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ium cyanate (Chem.), a remarkable white crystalline substance, NH4.O.CN, which passes, on standing, to the organic compound, urea, CO.(NH)2.

Not clear to the understanding; not easily The dark problems of existence. Shairp. What may seem dark at the first, will afterward be found more plain. Hooker. What's your dark meaning, mouse, of this light word Shak.

Unwillingness to hear; voluntary rejection of what is addressed to the understanding. Nervous deafness, a variety of deafness dependent upon morbid change in some portion of the nervous system, especially the auditory nerve.

Liable to defect; imperfect. [R.] "A defectible understanding." Jer. Taylor.

e act of reducing in rank, character, or reputation, or of abasing; a lowering from one's standing or rank in office or society; diminution; as, the degradation of a peer, a knight, a general, or a bishop. He saw many removes and degradations in all the other offices of which he had been possessed. Clarendon.…

unds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Shak. A fool hath no delight in understanding. Prov. xviii. 2.

To portray to the mind or understanding by words; to set forth; to describe. Customs or habits delineated with great accuracy. Walpole.

Aberration of mind; delirium. J. Motley. Deliration or alienation of the understanding. Mede.

In spite of; against, or in defiance of; notwithstanding; as, despite his prejudices.

reduce to a plan or method; to receive in the mind and consider carefully; to get an understanding of; to comprehend. Feelingly digest the words you speak in prayer. Sir H. Sidney. How shall this bosom multiplied digest The senate's courtesy Shak.

weak perception; obtuse. Mine eye also is dim by reason of sorrow. Job xvii. 7. The understanding is dim. Rogers.

An order of extinct mesozoic reptiles, mostly of large size (whence the name). Notwithstanding their size, they present birdlike characters in the skeleton, esp. in the pelvis and hind limbs. Some walked on their three-toed hind feet, thus producing the large "bird tracks," so-called, of mesozoic sandstones; others wer…

To see by the eye or by the understanding; to perceive and recognize; as, to discern a difference. And [I] beheld among the simple ones, I discerned among the youths, a young man void of understanding. Prov. vii. 7. Our unassisted sight . . . is not acute enough to discern the minute texture of visible objects. Beattie…

Capable of being discerned by the eye or the understanding; as, a star is discernible by the eye; the identity of difference of ideas is discernible by the understanding. The effect of the privations and sufferings . . . was discernible to the last in his temper and deportment. Macaulay.

s deformity in the body; the studies of youth should not be disproportional to their understanding.

e mentally or morally. Wrath and malice, envy and revenge, do darken and distort the understandings of men. Tillotson.

Deprived of wits or understanding; distracted. [Obs.] Drayton.

to give the vertigo to; to confuse. If the jangling of thy bells had not dizzied thy understanding. Sir W. Scott.

mini). The first seven letters of the alphabet are used for this purpose, the same letter standing for Sunday during a whole year (except in leap year, when the letter is changed at the end of February). After twenty-eight years the same letters return in the same order. The dominical letters go backwards one day every…

ite number of times. Derived from an entertainment using dominoes arranged in a row, each standing on edge and therefore easily knocked over; when the first is made to fall against the next, it starts a sequence which ends when all have fallen. For amusement, people have arranged such sequences involving thousands of d…