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A woman; -- used in contempt. Burton.

Moderately good or agreeable; not contemptible; not very excellent or pleasing, but such as can be borne or received without disgust, resentment, or opposition; passable; as, a tolerable administration; a tolerable entertainment; a tolerable translation. Dryden. -- Tol"er*a*ble*ness, n. -- Tol"er*a*bly, adv.…

Tossing the head, as in scorn or pride; hence, proud; contemptuous; scornful; affectedly indifferent; as, a tossy commonplace. [R.] C. Kingsley.

To expose to contempt or shame; to represent as blamable; to calumniate; to vilify; to defame. The best stratagem that Satan hath . . . is by traducing the form and manner of them [prayers], to bring them into contempt. Hooker. He had the baseness . . . to traduce me in libel. Dryden.

Fig.: To treat with contempt and insult. Cowper.

A transcriber; -- used in contempt. He [Aristotle] has suffered vastly from the transcribblers, as all authors of great brevity necessarily must. Gray.

f birds, esp. the males. Shak. To tread on or upon. (a) To trample; to set the foot on in contempt. "Thou shalt tread upon their high places." Deut. xxxiii. 29. (b) to follow closely. "Year treads on year." Wordsworth. -- To tread upon the heels of, to follow close upon. "Dreadful consequences that tread upon the heel…

The entrails; hence, humorously or in contempt, the belly; -- generally used in the plural. Howell.

A drunkard; -- so called humorously, or in contempt.

r, etc. " Turn these ideas about in your mind." I. Watts. -- To turn off. (a) To dismiss contemptuously; as, to turn off a sycophant or a parasite. (b) To give over; to reduce. (c) To divert; to deflect; as, to turn off the thoughts from serious subjects; to turn off a joke. (d) To accomplish; to perform, as work. (e)…

An exclamation indicating check, rebuke, or contempt; as, tush, tush! do not speak of it. Tush, say they, how should God perceive it Bk. of Com. Prayer (Ps. lxxiii. 11).

To treat with contempt. [Obs.] Spenser.

Hence, in contempt, noxious human beings. You are my prisoners, base vermin. Hudibras.

pecially, a writer of commonplace poetry; a poetaster; a rhymer; -- used humorously or in contempt.

An authoritative prohibition or negative; a forbidding; an interdiction. This contemptuous veto of her husband's on any intimacy with her family. G. Eliot.

An act of irreverence or desecration; profanation or contemptuous treatment of sacred things; as, the violation of a church. Udall.

To baptize; -- used in contempt by the Reformers. [Obs.] Tyndale.

A child; a youth; -- jocosely or in contempt. That awkward whelp with his money bags would have made his entrance. Addison.

A Whig; -- a cant term applied in contempt to Scotch Presbyterians. [Scot.] Sir W. Scott.

A petty or inferior Whig; -- used in contempt. Spectator.