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To reduce, modify, or moderate, by mixture; to temper; to regulate, as temperature. If sweet with bitter . . . were not attempered still. Trench.

To use the Attic idiom or style; to conform to the customs or modes of thought of the Athenians.

Severe in modes of judging, or living, or acting; rigid; rigorous; stern; as, an austere man, look, life. From whom the austere Etrurian virtue rose. Dryden.

A verb which helps to form the voices, modes, and tenses of other verbs; -- called, also, an auxiliary verb; as, have, be, may, can, do, must, shall, and will, in English; être and avoir, in French; avere and essere, in Italian; estar and haber, in Spanish.

Actuated by avarice; greedy of gain; immoderately desirous of accumulating property.

for felling trees, chopping and splitting wood, hewing timber, etc. It is wielded by a wooden helve or handle, so fixed in a socket or eye as to be in the same plane with the blade. The broadax, or carpenter's ax, is an ax for hewing timber, made heavier than the chopping ax, and with a broader and thinner blade and a…

dagascar (Cheiromys Madagascariensis), remarkable for its long fingers, sharp nails, and rodent-like incisor teeth.

of China or of North America; false honeysuckle. The genus is scarcely distinct from Rhododendron.

The doctrine of a modern religious sect, which originated in Persia in 1843, being a mixture of Mohammedan, Christian, Jewish and Parsee elements.

The doctrine of a modern religious pantheistical sect in Persia, which was founded, about 1844, by Mirza Ali Mohammed ibn Rabhik (1820 -- 1850), who assumed the title of Bab-ed-Din (Per., Gate of the Faith). Babism is a mixture of Mohammedan, Christian, Jewish, and Parsi elements. This doctrine forbids concubinage and…

The upper part of a lode, or the roof of a horizontal underground passage.

the western United States, where horizontal strata (Tertiary deposits) have been often eroded into fantastic forms, and much intersected by canons, and where lack of wood, water, and forage increases the difficulty of traversing the country, whence the name, first given by the Canadian French, Mauvaises Terres (bad la…

A short wooden club having a deeply concave face, seldom used.

A kind of reddish, moderately acid, winter apple. [U.S.]

lead (Bot.), a small evergreen African and Asiatic tree of the terebinthine family (Balsamodendron Gileadense). Its leaves yield, when bruised, a strong aromatic scent; and from this tree is obtained the balm of Gilead of the shops, or balsam of Mecca. This has a yellowish or greenish color, a warm, bitterish, aromatic…

One of the leather or wooden cases in which the charges of powder were carried. [Obs.]

A vein or dike crossing a lode.

To adopt a foreign or barbarous mode of speech. The ill habit . . . of wretched barbarizing against the Latin and Greek idiom, with their untutored Anglicisms. Milton.

A form or mode of syllogism of which the first proposition is a universal affirmative, and the other two are particular negative.

e of nobility; originally, the possessor of a fief, who had feudal tenants under him; in modern times, in France and Germany, a nobleman next in rank below a count; in England, a nobleman of the lowest grade in the House of Lords, being next below a viscount.