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See Troy ounce, under Troy weight, above, and under Ounce.

To advance. [Obs.] Spenser.

To give up absolutely; to forsake entirely ; to renounce utterly; to relinquish all connection with or concern on; to desert, as a person to whom one owes allegiance or fidelity; to quit; to surrender. Hope was overthrown, yet could not be abandoned. I. Taylor.

To renounce; to relinquish; -- said of authority, a trust, duty, right, etc. He abdicates all right to be his own governor. Burke. The understanding abdicates its functions. Froude.

To renounce upon oath; to forswear; to disavow; as, to abjure allegiance to a prince. To abjure the realm, is to swear to abandon it forever.

Without notice to prepare the mind for the event; sudden; hasty; unceremonious. "The cause of your abrupt departure." Shak.

Suddenness; unceremonious haste or vehemence; as, abruptness of style or manner.

om the consequences of guilt or such ties as it would be sin or guilt to violate; to pronounce free; as, to absolve a subject from his allegiance; to absolve an offender, which amounts to an acquittal and remission of his punishment. Halifax was absolved by a majority of fourteen. Macaulay.

To pronounce with an accent or with accents.

To give public notice of; to announce publicly, esp. by a printed notice; as, to advertise goods for sale, a lost article, the sailing day of a vessel, a political meeting.

Depending on some uncertain contingency; as, an aleatory contract. Bouvier.

Capable of being altered. Our condition in this world is mutable and uncertain, alterable by a thousand accidents. Rogers.

The quality or state of being ambiguous; doubtfulness or uncertainty, particularly as to the signification of language, arising from its admitting of more than one meaning; an equivocal word or expression. No shadow of ambiguity can rest upon the course to be pursued. I. Taylor. The words are of single signification, w…

Doubtful or uncertain, particularly in respect to signification; capable of being understood in either of two or more possible senses; equivocal; as, an ambiguous course; an ambiguous expression. What have been thy answers What but dark, Ambiguous, and with double sense deluding Milton.

A phrase, discourse, or proposition, susceptible of two interpretations; and hence, of uncertain meaning. It differs from equivocation, which arises from the twofold sense of a single term.

less emphatically. In such expressions as "twice an hour," "once an age," a shilling an ounce (see 2d A, 2), it has a distributive force, and is equivalent to each, every.

; as, wine and honey, ana (or, contracted, aa), ., that is, of wine and honey, each, two ounces. An apothecary with a . . . long bill of anas. Dryden.

A ban or curse pronounced with religious solemnity by ecclesiastical authority, and accompanied by excommunication. Hence: Denunciation of anything as accursed. [They] denounce anathemas against unbelievers. Priestley.

Anathematization. [Obs.] We find a law of Justinian forbidding anathematisms to be pronounced against the Jewish Hellenists. J. Taylor.

To pronounce an anathema against; to curse. Hence: To condemn publicly as something accursed. Milton.