Search the Dictionary

The form of anything; shape; outline; appearance. Flowers have all exquisite figures. Bacon.

Adorned with figures; marked with figures; as, figured muslin.

The figure, statue, or bust, on the prow of a ship.

To arrange or dispose in a certain form, figure, or shape. Bentley.

To delineate. [Obs.] These two stones as they are here defigured. Weever.

To mar the figure of; to render less complete, perfect, or beautiful in appearance; to deface; to deform. Disfiguring not God's likeness, but their own. Milton.

Act of disfiguring, or state of being disfigured; deformity. Milton.

One who disfigures.

ounce, by antecedent types and similitudes; to foreshadow. "Whom all the various types prefigured." South.

The act of prefiguring; prefiguration; also, that which is prefigured. Carlyle.

To figure again. Shak.

, to change to something exalted and glorious; to give an ideal form to. [Jesus] was transfigured before them; and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. Matt. xvii. 2.

Certain figures appearing on etched meteoric iron; -- so called after A. B. Widmanstätten, of Vienna, who first described them in

A mystical word or collocation of letters written as in the figure. Worn on an amulet it was supposed to ward off fever. At present the word is used chiefly in jest to denote something without meaning; jargon.

A figure of speech employed when a speaker having begun to say a thing stops abruptly: thus, "He is a man of so much honor and candor, and of such generosity -- but I need say no more."

turally accompany it; as the solidity of marble when contemplated apart from its color or figure. -- Abstract terms, those which express abstract ideas, as beauty, whiteness, roundness, without regarding any object in which they exist; or abstract terms are the names of orders, genera or species of things, in which th…

s the form of a tree by itself, or the color of the leaves as separate from their size or figure, the act is called abstraction. So, also, when it considers whiteness, softness, virtue, existence, as separate from any particular objects.

; as, the military academy at West Point; a riding academy; the Academy of Music. Academy figure (Paint.), a drawing usually half life-size, in crayon or pencil, after a nude model.

part, or parts, accompanying the voice or a principal instrument; also, the harmony of a figured bass. P. Cyc.

The shadow or outlines of a figure.