Improve your vocabulary by Quiz

Use rampant in a sentence

Definition of rampant:

  • (adjective) rearing on left hind leg with forelegs elevated and head usually in profile
  • (adjective) unrestrained and violent; "rampant aggression"
  • (adjective) (of a plant) having a lush and unchecked growth; "a rampant growth of weeds"

Sentence Examples:

The small farmer class were deprived of holdings, the soil was being worked by slaves, and its products wasted on pleasure and debauchery by the rich; the law courts were controlled by the wealthy and powerful, while oppression, bribery, and fraud were generally rampant in the city.

He envied Joe, down in the village, rampant, tearing the slats off the bar, his brain gnawing with maggots, exulting in maudlin ways over maudlin things, fantastically and gloriously drunk and forgetful of Monday morning and the week of deadening toil to come.

Music, which grows rampant with passion, speaks in all its tones of woman: as long as the strain lasts we are in a frenzy of love, though it is not very clear with whom, and happily the delirium ends the moment the strings of the violin have ceased to vibrate.

Andy Green nudged his wife, Rosemary, and whispered hurriedly that this was where the camera man had pulled up his tripod by the roots and beat it, thinking he was going to be run over; and that was why the scene was cut unexpectedly just where Andy set his horse on its haunches and posed, a heroic figure of a cowboy rampant, immediately before the lens.

I can remember well one day when we were both for some long time engaged in gambols, broken off by my terror at his screwing up his long and curling hair into a horn, and approaching me with rampant paws and frightful gestures as some imaginative monster.

The other possible place of concealment was an island about five acres in extent, completely hemmed in by a group of other islands, which were so overrun with rampant vegetation, including bushes and trees, as to conceal the inner isle from any but the most scrutinizing vision.

Yes, but many good religious people are not used to seeing the issue in this light, and those who make a trade of fanning old bitterness will still ply their bitter trade, crying that anarchists, atheists, heretics, infidels, all outcasts and wicked men, are all rampant for our destruction.

There was no denying the fact that that brutal murder was the natural outcome of the disgraceful system of intimidation and outrage that had been rampant for a long time in certain districts of that unhappy county and of the immunity from punishment enjoyed by the wicked and cowardly moonlighter.

If such times of degeneracy and rampant iniquity ever return, if humanity is again compelled to stagger under the moral burdens that crushed the Roman Empire, without doubt the love of solitude, which is now held in check by the satisfactions of a comparatively pure and peaceful social life, will again arise in its old-time strength and impel men to seek in waste and lonely places the virtues they cannot acquire in a decaying civilization.

It is idle, in view of this, to protest that the demand is urged only on behalf of rampant clericalism, and that the only form of university which Catholics will accept is of such a kind as would serve to strengthen the hand of the priests, whose sole aim in this demand is to secure that increase of power.

Mythology, if still rampant according to our taste, at least becomes subsidiary and more detachable from the supreme deity, and this deity, if less anthropomorphic than Allah or Jehovah, is still a being who loves and helps souls, and these souls are explained in varying formulae as being identical with him and yet distinct.

The day when I understood, root and branch, these difficulties, which like a rampant overgrowth repressed the actions and stifled the breathing of the whole family, hindered the management of the household and retarded the improvement of the estate by complicating the most necessary acts, I felt an admiring awe which rose higher than my love and drove it back into my heart.

Again, an unashamed and rampant naturalism has just been sweeping this country in the wave of mean and cruel intolerance which insists upon the continued imprisonment of political heretics, which would prohibit freedom of speech by governmental decree and oppose new or distasteful ideas by the physical suppression of the thinker.

Below the fresco which I have thus minutely described is another about the same size, representing a sphinx, with a nondescript animal, which may be either an ass or a young deer standing below it, and a panther or leopard sitting behind in a rampant attitude, with one paw on the haunch of the sphinx, and the other on the tail, and its face turned towards the spectator.

The extent to which disaffection is rampant in the native Bar also hampers the administration of justice, for whilst there is an eager competition for earning political notoriety by an eloquent defense of political prisoners, it is sometimes difficult to find pleaders who will undertake to conduct prosecutions.

