Word Finder - liable

definition

Bound or obliged in law or equity; responsible; answerable.

example

1748. David Hume. Enquiries concerning the human understanding and concerning the principles of moral. London: Oxford University Press, 1973. § 34.

definition

Subject; susceptible.

example

A man liable to heart disease.

definition

Exposed to a certain contingency or causality, more or less probable.

definition

(as predicate, with "to" and an infinitive) likely.

example

Someone is liable to slip on your icy sidewalk.

The species most liable to be struck are oaks, poplars and pear trees; beech trees are exceptionally safe.

If there are, they are liable to be glass oats!

Such partial competition, with the discrimination it involves, is liable to be worse for the public than no competition at all.

On the Pacific coast all the rivers are rapid and liable to sudden floods.

It held shipper as well as carrier, and corporation as well as its officer or agent, liable for violations of the act, and conferred upon United States courts power to employ equity processes in putting an end to discrimination.

Sugars are also liable to fermentation.'

In ethics empiricism begins by recognizing that man possesses sensations, and so is liable to pleasures and pains.

The company is liable to a fine of twenty pounds a day if it should open the line in contravention of such order or direction.

In summer the heat and moisture are excessive, and the Aapies (which is spanned by four bridges) is liable to floods.

The surface of the vessel may be hard, but the vessel is liable to fracture on receiving a trifling shock.

Its whereabouts is thus, to a great extent, concealed both from enemies searching for spiders and from insects suitable for food; and its open meshwork of strong threads makes it much less liable to be beaten down by rain or torn to shreds by winds than if it were a flat sheet of closely woven silk.

In 1792 the quantity exported from the United States was only 1 It is related that in the year 1784 William Rathbone, an American merchant resident in Liverpool, received from one of his correspondents in the southern states a consignment of eight bags of cotton, which on its arrival in Liverpool was seized by the customhouse officers, on the allegation that it could not have been grown in the United States, and that it was liable to seizure under the Shipping Acts, as not being imported in a vessel belonging to the country of its growth.

The initial diameter of the well drilled from the bottom of this pit is in some instances as much as 36 in., bore-holes of the larger size being preferred, as they are less liable to become choked, and admit of the use of larger bailers for raising the oil.

The steam is superheated and may thus be heated to any desired temperature without increase of pressure, which would be liable to damage the still.

Hot-wire ammeters are, however, liable to a shift of zero, and means are always provided by some adjusting screw for slightly altering the sag of the wire and so adjusting the index needle to the zero of the scale.

It is essential that the permanent magnet should be subjected to a process of ageing so that its field may not be liable to change subsequently with time.

Its most important feature, when compared with the previous constitution of 1868, is its provision for the choice of state officials other than the governor (who was previously chosen by election) by elections instead of by the governor's appointment, but the governor, who serves for four years and is not eligible for the next succeeding term, still appoints the circuit judges, the state' attorneys for each judicial circuit and the county commissioners; he may fill certain vacancies and may suspend, and with the Senate remove officers not liable to impeachment..

The chief exports are raw cotton, rice, wheat, oil-seeds, hides and lac. The exports of wheat are liable to extreme fluctuations, especially during famine periods.

Several imprisonments, including that of George Fox at Derby in 1650-1651, were brought about under the Blasphemy Act of 1650, which inflicted penalties on any one who asserted himself to be very God or equal with God, a charge to which the Friends were peculiarly liable owing to their doctrine of perfection.

The interruption of preachers when celebrating divine service rendered the offender liable to three months' imprisonment under a statute of the first year of Mary, but Friends generally waited to speak till the service was over.'

For many years after this they were liable to imprisonment for non-payment of tithes, and, together with other Dissenters, they remained under various civil disabilities, the gradual removal of which is part of the general history of England.

The slaves were bound to work for their masters during this period for three-fourths of the day, and were to be liable to corporal punishment if they did not give the due amount of labour.

The width, however, proved inconvenient, and the broad sheet was liable to injury by tearing.

Where, as in private herbaria, the specimens are not liable to be handled with great frequency, a stitch here and there round the stem, tied at the back of the sheet, or slips of paper passed over the stem through two slits in the sheet and attached with gum to its back, or simply strips of gummed paper laid across the stem, may be resorted to.

