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ne who steals anything in a shop, or takes goods privately from a shop; one who, under pretense of buying goods, takes occasion to steal.

False semblance; deceitful appearance; pretense. Beware of the scribes, . . . which devour widows' houses, and for a shew make long prayers. Luke xx. 46. 47.

; honesty of mind or intention; freedom from simulation, hypocrisy, disguise, or false pretense; sincereness. I protest, in the sincerity of love. Shak. Sincerity is a duty no less plain than important. Knox.

Lax; not tense; not hard drawn; not firmly extended; as, a slack rope.

To become slack; to be made less tense, firm, or rigid; to decrease in tension; as, a wet cord slackens in dry weather.

which become phosphorescent, and shine in the dark, after exposure to sunlight or other intense light. -- Solar plexus (Anat.), a nervous plexus situated in the dorsal and anterior part of the abdomen, consisting of several sympathetic ganglia with connecting and radiating nerve fibers; -- so called in allusion to the…

To make a pretense of doing something, or of performing any task. [Colloq.U.S.]

A luminous appearance, or an image seen after the eye has been exposed to an intense light or a strongly illuminated object. When the object is colored, the image appears of the complementary color, as a green image seen after viewing a red wafer lying on white paper. Called also ocular spectrum. Absorption spectrum, t…

Fig.: Something used to cover up a secret project; a mask; a pretense. Hypocrisy is the devil's stalking-horse under an affectation of simplicity and religion. L'Estrange. How much more abominable is it to make of him [Christ] and religion a stalking-horse, to get and enjoy the world! Bunyan.

grow desperate under any calamity or strait whatsoever. South. Ulysses made use of the pretense of natural infirmity to conceal the straits he was in at that time in his thoughts. Broome.

To make tense, or tight; to tighten. They straiten at each end the cord. Pope.

To make tense; to tighten; to distend forcibly. The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain. Shak.

Tense; not relaxed; as, a strict fiber.

To make tense; to strengthen. Toil strung the nerves, and purified the blood. Dryden.

Fig.: Extreme strain of mind or excitement of feeling; intense effort.

The quality or state of being tense, or strained to stiffness; tension; tenseness.

A muscle that stretches a part, or renders it tense.

A hydrocarbon obtained from coal-tar residues, and remarkable for its intense yellowish green fluorescence.

Tense.

A kind of grass (Phleum pratense) with long cylindrical spikes; -- called also herd's grass, in England, cat's-tail grass, and meadow cat's-tail grass. It is much prized for fodder. See Illustration in Appendix.