Search the Dictionary

To make ridiculous and contemptible. [Obs.] I do now fool myself, to let imagination jade me. Shak.

Shak. The Right Honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts. Sheridan.

d in India for its fiber. -- Jew's pitch, asphaltum; bitumen. -- The Wandering Jew, an imaginary personage, who, for his cruelty to the Savior during his passion, is doomed to wander on the earth till Christ's second coming.

One of supreme magistrates, with both civil and military powers, who governed Israel for more than four hundred years.

inment; a revel. All those snug junketings and public gormandizings for which the ancient magistrates were equally famous with their modern successors. W. Irving. The apostle would have no reveling or junketing upon the altar. South.

An imaginary spirit of the waters, horselike in form, vulgarly believed to warn, by preternatural noises and lights, those who are to be drowned. Jamieson.

A chief magistrate in some of the Swiss cantons.

A chief magistrate in rural districts. He was replaced in 1827 by "resident magistrates."

Of or pertaining to Laputa, an imaginary flying island described in Gulliver's Travels as the home of chimerical philosophers. Hence, fanciful; preposterous; absurd in science or philosophy. "Laputan ideas." G. Eliot.

raight bar of wood, in which is imbedded a small spirit level. -- Level of the sea, the imaginary level from which heights and depths are calculated, taken at a mean distance between high and low water. -- Line of levels, a connected series of measurements, by means of a level, along a given line, as of a railroad, t…

bore an ax and fasces or rods, as ensigns of his office. His duty was to attend the chief magistrates when they appeared in public, to clear the way, and cause due respect to be paid to them, also to apprehend and punish criminals. Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power. Milton.

representative of, or substitute for, another in the performance of any duty. The lawful magistrate, who is the vicegerent or lieutenant of God. Abp. Bramhall.

A nerve, or string, that is imagined to be essential to life. Daniel.

Impotence caused by magic or charms. [Obs.]

mbles; a portrait. [How he looked] the likenesses of him which still remain enable us to imagine. Macaulay.

Of or having to the imaginary island of Lilliput described by Swift, or to its inhabitants.

Hence: Any real or imaginary place of restraint or confinement; a prison; as, to put a man in limbo.

Giving a strict or literal construction; unimaginative; matter-of fast; -- applied to persons. Literal contract (Law), contract of which the whole evidence is given in writing. Bouvier. -- Literal equation (Math.), an equation in which known quantities are expressed either wholly or in part by means of letters; -- dis…

ervals; a madman; a person of unsound mind. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact. Shak.

A kind of erratic melancholy, in which the patient imagines himself a wolf, and imitates the actions of that animal.