malice implies a deep-seated often unexplainable desire to see another suffer.
felt no malice toward their former enemies
malevolence suggests a bitter persistent hatred that is likely to be expressed in malicious conduct.
a look of dark malevolence
ill will implies a feeling of antipathy of limited duration.
ill will provoked by a careless remark
spite implies petty feelings of envy and resentment that are often expressed in small harassments.
petty insults inspired by spite
malignity implies deep passion and relentlessness.
a life consumed by motiveless malignity
spleen suggests the wrathful release of latent spite or persistent malice.
venting his spleen against politicians
grudge implies a harbored feeling of resentment or ill will that seeks satisfaction.
never one to harbor a grudge
Examples of malignity in a Sentence
one of the characters in the novel is a dictator of such malignity that he came to be one of the most famous villains in all of literature
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His Cyrano is the play’s hero, even if the character’s psychological limitations are as much a factor in the story as the machinations of De Guiche, whose malignity is sent up in Nathanson’s flamboyantly comic turn.—Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, 10 Sep. 2024 For a decade, the central drama of Trumpism has concerned the Republican élites who continued to support him—the story has been about their malignity, or opportunism, or willful moral blindness.—Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker, 16 Sep. 2023 Though Bilger does not quite say so, his grandfather emerges as a case study in the capacity for compartmentalization that is arguably more destructive of morality than outright malignity.—Fintan O’Toole, The New York Review of Books, 20 July 2023 In a landscape of such confused malignity as capital-p Publishing, who actually suffers from an act like June’s?—Zoe Hu, Washington Post, 12 May 2023 American exceptionalism has two faces, equally transfixed with a sense of specialness—one radiant with the nation’s unique beneficence, the other sunk in its unrivaled malignity.—George Packer, The Atlantic, 21 Nov. 2022 Modernist malignity has long been a topic of discussion in architectural circles.—Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 27 Oct. 2022 Where Moyn is driven by a photonegative of American exceptionalism—a sense that American power is a singular force of malignity in the world—Arkin is concerned that this perpetual-war machine is at odds with America’s strategic interests.—Dexter Filkins, The New Yorker, 6 Sep. 2021 Decades of miserable history had to pass before the comedy buried within their malignity was revealed, like a vein of ore uncovered by a natural catastrophe.—Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, 19 Aug. 2019
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