Search the Dictionary

tate in which the thoughts, expressions, and actions are wild, irregular, and incoherent; mental aberration; a roving or wandering of the mind, -- usually dependent on a fever or some other disease, and so distinguished from mania, or madness.

Concealment; seclusion; retirement. The delitescence of mental activities. Sir W. Hamilton.

Concealment; seclusion. The mental organization of the novelist must be characterized, to speak craniologically, by an extraordinary development of the passion for delitescency. Sir W. Scott.

Dementia; loss of mental powers. See Insanity.

; madness; esp. that form which consists in weakness or total loss of thought and reason; mental imbecility; idiocy.

An ornamental tooling like lace. Knight.

A small square block or projection in cornices, a number of which are ranged in an ornamental band; -- used particularly in the Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite orders.

ed for its size and beauty as well as for its timber, and also grown in England as an ornamental tree.

districts composed of several arrondissements into which the country is divided for governmental purposes; as, the Department of the Loire.

f order, or the state of being deranged; disarrangement; disorder; confusion; especially, mental disorder; insanity.

variety of fluor spar, found in Derbyshire, England, and wrought into vases and other ornamental work.

Obtained by derivation; derived; not radical, original, or fundamental; originating, deduced, or formed from something else; secondary; as, a derivative conveyance; a derivative word. Derivative circulation, a modification of the circulation found in some parts of the body, in which the arteries empty directly into the…

To enter mentally; to retire. [Poetic] [He] with holiest meditations fed, Into himself descended. Milton.

Readiness in the use or control of the mental powers; quickness and skill in managing any complicated or difficult affair; adroitness. His wisdom . . . was turned . . . into a dexterity to deliver himself. Bacon. He had conducted his own defense with singular boldness and dexterity. Hallam.

Originally, an ornamental head band or fillet, worn by Eastern monarchs as a badge of royalty; hence (later), also, a crown, in general. "The regal diadem." Milton.

Pertaining to dialectics; logical; argumental.

Fundamental principle; axiom; maxim. [Obs.] Sciences concluding from dignities, and principles known by themselves. Sir T. Browne.

The manifoldness with which the fundamental units of time, length, and mass are involved in determining the units of other physical quantities. Thus, since the unit of velocity varies directly as the unit of length and inversely as the unit of time, the dimensions of velocity are said to be length ÷ time; the dimension…

Crystallizing under two forms fundamentally different, while having the same chemical composition.

To injure the interest of; to be detrimental to.