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Legal or rightful power; a right to command or to act; power exercised buy a person in virtue of his office or trust; dominion; jurisdiction; authorization; as, the authority of a prince over subjects, and of parents over children; the authority of a court. Thus can the demigod, Authority, Make us pay down for our offe…

To clothe with authority, warrant, or legal power; to give a right to act; to empower; as, to authorize commissioners to settle a boundary.

Supreme, uncontrolled, unlimited authority, or right of governing in a single person, as of an autocrat.

overeign; a monarch who holds and exercises the powers of government by claim of absolute right, not subject to restriction; as, Autocrat of all the Russias (a title of the Czar).

Independent in government; having the right or power of self- government.

The power or right of self-government; self-government, or political independence, of a city or a state.

To declare openly, as something believed to be right; to own or acknowledge frankly; as, a man avows his principles or his crimes. Which I to be the of Israel's God Avow, and challenge Dagon to the test. Milton.

The person who has a right to present to a benefice; the patron; an advowee. See Advowson.

rainer of goods, who, in an action of replevin, avows and justifies the taking in his own right. Blackstone.

esembling sleep, as inaction or death. The national spirit again awoke. Freeman. Awake to righteousness, and sin not. 1 Cor. xv. 34.

Causing awe; appalling; awful; as, an awesome sight. Wright.

Frightful; exceedingly bad; great; -- applied intensively; as, an awful bonnet; an awful boaster. [Slang]

or twisted toward one side; not in a straight or true direction, or position; out of the right course; distorted; obliquely; asquint; with oblique vision; as, to glance awry. "Your crown's awry." Shak. Blows them transverse, ten thousand leagues awry. Into the devious air. Milton.

cts a system of parallel chords of a curve; called a principal axis, when cutting them at right angles, in which case it divides the curve into two symmetrical portions, as in the parabola, which has one such axis, the ellipse, which has two, or the circle, which has an infinite number. The two axes of the ellipse are…

A kind of handwriting in which the downward slope of the letters is from left to right.

A disease of hawks. See Filanders. Wright.

Having the right or privilege of being admitted to bail, upon bond with sureties; -- used of persons. "He's bailable, I'm sure." Ford.

A row of bright spots observed in connection with total eclipses of the sun. Just before and after a total eclipse, the slender, unobscured crescent of the sun's disk appears momentarily like a row of bright spots resembling a string of beads. The phenomenon (first fully described by Francis Baily, 1774 -- 1844) is tho…

A division of the Cetacea, including the right whale and all other whales having the mouth fringed with baleen. See Baleen.

Fig.: That which gives, or helps to maintain, uprightness, steadiness, and security. It [piety] is the right ballast of prosperity. Barrow. Ballast engine, a steam engine used in excavating and for digging and raising stones and gravel for ballast. -- Ship in ballast, a ship carring only ballast.