noun
definition
Free postage, a right exercised by governments (usually with definite article).
definition
The notice on an envelope where a stamp would normally be found.
verb
definition
To place a frank on an envelope.
definition
To exempt from charge for postage, as a letter, package, or packet, etc.
definition
To send by public conveyance free of expense.
noun
definition
A hot dog or sausage.
example
Buy a package of franks for the barbecue.
synonyms
noun
definition
The grey heron.
noun
definition
A pigsty.
verb
definition
To shut up in a frank or sty; to pen up; hence, to cram; to fatten.
Examples of franks in a Sentence
This was accomplished by calling the Franks in against the Lombards.
In the 5th century the Franks seized Tournai, and Merovaeus made it the capital of his dynasty.
The original significance of the name remains in dispute, but the first of the family to whom it was applied was Hugh, who was elected king of the Franks in 987.
The Armenians in the south-east of Asia Minor borrowed feudal institutions from the Franks and the feudal vocabulary itself.
By these measures the counts became citizens, the rural population ceased to rank as serfs, and the Italo-Roman population of the towns absorbed into itself the remnants of Franks, Germans and other foreign stocks.
Of this period scarcely any record remains, but when at the end of the 3rd century the Franks began to swarm over the Rhine into the Roman lands, the names of the old tribes had disappeared.
The branch of the Franks - who were a confederacy, not a people - which gradually overspread Gallia Belgica, bore the name of the Salian Franks..
The strip of coast from the mouth of the Scheldt to that of the Ems remained, however, in the hands of the free Frisians (q.v.), in alliance with whom against the Franks were the Saxons, who, pressing forward from the east, had occupied a portion of the districts known later as Gelderland, Overyssel and Drente.
Odoacer inaugurated that long series of foreign rulersGreeks, Franks, Germans, Spaniards and Austrians who have successively contributed to the misgovernment of Italy from distant seats of empire.
Towards the end of the 3rd century, the inroads of the Franks having been repelled by the emperor Probus, the city rapidly acquired wealth and importance.
The Franks, who had thrice previously sacked the city, gained permanent possession of it about 455.
With this use of the word, philologically inexact, but historically quite defensible, may be compared the use of the word English, which is not exactly the language of the Angles, or of the word French, which is not exactly the language of the Franks.
In 728 the Lombard king Luitprand took and destroyed the suburb Classis; about 752 the city itself fell into the hands of his successor Aistulf, from whom a few years after it was wrested by Pippin, king of the Franks.
The legions at once joined him; numbers of Franks enlisted in his service; an increased and well-equipped fleet secured him the command of the neighbouring seas.
The Romans held it nearly five hundred years, and on the dissolution of their power it passed under the sway of the Franks.
In the 5th century came other German tribes, the Alamanni, and then the Franks, who drove the Alamanni into the south.
The custom, indeed, so far from dying out, was adopted by the barbarian conquerors and spread among the Christian Goths in Spain, Franks in Gaul, Alemanni in Germany, and Anglo-Saxons in Britain.
Charles's son, Pippin, was crowned king of Italy, entered the peninsula at the head of the Franks, defeated the Lombards, took Ravenna and presented it to the pope, while retaining a feudal superiority.
Venice was now brought face to face with the Franks under their powerful sovereign, who soon showed that he intended to claim the lagoons as part of his new kingdom.
He and his followers plotted the murder of the doge, were discovered, and sought safety at the court of Charlemagne, where Fortunatus strongly urged the Franks to attack the lagoons.
The period from the election of the first doge to the appearance of the Franks was characterized by fierce struggles between Heraclea and Jesolo.
He turned his attention to the lagoon of Venice, which had been steadily growing in commercial and maritime importance, and had, on the whole, shown a sympathy for Byzantium rather than for the Franks.
In order to hold these possessions, she borrowed from the Franks the feudal system, and granted fiefs in the Greek islands to her more powerful families, on condition that they held the trade route open for her.
The real founder of the house, however, was Robert the Strong, who received from Charles the Bald, king of the Franks, the countships of Anjou and Blois, and who is sometimes called duke, as he exercised some military authority in the district between the Seine and the Loire.
Robert's two sons, Odo or Eudes, and Robert II., succeeded their father successively as dukes, and, in 887, some of the Franks chose Odo as their king.
They gave the kingdom a connexion of its own with the Red Sea and its shipping; and they enabled the Franks to 2 Pisa naturally connected itself with Antioch, because Antioch was hostile to Constantinople, and Pisa cherished the same hostility, since Alexius I.
