Word Finder - severity

definition

The state of being severe.

definition

The degree of something undesirable; badness or seriousness.

example

The severity of the offence merits a long prison sentence.

His severity has remained legendary.

More than eight or ten years rarely pass without tornadoes or hurricanes of local severity at least.

He exhibited severity and injustice when dealing with pagans and heretics.

The duel between Pierre and Dolokhov was hushed up and, in spite of the Emperor's severity regarding duels at that time, neither the principals nor their seconds suffered for it.

Their servility awakened the bitterest contempt of their conquerors and forms the best excuse for the unparalleled severity of the French yoke.

In prison he was chained and treated with great severity.

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.

It is clear, from the extreme variations in the severity of the illness, that the resisting power of individuals varies greatly.

He determined to treat prisoners captured from submarines, in view of their breaches of the laws of war, with more severity than ordinary prisoners; but the Germans retaliated harshly on the most noteworthy English prisoners in their hands, and Mr. Balfour, on succeeding Mr. Churchill, gave up this discrimination.

Owing to its high altitude, north-western Mongolia is very cold, and the severity of the winter is intensified by the prevalence of cold but dry north-western winds.

At Hirado the ceramists affected a lighter and more delicatetone than that of the Chinese, and, in order to obtain it, subjected the choice pigment of the Middle Kingdom to refining processes of great severity.

A reaction against the extreme severity of the king's courts became apparent at this date.

Taking advantage of the absence of Flaccus at Chalcedon and the discontent aroused by his avarice and severity, Fimbria stirred up a revolt and slew Flaccus at Nicomedia.

Subsequently Alexander was alienated from him owing to the intrigues of the count's enemies, who hated him for his severity and regarded him as a dangerous reactionary.

The German college, for the children of poor nobles, was founded in 1552; and in the same year Ignatius firmly settled the discipline of the Society by putting down, with promptness and severity, some attempts at independent action on the part of Rodriguez at Coimbra - this being the occasion of the famous letter on obedience; while 1553 saw the despatch of a mission to Abyssinia with one of the fathers as patriarch, and the first rift within the lute when the pope thought that the Spanish Jesuits were taking part with the emperor against the Holy See.

A domesticated animal or a cultivated plant need not necessarily be acclimatized; that is, it need not be capable of enduring the severity of the seasons without protection.

The severity of this law was ascribed to efforts of the liquor interests to render it objectionabie.

Though she deprecated excess of ascetic severity in others, she scourged herself habitually, and wore a peculiarly painful haircloth.

She wondered if she'd freak everyone out with a few Hello Kitty posters to take away the severity of the rooms.

For the next ten years Baldwin ruled his principality with success, if not without severity.

The acts imposing fines for recusancy, repealed in 1650, were later executed with great severity.

The rash attempt of Murat in the autumn of 1815, which led to his death at Pizzo in Calabria, enabled the Bourbon dynasty to crush malcontents with all the greater severity.

The constant stream of petitions to Rome opened the eyes of the pope to the effects of Torquemada's severity.

It has an extraordinary power over the pain of acute gout; it lessens the severity and frequency of the attacks when given continuously between them, and it markedly controls such symptoms of gout as eczema, bronchitis and neuritis, whilst it is entirely inoperative against these conditions when they are not of gouty origin.

The severity of the crisis produced a remedy, in the form of a patriotic rising of the masses under the leadership of a butcher called Minin and a Prince Pozharski.

On arriving in Moscow he found that the mutiny had been suppressed and the ringleaders punished, but he considered it necessary to reopen the investigation and act with exemplary severity.

In France, blasphemy (which included, also, speaking against the Holy Virgin and the saints, denying one's faith, or speaking with impiety of holy things) was from very early times punished with great severity.

Whatever question may be possible as to the force or character of Pharisaism in the time of Christ, there can be no doubt that it became both all-pervading and ennobling among the successors of Aqiba (q.v.), himself one of the martyrs to Hadrian's severity.

The mountainous country, ill-suited for agricultural purposes, was well adapted for these hardy warriors,whose training was Spartan in its simplicity and severity.

The severity with which the land was treated may pass for a gentle reprisal if the Moabites of that day were not more humane than their descendants in the days of King Mesha.

The court of Vienna had treated the Silesian Protestants with tyrannical severity, in direct contravention of the treaty of Osnabruck, of which Sweden was one of the guarantors; and Charles demanded summary and complete restitution so dictatorially that the emperor prepared for war.

But the unusual severity of the winters of 1887, 1894 and 1899 (the report of the Twelfth Census which gives the figures for this year being therefore misleading) destroyed three-fourths of the orange trees, and caused an increased attention to stockraising, and to various agricultural products.

The people, who felt the severity of his laws, at the same time acknowledged their justice, and found themselves protected from the rapacity of their superiors.

But in spite of the severity with which the resolution was enforced, the resistance to iconoclasm continued, chiefly owing to the attitude of the monks, who exercised great influence over the common people.

The new grand vizier, Cicala, by his severity to the soldiers, mainly Asiatics, who had shown cowardice in the battle, drove thousands to desert; and the sultan, who had himself little stomach for the perils of campaigning, returned to Constantinople, leaving the conduct of the war to his generals.

This continued until the new sultan had acquired age and experience; but, nine years after his accession, he successfully crushed the military rebels, and thereafter ruled with a severity amounting to bloodthirsty cruelty.

The fleet was restored, and recaptured Lemnos and other islands which had passed into the hands of the Venetians; the revolts caused by Kuprili's severity were put down, and tranquillity was reestablished in Transylvania.

Turkey's severity in repressing the Bulgarian insurrection had raised up in England a storm of public opinion against her, of which the Liberal opposition had taken the fullest advantage; moreover the suspension of payments on the Ottoman debt had dealt Turkey's popularity a blow from which it had never recovered.

The repression of these revolts in the Sassun district in the autumn of 1894 was effected under circumstances of great severity by Turkish troops and Kurdish irregulars.

The interior of Greenland contains both summer and winter a pole of cold, situated in the opposite longitude to that of Siberia, with which it is well able to compete in extreme severity.

We may form some idea of the extent and the severity of their incursions from the fact that at the beginning of the reign of Valdemar the whole of the Danish eastern coast lay wasted and depopulated.

In 1890 a feeling of considerable irritation had grown up among the Uitlanders at the various monopolies, but particularly at the dynamite monopoly, which pressed solely and with peculiar severity upon gold miners.

The reactions of the tissues vary in degrees according to the nature and severity of the injury.

He put an end to the division which had arisen between the spiritual leaders of Palestinian Judaism by the separation of the scribes into the two schools called respectively after Hillel and Shammai, and took care to enforce his own authority as the president of the chief legal assembly of Judaism with energy and often with severity.

This report, the proposal that he made (August 27, 1795) to lessen the severity of the revolutionary laws, and the eulogies he received from several Paris sections suspected of disloyalty to the republic, resulted in his being obliged to justify himself (October 1 5, 1 795).

In 762 there was a rebellion in favour of a descendant of 'Ali, but it was put down with great severity by the army of the caliph Mansur.

Had the simplicity and religious severity of the first four caliphs continued in their successors, the fate of poetry would have been hard.

Perhaps even this degree of severity might have been held by the Prussian authorities to be unnecessary, had Ewald been less exasperating in his language.

He thought his poetry too imitative, detecting not only the truthful severity of Crabbe, but a "slight bravura dash of the fair tuneful Hemans."

At the outbreak of the revolution of 1820 the king called him to his councils, and when the constitution had been granted Colletta was sent to put down the separatist rising in Sicily, which he did with great severity.