Advertisement

Advertisement

View synonyms for duty-bound

duty-bound

adjective

  1. morally obliged as a matter of duty
“Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged” 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012


Discover More

Idioms and Phrases

Obliged, as in You're duty bound to help your little brother . [c. 1900]
Discover More

Example Sentences

That we know Earp not as a confidence man but as a duty-bound law officer was his most enduring and successful confidence game.

He was duty-bound, he said, to follow the gospel of helping the least among them.

The Starks are fatalistic, duty-bound, honorable but kind of unsophisticated.

He preaches his message with characteristic urgency, casting himself as a duty-bound martyr.

McLean informed Ivins that she was duty bound to report to the authorities any homicidal threat.

Succor could not arrive, he argued, and they were in duty bound to save the surviving civilians and the women and children.

Then, as in duty bound, I knelt and kissed the hand of the king in token of homage, and he smiled at me contented.

The world takes it for granted that the wife or paramour of a man of genius is in duty bound to sacrifice herself for him.

Sethos tendered the wine-cup as in duty bound, then stood with hands crossed before him, and looks bent lowly on the earth.

Here he is supposed to have arranged it all, a belief which I vigorously combated as I believed myself in duty bound to do.

Advertisement

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement