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To give a mental existence to, as to something not real or actual; to imagine; to invent; hence, to pretend; to form and relate as if true. There are no such things done as thou sayest, but thou feignest them out of thine own heart. Neh. vi. 8. The poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods. Shak.…

n in abundance; fruitful; able to produce abundantly; prolific; fecund; productive; rich; inventive; as, fertile land or fields; a fertile mind or imagination. Though he in a fertile climate dwell. Shak.

itful; fruitfulness; productiveness; fecundity; richness; abundance of resources; fertile invention; quickness; readiness; as, the fertility of soil, or of imagination. "fertility of resource." E. Everett. And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps Corrupting in its own fertility. Shak. Thy very weeds are beautiful; thy w…

The act of feigning, inventing, or imagining; as, by a mere fiction of the mind. Bp. Stillingfleet.

An invention; a fiction; something feigned or imagined. Social figments, feints, and formalism. Mrs. Browning. It carried rather an appearance of figment and invention . . . than of truth and reality. Woodward.

laterally without danger of spilling; -- so called from Erlenmeyer, a German chemist who invented it. -- Florence flask. Etym: [From Florence in Italy.] (a) Same as Betty, n., 3. (b) A glass flask, round or pear-shaped, with round or flat bottom, and usually very thin to allow of heating solutions. -- Pocket flask,…

To form or shape out in any way; to produce; to frame; to invent. Those names that the schools forged, and put into the mouth of scholars, could never get admittance into common use. Locke. Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves. Tennyson.

Inventive; productive; capable. [Obs.] Shak.

A machine used in making paper; -- so named from an early inventor of improvements in this class of machinery.

To originate; to plan; to devise; to contrive; to compose; in a bad sense, to invent or fabricate, as something false. How many excellent reasonings are framed in the mind of a man of wisdom and study in a length of years. I. Watts.

tinguished mental superiority; uncommon intellectual power; especially, superior power of invention or origination of any kind, or of forming new combinations; as, a man of genius. Genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifyng power. Coleridge.

er at the breech of the bore in heavy ordnance, especially in mortars; -- named after the inventor.

ccessively shall have the same direction; -- called also Wollaston's goniometer, from the inventor.

A kind of dynamo-electric machine; -- so named from its French inventor, M. Gramme. Knight.

A scale invented by the Rev. Edmund Gunter (1581-1626), a professor of astronomy at Gresham College, London, who invented also Gunter's chain, and Gunter's quadrant.

A form of the above apparatus, invented by M. Foucault, mounted so delicately as to render visible the rotation of the earth, through the tendency of the rotating wheel to preserve a constant plane of rotation, independently of the earth's motion.

e of penmanship; as, a good, bad or running hand. Hence, a signature. I say she never did invent this letter; This is a man's invention and his hand. Shak. Some writs require a judge's hand. Burril.

urned about. Robynson (Utopia). For a thief it is so handsome as it may seem it was first invented for him. Spenser.

A process of hardening the face of steel, as armor plates, invented by Hayward A. Harvey of New Jersey, consisting in the additional carburizing of the face of a piece of low carbon steel by subjecting it to the action of carbon under long-continued pressure at a very high heat, and then to a violent chilling, as by a…

condition; as, a heaven of delight. "A heaven of beauty." Shak. "The brightest heaven of invention." Shak. O bed! bed! delicious bed! That heaven upon earth to the weary head! Hood.