Definition of "effete"
effete
adjective
comparative more effete, superlative most effete
(obsolete) Of substances, quantities etc: exhausted, spent, worn-out.
Quotations
Nature is not effœte, as he saith, or so lavish, to bestow all her gifts upon an age, but hath reserved some for posterity, to shew her power, that she is still the same, and not old or consumed.
1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Printed by John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, partition II, section 4, member 1, subsection v
Lacking strength or vitality; feeble, powerless, impotent.
Quotations
Amid the effete monarchies and princedoms of feudal Europe, morally and materially exhausted by the Thirty Years' War, the only hope of resistance to France lay in the little Republic of merchants, Holland.
1929, George Macaulay Trevelyan, History of England: From 1485 to the End of the Reign of Queen Anne, 1714, page 457
They used rock'n'roll as a weapon against itself. With all instruments but guitar, bass, drums, and voice written off as effete, as elitist accoutrements of a professionalist cult of technique, it was music best suited to anger and frustration, […]
1989, Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces, Faber & Faber, published 2009
Decadent, weak through self-indulgence.
Quotations
(of a person) Affected, overrefined.