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tion, or payment, for a greater, or a single thing for an aggregate; hence; to lessen; to diminish; as, to commute a sentence of death to one of imprisonment for life; to commute tithes; to commute charges for fares. The sounds water and fire, being once annexed to those two elements, it was certainly more natural to c…

To increase the strength and diminish the bulk of, as of a liquid or an ore; to intensify, by getting rid of useless material; to condense; as, to concentrate acid by evaporation; to concentrate by washing; -- opposed to Ant: dilute. Spirit of vinegar concentrated and reduced to its greatest strength. Arbuthnot.…

ric cones closely packed together; -- said of a kind of structure sometimes observed in sedimentary rocks.

was Into two parties, is now conjoined in one. Shak. If either of you know any inward impediment why you should not be conjoined. Shak. Let that which he learns next be nearly conjoined with what he knows already. Locke.

the total energy of any material system is a quantity which can neither be increased nor diminished by any action between the parts of the system, though it may be transformed into any of the forms of which energy is susceptible. Clerk Maxwell.

The state or process of being consumed, wasted, or diminished; waste; diminution; loss; decay.

To be drawn together so as to be diminished in size or extent; to shrink; to be reduced in compass or in duration; as, iron contracts in cooling; a rope contracts when wet. Years contracting to a moment. Wordsworth.

act; having the power or property of contracting, or of shrinking into shorter or smaller dimensions; as, the contractile tissues. The heart's contractile force. H. Brooke. Each cilium seems to be composed of contractile substance. Hixley. Contractile vacuole (Zoöl.), a pulsating cavity in the interior of a protozoan,…

age. All the artifice and conventionalism of life. Hawthorne. They gaze on all with dead, dim eyes, -- wrapped in conventionalisms, . . . simulating feelings according to a received standart. F. W. Robertson.

To be like something else in the dimensions and arrangement of its parts; -- followed by with or to; as, concurring figures correspond with each other throughout. None of them [the forms of Sidney's sonnets] correspond to the Shakespearean type. J. A. Symonds.

To eat away by degrees; to wear away or diminish by gradually separating or destroying small particles of, as by action of a strong acid or a caustic alkali. Aqua fortis corroding copper . . . is wont to reduce it to a green- blue solution. Boyle.

A diminutive of the bendlet, containing one half its area or one quarter the area of the bend. When a single cottise is used alone it is often called a cost. See also Couple-close.

A diminutive of the chevron, containing one fourth of its surface. Couple-closes are generally borne one on each side of a chevron, and the blazoning may then be either a chevron between two couple-closes or chevron cottised.

One skilled in, or who practices, cranioscopy. It was found of equal dimension in a literary man whose skull puzzied the cranioscopists. Coleridge.

Having concealed or rudimentary gills.

- Cubic foot, a volume equivalent to a cubical solid which measures a foot in each of its dimensions. -- Cubic number, a number produced by multiplying a number into itself, and that product again by the same number. See Cube. -- Cubical parabola (Geom.), two curves of the third degree, one plane, and one on space of…

love, son of Venus; usually represented as a naked, winged boy with bow and arrow. Pretty dimpled boys, like smiling cupids. Shak.

A stew of fowl, fish, or game, cooked with curry. Curry powder (Cookery), a condiment used for making curry, formed of various materials, including strong spices, as pepper, ginger, garlic, coriander seed, etc.

To cut off the end or tail, or any part, of; to shorten; to abridge; to diminish; to reduce. I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion. Shak. Our incomes have been curtailed; his salary has been doubled. Macualay.

occuring as a constituent of certain rare urinary calculi, and occasionally found as a sediment in urine.