Word Finder - gentlemen

definition

A man of gentle but not noble birth, particularly a man of means (originally ownership of property) who does not work for a living but has no official status in a peerage; an armiferous man ranking below a knight.

example

Being a gentleman, Robert was entitled to shove other commoners into the gongpit but he still had to jump out of the way of the knights to avoid the same fate himself.

definition

Any well-bred, well-mannered, or charming man.

definition

An effeminate or oversophisticated man.

example

Well, la-di-da, aren't you just a proper gentleman?

synonyms

• cockney
• puss-gentleman
• sissy

definition

(polite term of address) Any man.

example

Please escort this gentleman to the gentlemen's room.

synonyms

• sahib

definition

(usually historical, sometimes derogatory) An amateur or dabbler in any field, particularly those of independent means.

synonyms

• dilettante

definition

An amateur player, particularly one whose wealth permits him to forego payment.

definition

Possessive case of gentlemen: belonging to some or all gentlemen.

definition

A lavatory intended for use by men, often including urinals in addition to toilets.

definition

Other rooms intended for use by men, as waiting rooms, dressing rooms, locker rooms, etc.

The count took the gentlemen into his study and showed them his choice collection of Turkish pipes.

Let us talk like gentlemen.

In the study were four gentlemen of the diplomatic corps.

This blend which is suitable for ladies or gentlemen includes bergamot which is an excellent oil for treating over-work related problems.

Coat-armour was in itself not necessarily a badge of nobility at all; it could be, and was, worn by people having no pretensions to be "gentlemen," and this is true both of England and the continent.

On the other hand, many undoubted "gentlemen" never assumed arms at all.

In 1802 he was appointed editor of the Gentlemen's Diary, and in 1818 editor of the Ladies' Diary and superintendent of the almanacs of the Stationers' Company.

The early death of his eldest son, Baltasar Carlos, was unquestionably due to debauchery encouraged by the gentlemen entrusted by the king with his education.

In 1771 he took holy orders, and afterwards visited many parts of Europe as tutor and travelling companion to various noblemen and gentlemen.

Among his most satisfactory productions are some of his earlier ones, such as the full-length of the duke of Argyll, and the numerous bust-portraits of Scottish gentlemen and their ladies which he executed before settling in London.

At midnight on the 6th of December 1741, with a few personal friends, including her physician, Armand Lestocq, her chamberlain, Michael Ilarionvich Vorontsov, her future husband, Alexius Razumovski, and Alexander and Peter Shuvalov, two of the gentlemen of her household, she drove to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Guards, enlisted their sympathies by a stirring speech, and led them to the Winter Palace, where the regent was reposing in absolute security.

In May 1314, by order of King Philip IV., she was arrested and imprisoned in the Chateau-Gaillard with her sisterin-law Marguerite, daughter of Robert II., duke of Burgundy, and wife of Louis Hutin, on the charge of adultery with two gentlemen of the royal household, Philippe and Gautier d'Aunai.

When the anti-clerical policy of the revolutionary powers provoked the rising of the peasantry, of La Vendee, he put himself at the head of the men of his neighbourhood, and came rapidly to the front among the gentlemen whom the peasants took for leaders.

The beauty and tears of Inez disarmed his resolution, and he turned to leave her; but the gentlemen about him had gone too far to recede.

This feeling led a number of high-minded gentlemen to form themselves into an organization under the name of Liberal Republicans.

On his travels he did not, we are told by the fourth earl, "greatly seek the conversation of other English young gentlemen on their travels," but rather that of their tutors, with whom he could converse on congenial topics.

He made his name immortal by founding on Mt Sceberras " a city built by gentlemen for gentlemen " and making Valletta a magnificent example of fortification, unrivalled in the world.

Strickland desired to replace bureaucratic government by a system more in touch with the independent gentlemen of the country, and to introduce English ideas and precedents.

A silver casket (originally Mary's property, but then in the possession of Bothwell) was placed in his hands on the 10th of June, and was inspected by several nobles and gentlemen on the 21st of June 1567.

Amongst its benefactors were many Catholic Scots and English peers and gentlemen whose arms are emblazoned on the windows of the spacious refectory hall.

Prince Albert was costumed as Edward III., the queen as Queen Philippa, and all the gentlemen of the court as knights of Poitiers.

Catherine was so favourably impressed by the youths that she restored them part of their estates, and in the beginning of 1796 made them gentlemen in waiting.

The 50,000 roubles presented to him by the emperor as a parting gift he at once handed to the Pavlovsk Institute for the education of the daughters of poor gentlemen.

And now, eighty-four years after his death, Poland was once more split up into half a dozen loosely federated states in the hands of country gentlemen too ignorant and prejudiced to look beyond the boundaries of their own provinces.

Yet it was for these persons that Repnin, in the name of the empress, now demanded absolute equality, political and religious, with the gentlemen of Poland.

The first church was "built by the gentlemen of Augusta" in 1750.

