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To roast or calcine so as to cause a crackling noise; as, to decrepitate salt.

taining to deduction; capable of being deduced from premises; deducible. All knowledge of causes is deductive. Glanvill. Notions and ideas . . . used in a deductive process. Whewell.

p, profound, mysterious, secretive, etc.; depth; profundity; -- opposed to shallowness. Because they had no deepness of earth. Matt. xiii. 5.

To cause fail. [Obs.]

Act of abandoning a person or cause to which one is bound by allegiance or duty, or to which one has attached himself; desertion; failure in duty; a falling away; apostasy; backsliding. "Defection and falling away from God." Sir W. Raleigh. The general defection of the whole realm. Sir J. Davies.

aintain against force or argument; to uphold; to guard; as, to defend a town; to defend a cause; to defend character; to defend the absent; -- sometimes followed by from or against; as, to defend one's self from, or against, one's enemies. The lord mayor craves aid . . . to defend the city. Shak. God defend the right!…

Capable of being defended; as, a defensible city, or a defensible cause.

ovocation; a summons to combat. A war without a just defiance made. Dryden. Stood for her cause, and flung defiance down. Tennyson.

To cause to burn with sudden and sparkling combustion, as by the action of intense heat; to burn or vaporize suddenly; as, to deflagrate refractory metals in the oxyhydrogen flame.

To cause to turn aside; to bend; as, rays of light are often deflected. Sitting with their knees deflected under them. Lord (1630).

Causing deflection. Deflective forces, forces that cause a body to deviate from its course.

A gradual deterioration, from natural causes, of any class of animals or plants or any particular or organs; hereditary degradation of type.

The state of being affected by slight causes; sensitiveness; as, the delicacy of a chemist's balance.

Affected by slight causes; showing slight changes; as, a delicate thermometer.

To cause to melt away; to dissolve; to consume; to waste. [Obs.] Dilapidating, or rather deliquating, his bishopric. Fuller.

Any substance which tends to cause delirium.

Fig.: Anything which overwhelms, or causes great destruction. "The deluge of summer." Lowell. A fiery deluge fed With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed. Milton. As I grub up some quaint old fragment of a [London] street, or a house, or a shop, or tomb or burial ground, which has still survived in the deluge. F. Harrison.…

A yellow-green, transparent variety of garnet found in the Urals. It is valued as a gem because of its brilliancy of luster, whence the name.

onstrable manner; incontrovertibly; clearly. Cases that demonstrably concerned the public cause. Clarendon.

To cause delay to; to put off. [Obs.] He demands a fee, And then demurs me with a vain delay. Quarles.