Word Finder - customs

definition

(in the plural) The duties or taxes imposed on imported or exported goods.

example

Customs of £200 were due on all the wine we took back from France.

definition

(in the singular) The government department or agency that is authorised to collect the taxes imposed on imported goods.

example

Customs has pulled us over on our way for an inspection.

I came to learn the customs of your people.

Similar customs seem to have existed among the Italian races.

From the date when Mr Hart took up his duties at Peking, in 1863, he unceasingly devoted the whole of his energies to the work of the department, with the result that the revenue grew from upwards of eight million taels to nearly twenty-seven million, collected at the thirty-two treaty ports, and the customs staff, which in 1864 numbered 200, reached in 1901 a total of 57 0 4.

There are other special customs recognized in various localities, e.g.

Taxation laws must deal with only one subject of taxation; but customs and excise duties may, respectively, be dealt with together.

Representatives of their race are also found scattered among the Malayan villages throughout the country, and also along the coast, but these have intermixed so much with the Malays, and have acquired so many customs, &c., from their more civilized neighbours, that they can no longer be regarded as typical of the race to which they belong.

Under the Constitution Act the Commonwealth is given the control of the postal and telegraph departments, public defence and several other services, as well as the power of levying customs and excise duties; its powers of taxation are unrestricted, but so far no taxes Dave been imposed other than those just mentioned.

The Domesday Survey contains a long account of the laws, customs and values of the salt-works at that period, which were by far the most profitable in Cheshire.

The commerce on Lake Champlain is carried on chiefly through Burlington, the port of entry for the Vermont customs district.

So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old.

Within two years uniform customs duties were to be imposed; thereafter the parliament of the Commonwealth had exclusive power to impose customs and excise duties, or to grant bounties; and trade within the Commonwealth was to be absolutely free.

The customs service includes British customs officers lent to the Liberian service.

He was a priest of the Jerusalem temple, probably a member of the dominant house of Zadok, and doubtless had the literary training of the cultivated priesthood of the time, including acquaintance with the national historical, legal and ritual traditions and with the contemporary history and customs of neighbouring peoples.

A merchant named Cony refused to pay customs not imposed by parliament, his counsel declaring their levy by ordinance to be contrary to Magna Carta, and Chief Justice Rolle resigning in order to avoid giving judgment.

In the first the plebeians strive to obtain relief from laws and customs which were actually oppressive to them, while they were profitable to the patricians.

In the ordinary tribunals weight is given to the " customs " of the peasants, even when these conflict with the written law.

Not so with the national customs. There are features - the wooden house, the oven, the bath - which the Russian never abandons, even when swamped in an alien population.

Numerous foreigners had been allowed to settle in Moscow and to build for themselves a heretical church, and their strange unholy customs had been adopted by not a few courtiers and great dignitaries.

The situation was conducive to the spread of foreign customs, and the condemnation passed upon Manasseh thus perhaps becomes more significant.

So inefficient, indeed, were the reforms as a whole, and so unsuited to the national character and customs, that the Slavophil critics of a later date could maintain plausibly the paradoxical thesis that in regard to internal administration Peter was anything but a national benefactor.

Finnish diet ought to refer to the imperial legislature not only all military matters - as the tsar demanded (Rescript of October 14) - but the question of the use of the Russian language in the grand-duchy, the principles of the Finnish administration, police, justice, education, formation of business companies and of associations, public meetings, the press, the customs tariff, the monetary system, means of communication, and the pilot and lighthouse system.

In these statistics, the third item, " other persons," includes post office and customs officials and other persons connected with the railway service, as well as railway officers and servants off duty.

In the annual "customs" of Dahomey, now abolished, hundreds of human victims were offered.

The world could only be christianized on condition that old holy days and customs were continued.

It contains a mass of information as to the life and customs of the early Arabs, and is the most valuable authority we have for their pre-Islamic and early Moslem days.

His grandfather was a man of ability, an enterprising merchant of London, one of the commissioners of customs under the Tory ministry during the last four years of Queen Anne, and, in the judgment of Lord Bolingbroke, as deeply versed in the " commerce and finances of England " as any man of his time.