During his residence in Kendal, Dalton had contributed solutions of problems and questions on various subjects to the Gentlemen's and Ladies' Diaries, and in 1787 he began to keep a meteorological diary in which during the succeeding fifty-seven VII.

In November 1640 the Long Parliament succeeded to the Short, and sent Laud and Strafford to the Tower, and Hobbes, who had become, or thought he had become, a marked man by the circulation of his treatise (of which, " though not printed, many gentlemen had copies "), hastened to Paris, " the first of all that fled."

Then Pascal the elder was confined to the house by the consequences of an accident on the ice, and was visited by certain gentlemen of the neighbourhood who had come under the influence of Saint-Cyran and the Jansenists.

He received Johnson's homage with the most winning affability, and requited it with a few guineas, bestowed doubtless in a very graceful manner, but was by no means desirous to see all his carpets blackened with the London mud, and his soups and wines thrown to right and left over the gowns of fine ladies and the waistcoats of fine gentlemen, by an absent, awkward scholar, who gave strange starts and uttered strange growls, who dressed like a scarecrow and ate like a cormorant.

In consequence probably of the good offices of Bubb Dodington, who was then the confidential adviser of Prince Frederick, two of his royal highness's gentlemen carried a gracious message to the printing office, and ordered seven copies for Leicester House.

The country gentlemen could not have a garden party without the presence of a commissary of police.

Just before his departure the announcement that he would address the Woman's Anti-Slavery Society of Boston created "a mob of gentlemen of property and standing," from which, if he had been present, he could hardly have escaped with his life.

There was not one point in the former administration of the army acceptable to English gentlemen.

The intelligent professional knowledge of the native officers, taught under British gentlemen, and the constant hard work cheerfully rendered by the fellah soldiers, were the main factors of the success achieved at Omdurman on the 2nd of September 1898.

The clamour of the preachers was now for blood, and gentlemen taken under promise of quarter were executed by command of the Estates at St Andrews, for to give quarter was " to violate the oath of the Covenant " - as interpreted by the clergy.

Of the guard that defended Holyrood " the gentlemen and the rabble, when they saw all danger over, killed some and put the rest in prison, where many of them died of their wounds and hunger," a parallel to the Dunottar cruelties not usually mentioned by historians (" Balcarres Memoirs ").

Thomas Wilson, in the epistle prefixed to his translation of the Olynthiacs of Demosthenes (1570), has a long and most interesting eulogy of Cheke; and Thomas Nash, in To the Gentlemen Students, prefixed to Robert Greene's Menaphon (1589), calls him "the Exchequer of eloquence, Sir Ihon Cheke, a man of men, supernaturally traded in all tongues."

In August 1814, however, these gentlemen, with Henry Clay and Jonathan Russell, began negotiations with English commissioners which resulted in the signature of the treaty of Ghent on the 24th of December of that year.

Moreover, he played for England against Australia, and for Gentlemen against Players; and for some years was a notable member of the Middlesex eleven.

Upon the arrival of the procession at the house of the bride the gentlemen gallantly remain outside, leaving room for the ladies to enter the house as the escort of the bridegroom.

Stevenson's various occasional sallies in verse and prose - his Fables for Grown Gentlemen (1761-1770), his Crazy Tales (1762), and his numerous skits at the political opponents of Wilkes, among whose "macaronies" he numbered himself - were collected after his death, and it is impossible to read them without being struck with their close family resemblance in spirit and turn of thought to Sterne's work, inferior as they are in literary genius.

The new chancellor proposed the continuance of the land tax at four shillings in the pound, while he held out hopes that it might be reduced next year to three shillings, whereupon his predecessor, William Dowdeswell, by the aid of the landed gentlemen, carried a motion that the reduction should take effect at once.

But here, and perhaps in most other towns in South America, a poor girl of mixed race - especially if good-looking - rarely thinks of marrying one of her own class until she has - as the Brazilians say - "approveitada de sua mocidade" (made the most of her youth) in receiving presents from gentlemen.

Communications were opened with China with a view to obtain fresh plants and seeds, and a deputation, composed of gentlemen versed in botanical studies, was despatched to Assam.

In Scotland by a recent statute it was death even to argue against it; and Knox after Wishart's execution was fleeing from place to place, when, hearing that certain gentlemen of Fife had slain the cardinal and were in possession of his castle of St Andrews, he gladly joined himself to them.

For the danger now was that some gentlemen were already cruel in exactions of their tenants, "requiring of them whatever before they paid to the Church, so that the papistical tyranny shall only be changed into the tyranny of the lords or of the laird."

A new race of politicians was springing up. Since 1719, when the influence of the few great territorial families had been merged in a multitude of needy gentlemen, the first estate had become the nursery and afterwards the stronghold of an opposition at once noble and democratic which found its natural leaders in such men as Count Carl Gyllenborg and Count Carl Gustaf Tessin.

Some time later the grade of district superintendent was created, held by gentlemen of superior status and intelligence, to each of whom the control of a large section of the whole force, embracing a wide area, was entrusted.

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."