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To be maintained with food and clothing; to be supported; to live. Milton. To subsist on other men's charity. Atterbury.

ing on itself; independent. He considered how sufficient and substantive this land was to maintain itself without any aid of the foreigner. Bacon.

To furnish with the means of sustenance or livelihood; to maintain; to provide for; as, to support a family; to support the ministers of the gospel.

Capable of being supported, maintained, or endured; endurable. -- Sup*port"a*ble*ness, n. -- Sup*port"a*bly, adv.

To maintain; to keep alive; to support; to subsist; to nourish; as, provisions to sustain an army.

Capable of being sustained or maintained; as, the action is not sustainable.

The aggregate of the functions by which a living organism is maintained in a normal condition of weight and growth. Sustentation fund (Eccl.), a fund of a religious body for support of its ministers, chapels, etc.; as, the sustentation fund of the Free Church of Scotland.

efore receiving impressions from without; -- a term used by Hobbes, Locke, and others, in maintaining a theory opposed to the doctrine of innate ideas.

s) See under Absolute. -- Animal temperature (Physiol.), the nearly constant temperature maintained in the bodies of warm-blooded (homoiothermal) animals during life. The ultimate source of the heat is to be found in the potential energy of the food and the oxygen which is absorbed from the air during respiration. See…

opinions, fashions, or occasions; a trimmer. A sort of temporizers, ready to embrace and maintain all that is, or shall be, proposed, in hope of preferment. Burton.

Any opinion, principle, dogma, belief, or doctrine, which a person holds or maintains as true; as, the tenets of Plato or of Cicero. That al animals of the land are in their kind in the sea, . . . is a tenet very questionable. Sir T. Browne. The religious tenets of his family he had early renounced with contempt. Macau…

One of a class of theologians who maintain that God has fixed a certain term for the probation of individual persons, during which period, and no longer, they have the offer to grace. Murdock.

A position or proposition which a person advances and offers to maintain, or which is actually maintained by argument.

the pronoun thou, now superseded in common discourse by your, the possessive of you, but maintaining a place in solemn discourse, in poetry, and in the usual language of the Friends, or Quakers.

To maintain obstinately against denial or contradiction; also, to contend or argue against (another) with obstinacy; to chide; as, he threaped me down that it was so. [Prov. Eng. & Scot.] Burns.

(Eng. Law), toll taken by a town for beasts driven through it, or over a bridge or ferry maintained at its cost. Brande & C. -- Toll traverse (Eng. Law), toll taken by an individual for beasts driven across his ground; toll paid by a person for passing over the private ground, bridge, ferry, or the like, of another.…

To keep in contact; to maintain connection or sympathy;-with with or of. -- Touch and go, a phrase descriptive of a narrow escape. -- True as touch (i.e., touchstone), quite true. [Obs.]

An organized combination among workmen for the purpose of maintaining their rights, privileges, and interests with respect to wages, hours of labor, customs, etc.

One who maintains the doctrine of transubstantiation. Barrow.

nciples are discussed or explained; a tract. Chaucer. He published a treatise in which he maintained that a marriage between a member of the Church of England and a dissenter was a nullity. Macaulay.