I sit down to write to you this morning in an inexpressibly flat state; having spent the whole of yesterday and the day before in a gradually increasing headache, which grew at last rampant and violent, ended with excessive sickness, and this morning I am quite weak and washy.

The figures have been carefully defaced with the hammer, but the outline of the king can still be discerned on the left; he seizes the rampant lion by the right paw, and while it raises its left paw against him, he plunges his dagger into the body of the beast.

They are pitiless in punishing corruption or drunkenness when they find either among officials; but they have built up a system in which the temptations to petty corruption are tremendous, and their own materialistic theory should persuade them that under such a system corruption must be rampant.

There seemed nothing but horror around her, a mental horror, a physical horror; and the sole means of even momentary relief and surcease from it had been a pitiful prowling around the streets, where even the fresh air seemed to be denied to her, for it was tainted with the smells of squalor that ruled, rampant, in that neighborhood.

Opposite the inn door, on the other side of the road, a signboard swung in a frame upheld by a massive oaken pillar, under the shelter of a cluster of tall elms; on a marine background, the noble beast that stands for the type of national courage and strength was depicted rampant, his fierce claws raised in defiance of all invaders.

Life, like Punch, has also its more serious side; and, if it has never produced a "Song of the Shirt," it earns our warm admiration for its steadfast championing of worthy causes, its severe and trenchant attacks on rampant evils, and its eloquent tributes to men who have deserved well of the country.

The abuse of psychology, rampant for two hundred years, seemed at last to be detected and challenged; and the impressionistic rhetoric that philosophy was saturated with began to be squeezed out by clear questions, and by a disconcerting demand for literal sincerity.

Tommy Downey, ears rampant, a tooth missing and a face radiant with joy and absolute self-confidence, mounted the bunting and flag-draped stage and in a booming voice wholly out of proportion to his midget dimensions and in ten dashing verses assured those assembled that the man who wore the shoulder straps was a fine enough fellow to be sure, but that it was after all the man without them who had to win the day.

It is a rampant grower, quickly covering large spaces by means of its progressive roots; in gardens or collections where it can only be allowed a limited space, the running habit of the roots will doubtless prove troublesome, and often such free growers, however handsome they may be otherwise, are esteemed common, which should not be.

All the way down Regent Street she had peeped out from the cab windows, hoping to catch sight of familiar faces or fascinating wares in the shopping paradise of the late nobility; but, though the stores still stood, few passers were to be seen, and the filthy, smoky aspect of the sidewalks told that anarchy was rampant even here.

The town was alive with expectation and the school children were wild to behold the great play of "The Scolding Wife," which was advertised through the streets, in the daytime, by a cartload of bedizened harlequins, belaboring each other with words and gestures, the wife with bare arms, short dress and a bundle of rods, standing rampant over the prostrate form of a drunken husband.

Now, amongst other my multitudinous authorial projects, this perhaps is not the worst; namely, by a series of dissimilar novels, psychological rather than religious, and for interest's sake laid in diverse ages and countries, to illustrate separately the most rampant errors of the Papacy.

He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.

The barren spot made by the bomb was covered; the whole mass of vegetation, thousands of square miles of it, was animated by a surging new vigor, so that eastward and southward the rampant tentacles jumped to capture and occupy great new swaths of territory.

The second heap was nearly passed in the same way, when Harry, who was first, stepped nimbly back and caught hold of the handkerchief that held Dick, who, seeing that something exciting was going on, immediately became rampant, but was soon guided to a spot where a snake had nearly buried itself in the rotten straw, and lay with about nine inches of its tail exposed, after the fashion of an ostrich, which supposes that if its head is hidden it must be all right and safe.

In Vanity Fair he still makes merciless war upon the poor paltry snob, whom one must suppose to have infested English society of that day in a very rampant form; though unless we have had great changes for the better in the last fifty years, one might suspect exaggeration.

Hungry Little Dagon, tied up in the barn, could hardly have noted with eyes or ears the direction in which his mother had been driven away; but as soon as we were out at the barn doors, instead of rushing to the other barn, where he had hitherto found his mother night and morning, the rampant little beast headed straight past the house and down the lane to take the road for the village.

