Search the Dictionary

or purloin from the writings of another; to appropriate without due acknowledgement (the ideas or expressions of another).

One who purloins another's expressions or ideas, and offers them as his own; a plagiarist. Dryden.

An ideal surface, conceived as coinciding with, or containing, some designated astronomical line, circle, or other curve; as, the plane of an orbit; the plane of the ecliptic, or of the equator.

uality or state of being flat, thin, or insipid; flat commonness; triteness; staleness of ideas of language. To hammer one golden grain of wit into a sheet of infinite platitude. Motley.

language in speaking or writing; the use of more words than are necessary to express the idea; as, I saw it with my own eyes.

Of or pertaining to plutocracy; as, plutocratic ideas. Bagehot.

ial group including many parasitic Entomostraca, together with the horseshoe crabs (Limuloidea).

To write as a poet; to compose verse; to idealize. I versify the truth, not poetize. Donne.

The art of apprehending and interpreting ideas by the faculty of imagination; the art of idealizing in thought and in expression. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. Coleridge.

s on the face of it that the contract it embodies is a pretended insurance, founded on an ideal risk, where the insured has no interest in anything insured.

One of the Polycystidea.

ue representing the actual features or person of an individual; -- in distinction from an ideal bust or statue.

pendent on changing circumstances or relations; absolute; -- opposed to relative; as, the idea of beauty is not positive, but depends on the different tastes individuals.

A river tortoise; one of a group of tortoises (Potamites, or Trionychoidea) having a soft shell, webbed feet, and a sharp beak. See Trionyx.

sired, or that constitute richness; as, poverty of soil; poverty of the blood; poverty of ideas. Poverty grass (Bot.), a name given to several slender grasses (as Aristida dichotoma, and Danthonia spicata) which often spring up on old and worn-out fields.

Capable of being turned to use or account; useful, in distinction from ideal or theoretical; as, practical chemistry. "Man's practical understanding." South. "For all practical purposes." Macaulay.

Popularly, any modern artist thought to be a would-be restorer of early ideas or methods, as one of the German painters often called Nazarenes, or one who paints and draws with extreme minuteness of detail.

To conceive, or form an opinion of, beforehand; to form a previous notion or idea of. In a dead plain the way seemeth the longer, because the eye hath preconceived it shorter than the truth. Bacon.

Previous sensation, notion, or idea. [Obs.] Dr. H. More.

rward or set forth; hence, fitted to be introduced to another, or to go into society; as, ideas that are presentable in simple language; she is not presentable in such a gown.