Search the Dictionary

Any person who has the power of judging and determining, or ordaining, without control; one whose power of deciding and governing is not limited. For Jove is arbiter of both to man. Cowper.

Exercised according to one's own will or caprice, and therefore conveying a notion of a tendency to abuse the possession of power. Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused licentiousness. Washington.

To decide, or determine generally. South. There shall your swords and lances arbitrate The swelling difference of your settled hate. Shak.

A small tree or shrub. [Obs.] Spenser. Among thick-woven arborets, and flowers Imbordered on each bank. Milton.

Cunning or sly; sportively mischievous; roguish; as, an arch look, word, lad. [He] spoke his request with so arch a leer. Tatler.

An ancient, antiquated, or old-fashioned, word, expression, or idiom; a word or form of speech no longer in common use.

The vital principle or force which (according to the Paracelsians) presides over the growth and continuation of living beings; the anima mundi or plastic power of the old philosophers. [Obs.] Johnson.

Chief; primary; primordial. [Obs.] Cudworth.

The higher order of clergy in Russia, including metropolitans, archbishops, and bishops. Pinkerton.

Pertaining to, or contained in, archives or records. Tooke.

The place in which public records or historic documents are kept. Our words . . . . become records in God's court, and are laid up in his archives as witnesses. Gov. of Tongue.

A keeper of archives or records. [R.]

The office of an archon. Mitford.

The termination of many English words; as, coward, reynard, drunkard, mostly from the French, in which language this ending is of German origin, being orig. the same word as English hard. It usually has the sense of one who has to a high or excessive degree the quality expressed by the root; as, braggart, sluggard.…

present indicative plural of the substantive verb to be; but etymologically a different word from be, or was. Am, art, are, and is, all come from the root as.

The sunken space or court, giving ingress and affording light to the basement of a building.

Pertaining to the Areopagus. Mitford.

A ludicrous corruption of the Latin word ergo, therefore. Shak.

reasons offered in proof, to induce belief, or convince the mind; reasoning expressed in words; as, an argument about, concerning, or regarding a proposition, for or in favor of it, or against it.

which the supreme power is vested in the principal persons of a state, or in a privileged order; an oligarchy. The aristocracy of Venice hath admitted so many abuses, trough the degeneracy of the nobles, that the period of its duration seems approach. Swift.