Having established his position satisfactorily, he instantly plunged his still rampant champion into my rear, producing in me the most rapturous sensations, which soon caused me in conjunction with Laura to die away in bliss before he was ready to join our sacrifice.

Then, with some difficulty disengaging myself from the link that bound us together, I wiped the ruby head of the still rampant champion, and stooping down, first kissed it and then his lips as he still lay reclining in the chair and then proceeded to arrange my dress.

Not the shake of an ear, not the tip of a tail, overpasses this appointed line, through a series of some five-and-twenty or thirty animals; until, on a sudden, and by mutual consent, two little beasts (not looking, for the rest, more rampant than the others), one on each side, lay their small paws across the enclosing fillet at exactly the same point of its course, and thus break the continuity of its line.

Nay, some very rampant theorists of some ethnological schools try to pierce Moses and his abettors with both horns of the dilemma at once, maintaining that men may be of different species, and yet may have existed for an enormous length of time as well.

For thirty years after the Civil War the creed of mere materialism was rampant in both American politics and American business, and many, many strong men, in accordance with the prevailing commercial and political morality, did things for which they deserve blame and condemnation; but if they now sincerely change, and strive for better things, it is unwise and unjust to bar them from fellowship.

Rocks, level sands, sky, sun, fade away; a misty whirl of the sea embraces him, shot with the jewelled lightnings of swift living creatures, with trains of resplendent shapes imperfectly glimpsed, with rampant bulks veiled in the foam of their strength.

Ingenious immorality and the extravagance of luxury were no doubt rampant in the last century of the Republic and in the first century of the Empire, and their enormity has been heightened by the perverted and often prurient literary skill with which the orgies of voluptuous caprice have been painted to the last loathsome details.

Then, rampant and muddy, it hurled itself forward, melting the snow as it went, and pouring over a high bank of the river, plunged in with tumultuous violence, making the deeper and slower stream swell, and eddy, and fume for a whole minute as it swallowed up the noisy affair.

And there, a few miles to the west, where you see that tracery of wheels and scaffolding against the sun, and there, a few miles to the north, where you see that pall of smoke upon the air, there lie hundreds and hundreds of cottages where gross luxury is rampant, where beneath one roof family incomes of ten times mine are free from any tax at all.

Reason is a harmony; and it has been reputed by egotistical philosophers to rule the world (in which unreason of every sort is fundamental and rampant), because when harmony between men and nature supervenes at any place or in any measure, the world becomes intelligible and safe, and philosophers are able to live in it.

In a blaze of hatred, I told myself that if ever the brute could be seen rampant in human beings' faces there it was, rampant, uncontrolled, unashamed, only just escaping from being degraded by the accompanying expressions of burning arrogance, and indomitable determination that blazed out of those hundreds of blue Teutonic eyes.

Day after day, he went striding into the kraal whence, after a skirmish which was more or less prolonged, he emerged astride a mount which, with shrieking voice and rampant hoofs, gave notice to all that such a liberty could not be permitted.

The misgovernment and lack of high statesmanship of the earl of Leicester had caused faction to be rampant in the United Provinces; and on his return to England he left the country without organized forces or experienced generals to oppose an advance of a veteran army under the greatest commander of his time.

The vague and inconclusive style of reasoning against which Dante contends is still rampant everywhere, though its forms have changed; while the firm grasp of scientific method and the incisive reasoning of Dante himself are still the exception in spite of all our modern training in research.

Fanaticism, no longer rampant, would hide itself in the darkest recesses of the forest; while pure and genuine religion would be the comfort of the weary emigrant, and the faithful guide of the fifty millions who, doubtless, before another century, will occupy the valley of the Mississippi.

Knitting portentous brows, sedulously he reconsidered the manuscript at length; then with a groan put it aside, ran fingers through his hair till it rose rampant, and sat scowling darkly at the wall, groping blindly and vainly for the lost ends of that snapped thread of enthusiasm.

Having been accustomed to life in a country where the Indians were rampant, and where the wise man on awakening looked about him before stirring, I opened my eyes without moving, and there, standing directly on my breast, looking me squarely in the face, was a skunk, with its nose not, I swear, six inches from my own.

