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using stratagem to accomplish a purpose; fraudulent skill or dexterity; deceit; craft. Discourage cunning in a child; cunning is the ape of wisdom. Locke. We take cunning for a sinister or crooked wisdom. Bacon.

iticism. "This doctrine cuts up all government by the roots." Locke. (c) To afflict; to discourage; to demoralize; as, the death of his friend cut him up terribly. [Colloq.] Thackeray.

Entertaining discourse. [Obs.] Chaucer.

deaden; to cloud; to check or restrain, as action or vigor; to make dull; to weaken; to discourage. "To damp your tender hopes." Akenside. Usury dulls and damps all industries, improvements, and new inventions, wherein money would be stirring if it were not for this slug. Bacon. How many a day has been damped and darke…

check by fear of danger; to cow; to intimidate; to dishearten. Some presences daunt and discourage us. Glanvill.

oming, in words or behavior; propriety of form in social intercourse, in actions, or in discourse; proper formality; becoming ceremony; seemliness; hence, freedom from obscenity or indecorum; modesty. Observances of time, place, and of decency in general. Burke. Immodest words admit of no defense, For want of decency i…

A set or harangue; declamatory discourse.

To leave out of account; to omit. [Obs.] Defaulting unnecessary and partial discourses. Hales.

To cast down the spirits of; to dispirit; to discourage; to dishearten. Nor think, to die dejects my lofty mind. Pope.

A discourse in which a question is discussed, or weighed and examined. Bacon.

A discourse or treatise on trees; the natural history of trees.

One who discourses on the skin and its diseases; one versed in dermatology.

A discourse formed on its theme, like variations on a musical air; a comment or comments. Upon that simplest of themes how magnificent a descant! De Quincey.

The state of desponding; loss of hope and cessation of effort; discouragement; depression or dejection of the mind. The unhappy prince seemed, during some days, to be sunk in despondency. Macaulay.

To discourse in dialogue. Fotherby.

for the expression of ideas; the construction, disposition, and application of words in discourse, with regard to clearness, accuracy, variety, etc.; mode of expression; language; as, the diction of Chaucer's poems. His diction blazes up into a sudden explosion of prophetic grandeur. De Quincey.

To sink; to faint; to pine; to languish, with weakness, discouragement, love, etc. His heart died within, and he became as a stone. 1 Sam. xxv. 37. The young men acknowledged, in love letters, that they died for Rebecca. Tatler.

The act of digressing or deviating, esp. from the main subject of a discourse; hence, a part of a discourse deviating from its main design or subject. The digressions I can not excuse otherwise, than by the confidence that no man will read them. Sir W. Temple.

Prolixity; diffuse discourse. [Obs.] "What needeth greater dilatation" Chaucer.

of the motion of a celestial body. Direct action. (Mach.) See Direct-acting. -- Direct discourse (Gram.), the language of any one quoted without change in its form; as, he said "I can not come;" -- correlative to indirect discourse, in which there is change of form; as, he said that he could not come. They are often c…