Search the Dictionary

ualities fabled to belong to the god Mercury; swift; active; sprightly; fickle; volatile; changeable; as, a mercurial youth; a mercurial temperament. A mercurial man Who fluttered over all things like a fan. Byron.

Subject to change; changeable; variable.

Easily moved in feeling, purpose, or direction; excitable; changeable; fickle. Testament of Love. The quick and mobile curiosity of her disposition. Hawthorne.

e or alteration, either in form, state, or essential character; susceptibility of change; changeableness; inconstancy; variation. Plato confessed that the heavens and the frame of the world are corporeal, and therefore subject to mutability. Stillingfleet.

Capable of alteration; subject to change; changeable in form, qualities, or nature. Things of the most accidental and mutable nature. South.

Of, pertaining to, or like, opal in appearance; having changeable colors like those of the opal.

Capable of being permuted; exchangeable. -- Per*mut"a*ble*ness, n. -- Per*mut"a*bly, adv.

To predetermine or foreordain; to appoint or ordain beforehand by an unchangeable purpose or decree; to preëlect. Whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son. Rom. viii. 29.

Changeable in form; resembling a Proteus, or an amoeba.

A changeable protozoan; an amoeba.

Mutually interchangeable. These two rules will render a definition reciprocal with the thing defined. I. Watts.

To cause to exist again. Those colors are unchangeable, and whenever all those rays with those their colors are mixed again they reproduce the same white light as before. Sir I. Newton.

ark or distinguished with red; to arrange as in a rubric; to establish in a settled and unchangeable form. Foxe. A system . . . according to which the thoughts of men were to be classed and rubricated forever after. Hare.

Woven in such a way as to produce an effect of variegation, of changeable tints, or of being figured; as, shot silks. See Shoot, v. t., 8.

Wanton; restive; freakish; volatile; changeable; fickle. "Skittish Fortune's hall." Shak. -- Skit"tish*ly, adv. -- Skit"tish*ness, n.

Unstable; changeable; mutable; uncertain; inconstant; fickle. "The slippery state of kings." Denham.

Constant in feeling, purpose, or pursuit; not fickle, changeable, or wavering; not easily moved or persuaded to alter a purpose; resolute; as, a man steady in his principles, in his purpose, or in the pursuit of an object.

Fig.: Formed in a fixed, unchangeable manner; as, stereotyped opinions. Our civilization, with its stereotyped ways and smooth conventionalities. J. C. Shairp.

y. All things sublunary are subject to change. Dryden. All sublunary comforts imitate the changeableness, as well as feel the influence, of the planet they are under. South.

de, and usually seen only by the telescope, but sometimes by the naked eye. They are very changeable in their figure and dimensions, and vary in size from mere apparent points to spaces of 50,000 miles in diameter. The term sun spots is often used to include bright spaces (called faculæ) as well as dark spaces (called…