The disunion between the Mahommedans of northern Syria and the Fatimites of Egypt, and the political disintegration of the former, were both favourable to the success of the Franks; but they had nevertheless to maintain their ground vigorously both in the north and the south against almost incessant attacks.
The plan of conquering Egypt had indeed presented itself to the Franks from the first, as it continued to attract them to the end; and it is significant that Godfrey himself, in 1100, promised Jerusalem to the patriarch, "as soon as he should have conquered some other great city, and especially Cairo."
Before the accession of Zengi, there had been constant fighting, which had led, however, to no definite result, between the various Mahommedan princes and the Franks of northern Syria.
If Fulk had been left alone to wage the struggle against Zengi, and if Zengi had enjoyed a clear field against the Franks, the fall of the kingdom of Jerusalem might have come far sooner than it did.
One of the great mistakes made by the Franks was the breach of the alliance in 1147 - a breach which was widened by the attack directed against Damascus during the Second Crusade; and the conquest of Damascus by Nureddin in 1154 was ultimately fatal to the Latin kingdom, removing as it did the one possible ally of the Franks, and opening the way to Egypt for the atabegs of Mosul.
On the whole, the interference of the Comneni, if it checked Zengi for the moment in 1138, may be said to have ultimately weakened and distracted the Franks, and to have helped to cause the loss of Edessa (1144), which marks the turning-point in the history of the kingdom of Jerusalem.
Two great central courts sat in Jerusalem to do justice - the high court of the nobles, and the court of burgesses for the rest of the Franks.
The fact is that until the 13th century the Franks lived consuetudinibus antiquis et jure non scripto.
The former courts, under their bailiffs, gradually absorbed the separate courts which the Syrians had at first been permitted to enjoy under their own refs; and the bailiff with his 6 assessors (4 Syrians and 2 Franks) thus came to judge both commercial cases and cases in which Syrians were involved.
Continually recruited from the West, they retained the vigour which the native Franks of Palestine gradually lost; and their corporate strength gave a weight to their arms which made them indispensable.
The Franks of northern Europe attempted to live a life that suited a northern climate under a southern sun.
Little driblets of men might indeed be added to the numbers of the Franks; but the great bodies of crusaders either perished in Asia Minor, as in I ioi and 1147, or found themselves thwarted and distrusted by the native Franks.
The result was the renewed enmity of the Greek empire, while the French adventurers who won the prize ruined the prospects of the Franks by their conduct.
Not only so, but in the spring of 1147 the Franks were unwise enough.
The position of the Franks in the Holy Land was not improved by the attack on Damascus; while the ignominious failure of a Crusade led by two kings brought the whole crusading movement into discredit in western Europe, and it was utterly in vain that Suger and St Bernard attempted to gather a fresh Crusade in 1150.
If a religious union had been effected between Egypt and northern Syria, political disunion still remained; and the Franks were safe as long as it lasted.
He was confronted, however, by Raymund, count of Tripoli, the one man of ability among the decadent Franks, who acted as guardian of the kingdom; while he was also occupied in trying to win for himself the Syrian possessions of Nureddin.
It was, however, by their own folly that the Franks lost Jerusalem in 1244.
The Franks evacuated Syria altogether, leaving behind them only the ruins of their castles to bear witness, to this very day, of the Crusades they had waged and the kingdom they had founded and lost.
Partly by contact with the Byzantines, partly by conflict with the Mahommedans, the Franks learned new methods 1 Authors like Heeren (Versuch einer Entwickelung der Folgen der Kreuzziige) and Michaud (in the last volume of his Histoire des croisades) fall into the error of assigning all things to the Crusades.
It is from the Second Crusade that William of Tyre, representing the attitude of the Franks of Jerusalem, begins to be a primary authority; while on the Mahommedan side a considerable authority emerges in Ibn Athir.
The various continuations of William of Tyre above mentioned represent the opinion of the native Franks (which is hostile to Richard I.); while in Nicetas, who wrote a history of the Eastern empire from 1118 to 1206, we have a Byzantine authority who, as Professor Bury remarks, "differs from Anna and Cinnamus in his tone towards the crusaders, to whom he is surprisingly fair."
Early in the 6th century it passed under the authority of the Franks, and in the 9th century was part of the Frankish kingdom of Aquitaine.
Bonif ace does not seem to have taken part in the anointing of Pippin as king of the Franks in 752.