This founder of the Ming sent an embassy to Japan to announce the inauguration of his line and to secure the coast of his empire from inroads and pillage by Japanese pirates, who, since several centuries, had been ravaging the Korean and then the Chinese coast, and became especially rampant during the civil war, being let loose by the unexampled lawless state of our country.

It is also considered desirable that the roots of the stock should be small and fibrous, and not long, naked, and straggling; the former will furnish the crude sap in more limited amounts, and are less likely to produce an excessively rampant or luxurious growth in the scion.

Emily started, for she was very close to him before she saw him, and her rampant thoughts led her to blush, apologize, and stammer precisely as she might have done, had her sex never advanced at all but merely remained the dominant note that they have always been.

There were no men, only great animals and immense lizards, whose skeletons may still be found embedded in rocks or frozen deep down among the Siberian marshes; for, after the period of fearful heat, when everything grew rampant, even in the very north, there came a time of equally intense cold, when every living creature perished in many parts of the world.

While barbarism and ignorance are rampant in the greater part of our country, that printing apparatus, the only agent of their dispersion, stands motionless for the want of a hand to work it and to bring forth from it the secrets of science and politics.

Our proud vessel, under the press of sail, absolutely flew over the water, haughtily tossing the rampant surges from her sides, while her bows were buried in a roaring and swirling sheet of foam, and a broad band of snow stretched far over the dark blue waste astern, showing a wake as strait as an arrow.

And after all, when a whole library of gravity has been written about a country, it is surely, allowable, in an age when fun is so rampant that even history is strained into burlesque, to write of it gaily, and place a setting of amusement round facts that would otherwise hardly obtain perusal.

The order thus imposed lasted twenty-four years, until a military revolution placed a soldier of fortune, half Armenian, half Persian, named Leo, on the throne; he, like his soldiers, was persuaded that the ill-success of the Roman arms against Bulgarians and other invaders was due to the idolatry rampant at court and elsewhere.

Policemen were neither ornamental nor useful, city detectives were employed by gamblers to hustle the fleeced stranger out of town, the mayor, the sheriff and who knows who else were in league with gamblers and thieves, while vice was everywhere rampant and did not even have to defy the law for there was no law.

He looked into her face, and while the woman did not recognize him, he did her, and in the excitement of the carnage that was rampant, he dropped his tomahawk and led the woman and her children to a corner of the fort, and took a position of defense in their behalf.

Early heraldry, however, when the various positions came into recognized use, soon sought to impose this definite distinction, that the lion could only be depicted erect in the rampant position, and that an animal represented to be walking must therefore be a leopard from the very position which it occupied.

The artistic evolution of the lion rampant can be readily traced in the examples and explanations which follow, but, as will be understood, the employment in the case of some of these models cannot strictly be said to be confined within a certain number of years, though the details and periods given are roughly accurate, and sufficiently so to typify the changes which have occurred.

The more serious the people, and the more prominent the religious side in it, the greater is the danger of this side, if set to choose out forms for itself and fight for existence, swelling and spreading till it swallows all other spiritual sides up, intercepts and absorbs all nutriment which should have gone to them, and leaves Hebraism rampant in us and Hellenism stamped out.

The house, furnished just as they had left it, was for sale, but the years went by, and no buyer appeared; and meantime the garden flowers ran wild, the lawns were dry and brown, and the fence was smothered in coarse rose vines and rampant wild blackberry vines.

This cat is lying on a faded hearthrug, in which once upon a time a rampant lion reigned in brilliant colors; and she is not at all disturbed by the thought that a cat lying full-length upon a lion, with his tongue hanging out, is an anomaly in nature and a parody in art.

In this sumptuous and gorgeous chamber, with its marble-pillared doorways, its painted and gilded walls, its niches, brackets, slabs, and pediments of white marble, its gilt antique statues, its gaudy domed ceiling of blue and gold, we have the very acme and essence of the style and art of William Kent, triumphant and rampant.

Instead of fortitude, the baser instincts and a thirst for self-preservation are rampant.

