Word Finder - familiarity

definition

The state of being extremely friendly; intimacy.

definition

Undue intimacy; inappropriate informality, impertinence.

definition

An instance of familiar behaviour.

definition

Close or habitual acquaintance with someone or something; understanding or recognition acquired from experience.

I am convinced that Helen's use of English is due largely to her familiarity with books.

A sense of familiarity hit her as they neared a clump of rocks.

Successful emendation requires a rare union of qualifications - insight, prudence, patience and familiarity with the author emended and the conditions of his text.

In 1772 the king's marriage with Caroline Matilda, who had been seized and had confessed to criminal familiarity with Struensee, was dissolved, and the queen, retaining her title, passed her remaining days at Celle, where she died on the 11 th of May 1775.

Whatever she found at the Peak had driven her into a forest full of insurgents despite her injury and her lack of familiarity with the forest or the world outside hers.

The style is vivid, the language elegant but comparatively simple, exhibiting familiarity with the best classical literature.

Some critics, however, hold that it is wholly Luke's own composition, and that the Hebraic style - in which he was able to write in consequence of his familiarity with the LXX.

As illustrating the rapid development of familiarity with foreign authors, a Japanese retrospect of the Meiji era notes that whereas Macaulays Esfays were ii the curriculum of the Imperial University in 1881-1882, they were studied, five or six years later, in secondary schools, and pupils of the latter were able to read with understanding the works of Goldsmith, Tennyson and Thackeray.

Here his perfect familiarity with the canon law gave him a great advantage.

The mingling of despotism and good-natured familiarity there described (and the spirit is doubtless correctly given by Josephus, whether or not his details are historical) agrees with the picture in Proverbs.

The familiarity thus acquired with military life and character stood Sterne in good stead when he drew the portraits of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim.

Struck by the familiarity of the scene, she paused as the fire reached the top of the hill.

His silence on the subject of Roman greatness and glory as contrasted with the prominence of these subjects in the poetry of men of provincial birth such as Ennius, Virgil and Horace, may be explained by the principle that familiarity had made the subject one of less wonder and novelty to him.

Presently there came walks in the long shrubbery, talks in the Belvedere, and I know not what tender familiarity.

Young children (preschool and early elementary years) do not have past experience and familiarity with tests and have limited understanding of the expectations of testing procedures.

She.d never liked her room, but she found some comfort in its familiarity.

Both women took the knives, handling them with awkwardness borne of a lack of familiarity with handling deadly weapons.

It is well known that in after years he had doubts whether he should not compose his great work in French; and it is certain that his familiarity with that language, in spite of considerable efforts to counteract its effects, tinged his style to the last.

This is a perfectly simple and straightforward operation, involving nothing more than familiarity with records and industry in going through them.

Familiarity with the sea is proved by the free use of marine motives in decoration.

His practical motto, if he is the author of the Economics attributed to him, is - " no outrage, and no familiarity."

His chief defects as a historian are want of imagination and an undignified familiarity of style, which, however, at least preserves his history from the dulness by which lack of imagination is usually accompanied.

With a curious respect for those theories his familiarity with the secret social history of France had caused him to entertain, he hoped and attempted to retain a hold over the king through the influence of Lady Yarmouth, though the futility of such means had already been demonstrated to him by his relations with Queen Caroline's "ma bonne Howard."

His father, a drysalter and dealer in colours, used sometimes to make experiments in the hope of finding improved processes for the production of his wares, and thus his son early acquired familiarity with practical chemistry.

He is acquainted with the poems of the epic cycle, the Cypria, the Epigoni, &c. He quotes or otherwise shows familiarity with the writings of Hesiod, Olen, Musaeus, Bacis, Lysistratus, Archilochus of Paros, Alcaeus, Sappho, Solon, Aesop, Aristeas of Proconnesus, Simonides of Ceos, Phrynichus, Aeschylus and Pindar.

An elder brother, who like himself was early turned out into the world to seek his own fortune, rose to command a brigade in the Mysore army, while Hyder, who never learned to read or write, passed the first years of his life aimlessly in sport and sensuality, sometimes, however, acting as the agent of his brother, and meanwhile acquiring a useful familiarity with the tactics of the French when at the height of their reputation under Dupleix.

