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To apply, as laws to particular cases; to administer; to execute; to manage; to direct. While you dispense the laws, and guide the state. Dryden.

To deprive of personality or individuality. [R.] We multiply; we dispersonate ourselves. Hare.

To deal out; to assign to a use; to bestow for an object or purpose; to apply; to employ; to dispose of. Importuned him that what he designed to bestow on her funeral, he would rather dispose among the poor. Evelyn.

Cut deeply into many lobes or divisions; as, a dissected leaf.

That which distinguishes one thing from another; distinguishing quality; sharply defined difference; as, the distinction between real and apparent good. The distinction betwixt the animal kingdom and the inferior parts of matter. Locke.

To plunge into water head foremost; to thrust the body under, or deeply into, water or other fluid. It is not that pearls fetch a high price because men have dived for them. Whately.

Fig.: One who goes deeply into a subject, study, or business. "A diver into causes." Sir H. Wotton.

The art or practice of applying tests to ascertain the nature, quality, etc., of objects, as of metals or ores, of medicines, or of facts pertaining to physiology.

To treat as a physician does; to apply remedies to; to repair; as, to doctor a sick man or a broken cart. [Colloq.]

One who would apply to political or other practical concerns the abstract doctrines or the theories of his own philosophical system; a propounder of a new set of opinions; a dogmatic theorist. Used also adjectively; as, doctrinaire notions.

To increase by adding an equal number, quantity, length, value, or the like; multiply by two; to double a sum of money; to double a number, or length. Double six thousand, and then treble that. Shak.

ch; to select. Some royal seminary in Upper Egypt, from whence they drafted novices to supply their colleges and temples. Holwell.

To drink drams; to ply with drams. [Low] Johnson. Thackeray.

A mild vesicatory; a sinapism; as, to apply draughts to the feet.

a locomotive to which the connecting rods of the engine are attached; -- called also, simply, driver. See Illust. of Locomotive.

A passerine bird of the family Dicruridæ. They are usually black with a deeply forked tail. They are natives of Asia, Africa, and Australia; -- called also drongo shrikes.

lls in drops; the excrement or dung of animals. Dropping bottle, an instrument used to supply small quantities of a fluid to a test tube or other vessel. -- Dropping fire, a continued irregular discharge of firearms. -- Dropping tube, a tube for ejecting any liquid in drops.

ng little humidity or none; arid; not wet or moist; deficient in the natural or normal supply of moisture, as rain or fluid of any kind; -- said especially: (a) Of the weather: Free from rain or mist. The weather, we agreed, was too dry for the season. Addison.

Easily led; tractable; complying; yielding to motives, persuasion, or instruction; as, a ductile people. Addison. Forms their ductile minds To human virtues. Philips.

Continuing; not completed; implying duration. Its durative tense, which expresses the thought of it as going on. J. Byrne.