Word Finder - definitions

definition

A statement of the meaning of a word or word group or a sign or symbol (dictionary definitions).

definition

(usually with the definite article the) A clear instance conforming to the dictionary or textbook definition.

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A statement expressing the essential nature of something; formulation

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The action or process of defining.

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The act of defining; determination of the limits.

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A product of defining.

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The action or power of describing, explaining, or making definite and clear.

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Her comic genius is beyond definition.

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Clarity of visual presentation, distinctness of outline or detail.

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Improve the definition of an image.

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Clarity, especially of musical sound in reproduction.

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Sharp demarcation of outlines or limits.

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A jacket with distinct waist definition.

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The degree to which individual muscles are distinct on the body.

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A statement which provides a previous declaration with a value or body of a subroutine (in the case of function).

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A statement that establishes the referent of a term or notation.

It may truly be said that the ideas for which Nestorius and the Antiochene school strove "won the day as regards the doctrinal definitions of the church.

The arithmetic of real numbers follows from appropriate definitions of the operations of addition and multiplication.

But an indefinite number of definitions of the product of two complex numbers yield interesting results.

Mention is also made of a work by Clement on the Prophet Amos, and another on Definitions.

The second includes definitions of technical terms in common use, together with so much of the elementary theory as is necessary for understanding the experimental work described in subsequent portions of the article; a number of formulae and results are given for purposes of reference, but the mathematical reasoning by which they are obtained is not generally detailed, authorities being cited whenever the demonstrations are not likely to be found in ordinary textbooks.

To say, for instance, that X is equal to A -B, is the same thing as to say that X is a quantity such that X and B, when added, make up A; and the above five statements of necessary connexion between two statements of equality are in fact nothing more than definitions of the symbols -, m of, =,, and loga.

They are (a+b)-?-c=a+(b+c) (A) (aXb)Xc=aX(bXc) (A') a+b=b+a (c) aXb=bXa (c') a(b c) =ab-Fac (D) (a - b)+b=a (I) (a=b)Xb=a (I') These formulae express the associative and commutative laws of the operations + and X, the distributive law of X, and the definitions of the inverse symbols - and =, which are assumed to be unambiguous.

Tumours Or New Growths The various definitions of the term " new growth " leave us with a definite conception of it as a new formation of tissue which appears to originate and to grow independently.

The province of reverent theology is to aid accurate thinking by the use of metaphysical or psychological terms. Its definitions are no more an end in themselves than an analysis of good drinking water, which by itself leaves us thirsty but encourages us to drink.

In later memoirs Reynolds followed up this subject by proceeding to establish definitions of the velocity and the momentum and the energy at an element of volume of the molecular medium, with the precision necessary in order that the dynamical equations of the medium in bulk, based in the usual manner on these quantities alone, without directly considering thermal stresses, shall be strictly valid - a discussion in which the relation of ordinary molar mechanics to the more complete molecular theory is involved.

The sciences, for example, all seek to define their own species; dialectic, on the other hand, sets forth the conditions which all definitions must satisfy whatever their subject matter.

Andrewes declares against the invocation of saints, the apparent examples in patristic literature are "rhetorical outbursts, not theological definitions."

The new view of faith is bracketed with the old, and practically neutralized by it; as was already the case in Melanchthon's theological definitions in the 1552-1553 edition of Loci Communes, also printed in other works by him.

Finally we have to glance at a new list of definitions which perhaps in some cases seek more or less to formulate modern Protestant ideas, but which in general represent rather the world of disinterested historical scholarship.

That world of the learned offers us non-dogmatic definitions, drawn up from the outside; definitions which do not share the root assumptions either of Catholicism or of post-Reformation Protestant orthodoxy.

Hence Catholic, and scientific or historical, definitions of dogma are on different planes.

Its meaning varies (a) according to the various definitions of deity, and especially (b) according as it is (i.) deliberately adopted by a thinker as a description of his own theological standpoint, or (ii.) applied by one set of thinkers to their opponents.

Many of these definitions describe an ideal state of things rather than realities.

Some of the definitions would apply to the authority of powerful religious bodies in certain periods of history, or of illegal associations, such as the Mafia, which have terrorized the community.

Being called upon to arrange the plants in the garden, he necessarily had to consider the best method of doing so, and, following the lines already suggested by his uncle, adopted a system founded in a certain degree on that of Ray, in which he embraced all the discoveries in organography, adopted the simplicity of the Linnean definitions, and displayed the natural affinities of plants.

The anathema of the Roman Church had fallen upon all the fundamental doctrines for which the Reformers had contended and died; the right of free discussion within the limits of the creeds, which had given room for the speculations of the medieval philosophers, was henceforth curtailed and confined; and the definitions of the schoolmen were for ever exalted by the authority of Rome into dogmas of the Church.

The class is divisible into two main divisions or sub-classes, Hydromedusae and Scyphornedusae, of which definitions and detailed systematic accounts will be found under these headings.

The definitions of the logarithmic and exponential functions may be extended to complex values of x.

Out of this mist of contradictions scholastic thought strove to emerge by means of clear-cut definitions.

In the succeeding three definitions the centre, diameter and the semicircle are defined, while the third postulate of the same book demands the possibility of describing a circle for every " centre " and " distance."