I thought it too cruel, after our long drive, to expect him to retranslate for my benefit, but then there came a faint suspicion in my mind, from a troubled expression on his face, when the guide launched into the deep waters of Venezuelan history, with Bolivar rampant and the Spaniards fleeing, that, possibly, it was not all clear sailing; that, possibly, this was just the occasion for the last of my phrases.

And though during his later life he has retracted much and softened more of what he said in those years of rampant masculine rebellion, he continues to this day to regard women as an intermediary biological form, standing between the man and the child.

The southern provinces could still furnish men of experience and wisdom, but it was less because the so-called sectionalism was still rampant than because these men, who possessed the prestige of service and age, could not well be replaced by the less experienced men of other localities.

Yet the world goes on, gaping and wondering at its monotonous mediocrity, while seven-eighths of its energy is being exhausted in repairing the consequences of the genius of its blunderers, who somehow are generally and everywhere in power, and rampant.

Into these filthy dens, where misery stalked rampant and corruption festered, unhappy prisoners brought their families, and the population was greatly increased by numbers of innocent persons, women, and even children, to be speedily demoralized and utterly lost.

To those who think it, this fine monument is the symbol of the new life rampant over a buried past, for it stands on the legendary playground of the giants, who laid waste the whole district, and heaped the bones of their victims, pile upon pile, until the headland rose majestic.

In every broad thoroughfare, and in every close alley, there was drunkenness abroad; not shamefaced drunkenness, creeping in maudlin helplessness to its home by the side of the scolding wife, but rampant, insolent, outrageous drunkenness.

Such a dispassionate observer will perceive that, while many other gigantic evils were rampant in this age, there prevailed a sort of epidemic fashion of selecting this one upon which to exhaust the virtuous indignation and sympathies of the professed friends of human amelioration.

Cromwell, the brave and handsome, who went gliding between the stones, bore on blue, a white lion rampant, double-tailed, and crowned with gold; but think not that he brought it away, or that it was not bruised, so much was it battered and defaced by stones before he retreated.

Seals also occur shaped entirely like a heater shield; with a similar shield in the center containing the arms, as in that of Matthew Fitz John, where the three lions rampant appear, while the space beyond is filled up with the inscribed name of the owner.

Lace forms her huge collar and her pendent lappets, and tightly round her throat sits a lace ruffle; an audacious feather stands rampant on top of her crown, and beneath this is a cap bordered with jewels, curved at one side to allow a good view of her curled head, where the flat cap of jewels holds a golden pendant in the center of her forehead.

It's not pleasant to come home and find one's housekeeper in hysterics, Molly half off her head with excitement, yourself capering about like a lad of ten, the cat rampant and distracted, the kitchen turned into a menagerie, and pieces of my best china flying about like shells in a bombardment.

The Baron, drawing out a private key, unlocked the casket, raised the lid, and produced a golden goblet of a singular and antique appearance, molded into the shape of a rampant bear, which the owner regarded with a look of mingled reverence, pride, and delight, that irresistibly reminded Waverley of Ben Jonson's Tom Otter, with his Bull, Horse, and Dog, as that wag wittily denominated his chief carousing cups.

It is the experience of mankind that reaction accompanied by remorse, ever follows close upon the heels of rampant fury; that generosity and clemency, however fiercely the infuriated storms had lashed them into savage atrocity, will seek and find again their unruffled calm.

And of course there are still dangers in the world: rampant arms proliferation, bitter regional conflicts, ethnic and nationalist tensions in many new democracies, severe environmental degradation the world over, and fanatics who seek to cripple the world's cities with terror.

She passed down broad paths and narrow ones, sometimes walking under trees, sometimes pushing her way between encroaching shrubs; she descended delightful mossy and broken steps and came upon dilapidated urns, in which weeds grew instead of flowers, and over which rampant but lovely, savage little creepers clambered and clung.

Cruelty was so rampant there, and there was so close an alliance with barbarian nations, that a plan was sketched out for a proscription not of persons but of whole classes; and everybody had made up their minds that the property of you all was to be the prize of his victory.

