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Severity of manners or life; extreme rigor or strictness; harsh discipline. The austerity of John the Baptist. Milton.

Severity; strictness; austerity. Shak.

sting; containing a joke, or abounding in jokes; merry; sportive; humorous. To quit their austerity and be jocose and pleasant with an adversary. Shaftesbury. All . . . jocose or comical airs should be excluded. I. Watts.

itate the manner of the Laconians, especially in brief, pithy speech, or in frugality and austerity.

Sourly; with sullen austerity.

Severity of life; austerity; voluntary submission to pain, abstinence, or mortification. The prince lived in this convent with all the rigor and austerity of a capuchin. Addison.

Holiness; devoutness; scrupulous austerity; sanctity; especially, outward or artificial saintliness; assumed or pretended holiness; hypocritical devoutness. Her pretense is a pilgrimage; . . . which holy undertaking with most austere sanctimony she accomplished. Shak.

Gravity or austerity; extreme strictness; rigor; harshness; as, the severity of a reprimand or a reproof; severity of discipline or government; severity of penalties. "Strict age, and sour severity." Milton.

s by an ingredient; hence, to soften; to mollify; to assuage; to soothe; to calm. Puritan austerity was so tempered by Dutch indifference, that mercy itself could not have dictated a milder system. Bancroft. Woman! lovely woman! nature made thee To temper man: we had been brutes without you. Otway. But thy fire Shall b…

established by Armand de Rancé in 1660 at the monastery of La Trappe in Normandy. Extreme austerity characterizes their discipline. They were introduced permanently into the United States in 1848, and have monasteries in Iowa and Kentucky.