When, as with some plants like Verbascum, the thick hard stems are liable to cause the leaves to wrinkle in drying by removing the pressure from them, small pieces of bibulous paper or cotton wool may be placed upon the leaves near their point of attachment to the stem.

This mode has some disadvantages attending it; such sheets are difficult to handle; the crustaceous species are liable to have their surfaces rubbed; the foliaceous species become so compressed as to lose their characteristic appearance; and the spaces between the sheets caused by the thickness of the specimen permit the entrance of dust.

The instincts of nest-building, incubation and the rearing of young, though they occur later in life than those concerned in locomotion and the obtaining of food, are none the less founded on a hereditary basis, and in some respects are less rather than more liable to modification by the experience gained by the carrying out of hereditarily definite modes of procedure.

In return for these privileges the lord was liable to forfeit his rights if he neglected to protect and defend the tenant or did anything injurious to the feudal relation.

Each of the larger streams, as well as a large proportion of the smaller ones, is accompanied by a belt of bottom land, of greater or less width, lying low as regards the stream, and liable to overflow at times of high water.

Whatever be the historical worth of this story, it may safely be said that it cannot be disproved by deductive reasoning from the premisses of abstract logic. The most we can do is to assert that a universe in which such things are liable to happen on a large scale is unfitted for the practical application of the theory of cardinal numbers.

All able-bodied males are liable, on reaching their 21 st year, for 3 years' service with the colours, and 9 years in the reserve.

So long as Stambolov, the energetic Bulgarian statesman, was alive he succeeded in keeping the Bulgarian element quiet, and the peace of the country was less liable to disturbance.

The only point of practical interest requiring mention here is the very singular fact attested by all peach-growers, that, while certain peaches are liable to the attacks of mildew, others are not.

Africa, can, however, only be enforced by special administrative machinery and at considerable expense, and this legislative action can only be regarded as temporary and preliminary to the establishment of plantations of rubber trees, which are not only easier to control, but the trees are less liable to injury from careless tapping.

During the tropical rains the soil is liable, to a greater or less extent, to denudation, which becomes very serious when the land slopes; and in any case, the soil is apt to become impoverished by the loss of its soluble constituents.

It is liable to floods, when it becomes impassable for weeks.

The offender, whether simoniacus (one who had bought his orders) or simoniace promotus (one who had bought his promotion), was liable to deprivation of his benefice and deposition from orders if a secular priest, - to confinement in a stricter monastery if a regular.

The innocent simoniace promotus was, apart from dispensation, liable to the same penalties as though he were guilty.

The tragedians used her story to point the moral of the instability of human happiness; Niobe became the representative of human nature, liable to pride in prosperity and forgetfulness of the respect and submission due to the gods.

It must always be remembered that we are liable (especially in the case of fossilized integuments) to attach an unwarranted interpretation to the mere discontinuity or continuity of the thickened plates of chitinous cuticle on the back of an Arthropod.

Like the scorpions the spiders have a special tendency to cannibalism, and accordingly the male, in approaching the female for the purpose of fertilizing her, is liable to be fallen upon and sucked dry by the object of his attentions.

Others have a special faculty of consuming dry, powdery vegetable and animal refuse, and are liable to multiply in manufactured products of this nature, such as mouldy cheese.

Owing to the uncertainty of the periodical rains in Cutch, the country is liable to severe famines, and it has suffered greatly from plague.

But neither earthquakes nor the plague, to which it was also peculiarly liable, could divert trade and prosperity from it.

There are also many rifle associations, the members of which are liable to be called out for defence.

The government was a despotism, but a king who aroused the extreme dissatisfaction of his subjects was liable to be murdered.

If our results are imperfect and liable to correction, that is only to be expected in the present position of the historical study of the Bible.

It was a deep-seated belief that those who took part in religious functions were liable to communicate this " holiness " to others (compare the complex ideas associated with the Polynesian taboo).

The drug has naturally always been liable to great adulteration in spite of penalties, the severity of which suggests the surviving tradition of its sacred character.

Another resolution, of importance for the history of the treatment of heresy, was the canon which decreed that armed force should be employed against the Cathari in southern France, that their goods were liable to confiscation and their persons to enslavement by the princes, and that all who took up weapons against them should receive a two years' remission of their penance and be placed - like the crusaders - under the direct protection of the church.