slavishness to a new orthodoxy and it's not actually paying the results that we've been promised.
Rhymes
- early day motion
- early door
- early doors
- Early English
- early flowering
- early fruiting
- early grave
- earlyish
- Early, Jubal
- early leaver
- early leaving
- early modern
- early music
- early musician
- early night
- early-onset
- early (or earlier) on
- Early Pointed
- early purple orchid
- early purple orchis
- early retirement
- early retirer
- early riser
- early rising
- early Victorian