This was a departure from the customs of the age, and was perhaps influenced less by generosity than by expediency.

At a time when all nationalities, and at the same time all bonds of religion and national customs, were beginning to be broken up in the seeming cosmos and real chaos of the Graeco-Roman Empire, the Jews stood out like a rock in the midst of the ocean.

Further, as confederates of the senate and people of Rome, the Jews had received accession of territory, including the port of Joppa and, with other material privileges, the right of observing their religious customs not only in Palestine but also in Alexandria and elsewhere.

Various customs, traditions and names of places also point to a former relation with Fiji.

The mode of election to the assembly was altered, the number of its members reduced, and the customs revenue, which had hitherto been shared with the island, was appropriated by the Turkish treasury.

The case was tried in 1329 and decided against Lymington, but in 1750 the judgment was reversed, and since then the petty customs have been regularly paid.

The Gulfport project reduced freight rates between Gulfport and the Atlantic seaboard cities and promoted the trade of Gulfport, which is the port of entry for the Pearl River customs district.

Ethnographers have traced a connexion between the Turkoman of central Asia and the Teutonic races of Europe, based on a similarity of national customs and immemorial usage.

Korea received its civilization and religion from China, but differs in language, and to some extent in customs. An alphabet derived from Indian sources is in use as well as Chinese writing.

The Parthians appear to have been a Turanian tribe who had adopted many Persian customs. They successfully withstood the Romans, and at one time their power extended from India to Syria.

The restored state of Jerusalem lived for about six centuries in partial independence under Persian, Egyptian, Syrian and Roman rule, often showing an aggressively heroic attachment to its national customs, which brought it into collision with its suzerains, until the temple was destroyed by Titus in A.D.

He saw also that much of the inefficiency of the Assembly arose from the inexperience of the members and their incurable verbosity; so, to establish some system of rules, he got his friend Romilly to draw up a detailed account of the rules and customs of the English House of Commons, which he translated into French, but which the Assembly, puffed up by a belief in its own merits, refused to use.

The chief buildings are that containing the town hall and the grammar school (a foundation of 1547), the exchange, a theatre, and the customs house and dock offices.

He demanded the reform of the taille, the suppression of internal customs duties and greater freedom of trade.

But his proposal to substitute for all aides and customs duties a single capitation tax of a tenth of the revenue of all property was naturally opposed by the farmers of taxes and found little support.

Derbyshire probably originated as a shire in the time of ZEthelstan, but for long it maintained a very close connexion with Nottinghamshire, and the Domesday Survey gives a list of local customs affecting the two counties alike.

From its remote position Carpathus has preserved many peculiarities of dress, customs and dialect, the last resembling those of Rhodes and Cyprus.

Copious extracts from a diary kept by him at this time are given by Bain; they show how methodically he read and wrote, studied chemistry and botany, tackled advanced mathematical problems, made notes on the scenery and the people and customs of the country.

From this oppressive feeling he found relief in the thought set forth in the opening of the second book of his Political Economy - that, while the conditions of production have the necessity of physical laws, the distribution of what is produced among the various classes of producers is a matter of human arrangement, dependent upon alterable customs and institutions.

But questions of sentiment, shop-feeling and trade customs invariably play an important part.

In the old Prussian provinces alone there were fifty-three different customs frontiers, and German manufactures could not develop until the growth of the Zollverein brought with it commercial consolidation, internal freedom and greater homogeneity of economic conditions.

We cannot suppose that there occurred, at or about the commencement of the 19th century, a breach of historical continuity of such a character that institutions, customs, laws and social conventions were suddenly swept away, the bonds of society loosened, and the state and people of England dissolved into an aggregate of competing individuals.

In the case of King Louis, family quarrels embittered the relations between the two brothers; but it is clear from Napoleon's letters of November - December 1809 that he had even then resolved to annex Holland in order to gain complete control of its customs and of its naval resources.

He censured Alexander's adoption of oriental customs, inveighing especially against the servile ceremony of adoration.