He appears to have joined the Homoean party, which took shape and acquired influence before the council of Constantinople in 360, where he adhered with the rest of the council to the creed of Ariminum, with the addendum that in future the terms inroTTao-cs and oucla should be excluded from Christological definitions.

According to Proclus an angle must be either a quality or a quantity, or a relationship. The first concept was utilized by Eudemus, who regarded an angle as a deviation from a straight line; the second by Carpus of Antioch, who regarded it as the interval or space between the intersecting lines; Euclid adopted the third concept, although his definitions of right, acute, and obtuse angles are certainly quantitative.

It is an elementary introduction to the study of Hebrew, the first of its kind, in which only the most indispensable definitions and rules have a place, the remainder being almost wholly occupied by paradigms. Moses Kimhi was the first who made the verb paqadh a model for conjugation, and the first also who introduced the now usual sequence in the enumeration of stem-forms. His handbook was of great historical importance as in the first half of the 6th century it became the favourite manual for the study of Hebrew among non-Judaic scholars (1st ed., Pesaro, 1508).

He attached no value to mere scholarship; scholastic disputations he utterly ignored and despised - and especially the discussions on medical topics, which turned more upon theories and definitions than upon actual practice.

Besides his great work, Malthus wrote Observations on the Effect of the Corn Laws; An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent; Principles of Political Economy; and Definitions in Political Economy.

During the seven years which he passed in the drudgery of penning definitions and marking quotations for transcription, he sought for relaxation in literary labour of a more agreeable kind.

The definitions show so much acuteness of thought and command of language, and the passages quoted from poets, divines and philosophers are so skilfully selected, that a leisure hour may always be very agreeably spent in turning over the pages.

It seemed unlikely that the author of these definitions would himself be pensioned.

He was absent from the important sitting of the 18th of June 1870, and did not send in his submission to the decrees until 1871, when he explained in a pastoral letter that the dogma "referred only to doctrine given forth ex cathedra, and therein to the definitions proper duly, but not to its proofs or explanations."

The difference between the two definitions, however, is of small practical concern.

He is variously styled Byzantinus, Hierosolymitanus (as an inmate of the monastery of St Saba near Jerusalem) and Scholasticus (the first "schoolman," as the introducer of the Aristotelian definitions into theology; according to others, he had been an advocate, a special meaning of the word scholasticus).

Thus the first and second definitions represent the founders of the sophistry of culture, Protagoras and Prodicus, from the respective points of view of the older Athenians, who disliked the new culture, and the younger Athenians, who admired it; the third and fourth definitions represent imitators to whom the note of itinerancy was not applicable; the fifth definition represents the earlier eristics, contemporaries of Socrates, whom it was necessary to distinguish from the teachers of forensic oratory; the sixth is framed to meet the anomalous case of Socrates, in whom many saw the typical sophist, though Plato conceives this view to be unfortunate; and the seventh and final definition, having in view eristical sophistry fully developed, distinguishes it from SfµoXoyuci, i.e.

The first four definitions represent the period of Protagoras, Prodicus, and their immediate successors, when the object sought was " virtue," " excellence," " culture," and the means to it was literature.

The fifth and sixth definitions represent the close of the 5th century, when sophistry handled eristically, and perhaps, though Plato demurs to the inclusion, dialectically, questions of justice, injustice and the like, Su

The two definitions are identical, provided that the thermal capacity of unit mass of water, at a standard temperature, is taken as the unit of heat.

Among the dialecticians, Socrates had used inductive arguments to obtain definitions as data of deductive arguments against his opponents, and Plato had insisted on the processes of ascending to and descending from an unconditional principle by the power of giving and receiving argument.

Erdmann propose new moods of syllogism with convertible premises, containing definitions and equations.

Much of the Principia consists of synthetical deductions from definitions and axioms. But the discovery of the centripetal force of the planets to the sun is an analytic deduction from the facts of their motion discovered by Kepler to their real ground, and is so stated by Newton in the first regressive order of Aristotle - P-M, S-P, S-M.

The ideal of science or demonstrative knowledge is to exhibit as flowing from the definitions and postulates of a science, from its special principles, by the help only of axioms or principles common to all knowledge, and these not as premises but as guiding rules, all the properties of the subject-matter, i.e.

Where they are not derivative they clearly are definitions or immediate transcripts from definitions.

There remain, then, primary definitions and the postulates of their realization, and the axioms or common principles, " which he must needs have who is to reach any knowledge."

Spinoza's philosophy is expounded ordine geometrico and with Euclidean cogency from a relatively small number of definitions, axioms and postulates.

The philosophies which are " redargued " are divided into three classes, the sophistical, of which the best example is Aristotle, who, according to Bacon, forces nature into his abstract schemata and thinks to explain by definitions; the empirical, which from few and limited experiments leaps at once to general conclusions; and the superstitious, which corrupts philosophy by the introduction of poetical and theological notions.

Amongst the numberless definitions of religion that have been suggested, those that have been most frequently adopted for working purposes by anthropologists are Tylor's and Frazer's.

Such definitions, then, are to be accepted, if at all, as definitions of type, selective designations of leading but not strictly universal features.