Search the Dictionary

Thoughtful, sober, or sad; employed in serious reflection; given to, or favorable to, earnest or melancholy musing. The pensive secrecy of desert cell. Milton. Anxious cares the pensive nymph oppressed. Pope.

The act of tapping or striking the surface of the body in order to learn the condition of the parts beneath by the sound emitted or the sensation imparted to the fingers. Percussion is said to be immediate if the blow is directly upon the body; if some interventing substance, as a pleximeter, is, used, it is called med…

The quality of being perspicuous to the understanding; clearness of expression or thought.

Criticism; grammatical learning. [R.] Johnson.

A lover of learning; a scholar. Chesterfield.

Having love of learning or letters.

The love of learning or letters.

ertaining to pictures; illustrated by pictures; forming pictures; representing with the clearness of a picture; as, a pictorial dictionary; a pictorial imagination. "Pictorial rhetoric." Ruskin. -- Pic*to"ri*al*ly, adv.

Forming, or fitted to form, a good or pleasing picture; representing with the clearness or ideal beauty appropriate to a picture; expressing that peculiar kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture, natural or artificial; graphic; vivid; as, a picturesque scene or attitude; picturesque language. What is picturesque…

of the Supreme Being, and love of his character; loving obedience to the will of God, and earnest devotion to his service. Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. Rambler.

f great pitch and moment. Shak. To lowest pitch of abject fortune. Milton. He lived when learning was at its highest pitch. Addison. The exact pitch, or limits, where temperance ends. Sharp.

quality, or allowance; an inconsiderable salary or compensation. "The small pittance of learning they received." Swift. The inconsiderable pittance of faithful professors. Fuller.

endering plebeian; the act of vulgarizing. [R.] You begin with the attempt to popularize learning . . . but you will end in the plebification of knowledge. Coleridge.

Bent; turn; direction; bias. The late learners can not so well take the ply. Bacon. Boswell, and others of Goldsmith's contemporaries, . . . did not understand the secret plies of his character. W. Irving. The czar's mind had taken a strange ply, which it retained to the last. Macaulay.

One versed in various learning. [R.]

Pertaining to polymathy; acquainted with many branches of learning.

One versed in many sciences; a person of various learning.

The knowledge of many arts and sciences; variety of learning. Johnson.

ld Testament, the gradual development of polytheism from the primitive monotheism may be learned. Shaff-Herzog.

ng; to embarrass by questioning or scrutiny; to bring to a stand. A question wherewith a learned Pharisee thought to pose and puzzle him. Barrow.