benevolent
adjective
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Benevolent Has a Good History
One who is benevolent genuinely wishes other people well, a meaning reflected clearly in the word's Latin roots: benevolent comes from bene, meaning "good," and velle, meaning "to wish." Other descendants of velle in English include volition, which refers to the power to make one's own choices or decisions, and voluntary, as well as the rare velleity, meaning either "the lowest degree of volition" or "a slight wish or tendency." A more familiar velle descendant stands directly opposed to benevolent: malevolent describes someone or something having or showing a desire to cause harm to another person.
Examples of benevolent in a Sentence
Sebastian Junger, This Old House, March/April 1998
Grandfather sometimes turned on us like a rigged trap, and of course the benevolent gaze of the sage became the glare of the patriarch.
—Darryl Pinckney, High Cotton, 1992
A Southern writer is allowed his eccentricities. The prevailing attitude is a kind of benevolent neglect.
—Walker Percy, "Why I Live Where I Live," 1980,
in Signposts in a Strange Land, 1991
They tore out the windows of the club's simple storefront and bricked them over and left two much smaller windows … so that the look of the club changed from that of a benevolent neighborhood organization to that of a paramilitary one.
—"The Talk of the Town,"
New Yorker, 26 Feb. 1990
a gift from a benevolent donor
He belonged to several benevolent societies and charitable organizations.
Rebecca Rubin, Variety, 9 June 2025
We Christians are sometimes tempted to consider the commitment to love our neighbor in sentimental ways, as a warm feeling in the heart, but nothing more binding than benevolent feelings toward another.
—Rick Fry, San Diego Union-Tribune, 3 June 2025
Erwitt, who died in 2023, at 95, was known for his photographs of benevolent irony.
—Air Mail, 31 May 2025
Elsewhere, organised crime still has its tendrils in many parts of the sport across the globe, and the misty-eyed reverence for benevolent local tycoons is a notion that went extinct before the Tasmanian tiger.
—Jacob Whitehead, New York Times, 2 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for benevolent
Cite this Entry
“Benevolent.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/benevolent. Accessed 18 Jun. 2025.
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benevolent
adjective
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