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The first step towards the attainment of a result; approach made to gain favor, to form an acquaintance, to adjust a difference, etc.; an overture; a tender; an offer; -- usually in the plural. [He] made the like advances to the dissenters. Swift.

Coming; any important arrival; approach. Death's dreadful advent. Young. Expecting still his advent home. Tennyson.

A summons to arms, as on the approach of an enemy. Arming to answer in a night alarm. Shak.

Aroused to vigilance; excited by fear of approaching danger; agitated; disturbed; as, an alarmed neighborhood; an alarmed modesty. The white pavilions rose and fell On the alarmed air. Longfellow.

To near; to approach. [Archaic]

To impeach; to accuse; to asperse; to inform against; to reproach. [Obs.] And oft of error did himself appeach. Spenser.

To approach. [Archaic] Ld. Lytton.

A drawing nigh; approach. [R.] Bp. Hall.

Approaching; proximate; nearly resembling.

The act of approximating; a drawing, advancing or being near; approach; also, the result of approximating. The largest capacity and the most noble dispositions are but an approximation to the proper standard and true symmetry of human nature. I. Taylor.

Approaching; approximate. -- Ap*prox"i*ma*tive*ly, adv. -- Ap*prox"i*ma*tive*ness, n.

A driving or running towards; approach; impulse; also, the act of striking against. In all consonants there is an appulse of the organs. Holder.

many abuses, trough the degeneracy of the nobles, that the period of its duration seems approach. Swift.

An approach. [Obs.] The house has a corner arrival. H. Walpole.

Expressing concession. (Often approaching though in meaning). We wish, however, to avail ourselves of the interest, transient as it may be, which this work has excited. Macaulay.

A line which approaches nearer to some curve than assignable distance, but, though infinitely extended, would never meet it. Asymptotes may be straight lines or curves. A rectilinear asymptote may be conceived as a tangent to the curve at an infinite distance.

great atrocity, great atrocity. Revelations . . . so atrocious that nothing in history approaches them. De Quincey.

To draw to, or cause to tend to; esp. to cause to approach, adhere, or combine; or to cause to resist divulsion, separation, or decomposition. All bodies and all parts of bodies mutually attract themselves and one another. Derham.

To speak reproachfully of; to twit; to upbraid. [Obs.]

A person dispatched before another person or company, to give notice of his or their approach.