There is no doubt that Leucas fits the Homeric descriptions much better than Ithaca; but, on the other hand, many scholars maintain that it is a mistake to treat the imaginary descriptions of a poet as if they were portions of a guide-book, or to look, in the author of the Odyssey, for a close familiarity with the geography of the Ionian islands.

Then, at the command of God, on the ninth day of the seventh month, 1643, I left my relations and broke off all familiarity or fellowship with old or young."

This is confirmed by the fact that the Book of Esther contains several Persian words and shows throughout a familiarity with Persian conditions.

Homer's familiarity with the art of tempering could come only after centuries of the wide use of iron.

The unfailing freshness and charm of the contrast between the importance, the gravity, in some cases the dry and abstruse nature, of their subjects, and the lightness, sometimes almost approaching levity in its special sense, of the manner in which these subjects are attacked is a triumph of literary art of which no familiarity dims the splendour, and which no lapse of time can ever impair.

The order of the Perpetual Edict, which appears to have been taken as a sort of model for the general scheme of books and titles, was doubtless convenient to the Roman lawyers from their familiarity with it, but was in itself rather accidental and historical than logical.

In 1819 he had begun to study German, with which he soon acquired a very remarkable familiarity.

This familiarity with the facts of art, though neither deep nor historical, gave a freshness to his lectures on aesthetics, which, as put together from the notes of 1820, 1823, 1826, are in many ways the most successful of his efforts.

Jefferson carried with him from the college of William and Mary at Williamsburg, in his twentieth year, a good knowledge of Latin, Greek and French (to which he soon added Spanish, Italian and Anglo-Saxon), and a familiarity with the higher mathematics and natural sciences only possessed, at his age, by men who have a rare natural taste and ability for those studies.

That he had a competent acquaintance with Greek is manifest from his translations of Dionysius the Areopagite and of Maximus, from the manner in which he refers to Aristotle, and from his evident familiarity with Neoplatonist writers and the fathers of the early church.

These facts point to a familiarity with the Greek colonies in Asia which contrasts strongly with the silence of the Iliad and Odyssey.

The Renaissance cannot be comprehended in its true character without familiarity with these six representatives of its manifold and many-sided inspiration.

Evidently it was his extraordinary dignity and poise, forbidding even the suggestion of familiarity, quite as much as his stature, that impressed those who knew him.

The graceful precision and dignified familiarity of the epistle are particularly attractive to the temperament of France.

As a youth, says Clarendon, " the ill-bred familiarity of the Scotch divines had given him a distaste " for Presbyterianism, which he indeed declared " no religion for gentlemen," and the mean figure which the fallen national church made in exile repelled him at the same time that he was attracted by the " genteel part of the Catholic religion."

They are the product of immediate and intimate familiarity with the life of the great city.

The knowledge of Leonardo's position among and familiarity with such men early helped to spread the idea that he had been at the head of a regularly constituted academy of arts and sciences at Milan.

He was now a power in the state, the intimate friend and recognized equal of the first writers of the day, the associate of ministers on a footing of perfect cordiality and familiarity.

What he would have been as a poet, if, instead of visiting Europe in early life and drinking in the spirit of the middle ages under the shadows of cathedral towers, he had, like Whittier, grown old amid American scenery and life, we can only guess from his earlier poems, which are as naturalistic, fresh and unmystical as could be desired; but certain it is that, from his long familiarity with the medieval view of nature, and its semi-pagan offspring, the romantic view, he was brought, for the greater part of his life, to look upon the world of men and things either as the middle scene of a miracle play, with a heaven of rewarding happiness above and a purgatory of purifying pain below, or else as a garment concealing, while it revealed, spiritual forms of unfathomed mystery.

He was affable to the point of familiarity, quick-witted like a true Gascon, good-hearted, indulgent, yet skilled in reading the character of those around him, and he could at times show himself severe and unyielding.

But these, to the untutored imagination, present a mystical, as well as a mechanical aspect; and barbaric familiarity with the heavens developed at an early age, through the promptings of superstition, into a fixed system of observation.

Or maybe, it was the apparent familiarity between the two of them.

Whoever coined the phrase "Familiarity breeds contempt" must have gone that route.

Bligh was still less visible to the men, not present in a "familiarity breeds contempt" sense.