Word Finder - abstention

definition

The act of restraining oneself.

definition

The act of abstaining; a holding aloof; refraining from.

definition

The act of declining to vote on a particular issue.

definition

Non-participation in the political world; as a country avoiding international affairs.

Sir George Grey found it impossible to maintain a policy of total abstention from the affairs of the republics.

Reverting to the origin and the meaning of the feast, modern criticism draws attention to the different nature of the two observances combined with the name Passover, the pastoral sacrifice of the paschal lamb and the agricultural observance of a seven days' abstention from unleavened bread.

Abstention may show antipathy to the lot of them.

So successful was their prudential abstention that no regular war occurred between Turkey and Poland during the two centuries of their sway.

With regard to the abstention from leavened bread, the inquiry is somewhat more complicated.

In principle, do you support the introduction of a system of positive abstention?

Abstention from drugs and alcohol during pregnancy may reduce risk.

The Liberal party had been out of office for eight years, the Conservative -Junimist coalition had practically carried out its complete programme, and legislation was at a deadlock owing to the abstention of the Liberal opposition.

An enormous amount of hard work will be needed from responsible commentators and politicians in the coming days to explain away the mass abstention.

This is abstaining, according to its usual definition, and it was expressly stated, so it was an express abstention.

Their political unhappiness will undoubtedly take the form of large-scale abstention at the general election.

The privation involved in abstention from the flesh of the swine, a taboo hardly less widespread, is obvious.

The Babylonian calendars contain explicit directions for the observance of abstention from certain secular acts on certain days which forms a close parallel to the Jewish Sabbatical rules.

If the Sabbath involved abstention from all such business as recorded in dated documents and always fell on these days, then the 7th, &c., should show a marked falling off in the number of dated documents.

Owing to the forced abstention from agricultural labour in the winter months the peasants of central Russia, more especially those of the governments of Moscow, Vladimir, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Tver, Smolensk and Ryazan have for centuries carried on a variety of domestic handicrafts during the period of compulsory leisure.

Sir George Gray found it impossible to maintain a policy of total abstention from the affairs of the republics.

This seeming casual connexion, to some extent, confirms the historic connexion suggested by the text, that the Jews at the Exodus had to use bread prepared in haste; but not even Hebrew tradition attempts to explain why the abstention should last for seven days.

But in spite of the moderation of his views and his abstention from controversy, he came under suspicion of heresy, and escaped expulsion from his office only by resignation (1619).

To force a crisis, abstention of elected members from the council was resorted to, together with the election of notoriously unfit candidates.

Frederick's first policy was one of selfish abstention, and from 1793 until 1796, when he concluded a definite treaty of neutrality with France, he limited his contribution to the war to the bare contingent due from him as a prince of the Empire.

Carthage, after a long period of abstention from intervention in Sicilian affairs, and the observance of a wise neutrality during the war between Athens and Syracuse, stepped in as the ally of Segesta, the enemy of her old ally Selinus.

Moreover it is very improbable that he could ever have shone as a public speaker, and to this fact unfriendly critics have attributed, at least in part, his abstention from debate.

In consequence of this abstention of the Venizelist electors, no Venizelist was elected, and the new Chamber consisted almost exclusively of the old politicians, whom the military revolt of 1909 had swept out of politics.

It is quite possible that shabattum and nubattum are from the same root and originally denoted much the same thing - a pause, abstention, from whatever cause or for ceremonial purposes.

A census, miserably deficient (largely owing to free-state abstention and obstruction), was the basis of apportionment of delegates.

The avoidance of wine, therefore, by Rechabites, Nazirites, Arab dervishes and Pythagoreans, and also of leaven in bread, is parallel to and explicable in the same way as abstention from flesh.