It had massive doors behind a row of highly polished steel gates, which would prove as useful in case of attempted invasion as they were now ornamental, and heavily barred windows, while on either side of the portico were great marble columns hung with chains and surmounted with bronze lions rampant.

Most boys after a careful introduction to the life of the age of Queen Anne and the curious characters of Swift, Steele, Addison and Defoe, appreciate quickly the beauties of the Spectator, and are only too glad as a weekly essay to interpolate a paper on some foible rampant in that school.

By copying this legion of hydras, gorgons, and chimeras dire, he attained an early taste for the ridiculous; and in the grotesque countenance of a baboon or a bear, the cunning eye of a fox, or the fierce front of a rampant lion, traced the characteristic varieties of the human physiognomy.

In the case of the father this idea of duty had crystallized in a strangely literal belief in the Deity and expressed itself with rampant boastfulness at the very discomforts of a faith which, like the worship of Juggernaut, demanded untold sacrifices and apparently gave nothing in return.

Well, I am afraid the modern triumph, such as it is, is pictured for us in the rampant poster, which pursues us in and out of stations, up and down streets, and even along the railway lines, which last vantage ground hitherto has been the prerogative of our American cousins.

He was prevented, however, by the continual objections and disputes of the experts whose advice was called in about it, from finishing the work, and the ornate construction of rampant arches and pinnacles and central spire which surmounts it belongs to the eighteenth century.

What a woman wants most of all is children; motherhood is the ideal, and the unmarried woman with a child is a far more enviable person than the married woman without, and even in this land, where motherhood is everything, there was in every household that I visited an unhappy woman without children, because vice has been rampant along the Coast for hundreds of years.

If the time ever comes when everyone realizes that the law is more clever than the individual, that justice is rampant and will not be denied, and that punishment follows an undiscovered crime as surely as if it were discovered, then indeed humanity may shrink from committing lawless acts.

He tells us that this was the finest of all the great fleet that had been brought into being at that yard up to this date: how, decked with flags from stem to stern, with the sun glinting brightly on the rampant crimson lion that towered proudly on high from her stem, she glided down the way amid the thunder of cannon and the cheers of the spectators.

To account for the existence of insanity by an assumed basis for it in the 'insane neurosis,' or to attribute the sleep which follows a dose of opium to the soporific virtues of the drug, are some exaggerated examples of the metaphysical intellect which is so rampant in much of our popular, and even of our esoteric science.

He went out, fuming at the nostrils, leaving me wondering if he would send a subordinate to place me under arrest, but abuse of authority had become so rampant that I would have been willing to explore the interior of a Brazilian prison to bring the matter to a head.

When I can see growing youths, surrounded by sordid misery and rampant vice, working on in poverty, withstanding every temptation to self-indulgence, framing no pictures till they can pay for them, whose artistic souls do not lead them to despise honest labor, whose poetic temperaments do not lead them to idleness and debt, when they are not ashamed of their boot-machining mother, I recognize them as heroes, and I don't care a rap whether they become great artists or not.

The assembled multitude of voices, the tearing and cutting down of branches of trees, crackling of fires, rattling of canteens, shooting of bullocks through the head, and the hurrying of parties of soldiers for rum and biscuit for rations, the neighing of horses, braying asses and rampant mules, all resounded throughout the forest, giving new life and merry echoes to its most intimate recesses.

It is but just to these distant people, however, to say that never was cannibalism rampant among them, as was true of the occupants of the neighboring isles; and it is equally pleasant to know that, ornaments of the human person, either as charms or necklaces, made of human teeth, have lost their former popularity.

The vine sorts are such rampant growers that they require a garden to themselves or at least a walled enclosure, but they are very profitable to grow as they produce enormously, and the fruit is excellent fried like eggplant; few, if any, persons would be able to distinguish between them and the difference, if any, would be in favor of the marrow.

There were still some who spoke with disapproval of the favoritism which displaced a veteran and put a young boy like Poole into an important field; but among this small number the generally rampant patriotism proved too strong for personal prejudice.

It is very well known, to those conversant with the nursery business, that great growers and early growers are the favorites (and, so far as an expeditious preparation of stock for sale is concerned, justly), that slow and tedious growers are put upon rampant growing stocks to quicken them.