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Orderly arrangement; preparation; provision. [Obs.] Spenser. They had made their ordinance Of victual, and of other purveyance. Chaucer.

According to established order; methodical; settled; regular. "The ordinary forms of law." Addison.

Well-ordered; orderly; regular; methodical. "A life blissful and ordinate." Chaucer. Ordinate figure (Math.), a figure whose sides and angles are equal; a regular figure.

In an ordinate manner; orderly. Chaucer. Skelton.

The act of setting apart to an office in the Christian ministry; the conferring of holy orders.

Tending to ordain; directing; giving order. [R.] Gauden.

having a special function, act, office, or relation; to systematize; to get into working order; -- applied to products of the human intellect, or to human institutions and undertakings, as a science, a government, an army, a war, etc. This original and supreme will organizes the government. Cranch.

Fig.: To correct or set right by recurring to first principles; to arrange in order; to orientate.

To arrange in order; to dispose or place (a body) so as to show its relation to other bodies, or the relation of its parts among themselves. A crystal is orientated when placed in its proper position so as to exhibit its symmetry. E. S. Dana.

Fig.: A return to first principles; an orderly arrangement. The task of orientation undertaken in this chapter. L. F. Ward.

Pertaining to the origin or beginning; preceding all others; first in order; primitive; primary; pristine; as, the original state of man; the original laws of a country; the original inventor of a process. His form had yet not lost All her original brightness. Milton.

sition of the whole civill and political mass, for the purpose of originating a new civil order. Burke.

An extinct order of birds. It includes only the Archæopteryx.

An order of herbivorous dinosaurs with birdlike characteristics in the skeleton, esp. in the pelvis and hind legs, which in some genera had only three functional toes, and supported the body in walking as in Iguanodon. See Illust. in Appendix.

An order of extinct flying reptiles; -- called also Pterosauria.

An extinct order of reptiles which stood erect on the hind legs, and resembled birds in the structure of the feet, pelvis, and other parts.

An order of mandibulate insects including grasshoppers, locusts, cockroaches, etc. See Illust. under Insect.

A curve whose contact with a given curve, at a given point, is of a higher order (or involves the equality of a greater number of successive differential coefficients of the ordinates of the curves taken at that point) than that of any other curve of the same kind.

The showing of the sacrament on the altar in order that it may receive the adoration of the communicants.

The operation of breaking a bone in order to correct deformity.