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sing; urgent; importunate; earnest. Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer. Rom. xii. 12. I am beginning to be very instant for some sort of occupation. Carlyle.

Quality of being instantaneous. Shenstone.

Done or occurring in an instant, or without any perceptible duration of time; as, the passage of electricity appears to be instantaneous. His reason saw With instantaneous view, the truth of things. Thomson.

Immediately; instantly; at once; as, he left instanter.

With urgency or importunity; earnestly; pressingly. "They besought him instantly." Luke vii. 4.

Happening at the same instant. C. Darwin.

cquire a title, riches, knowledge, skill, good or bad habits. No virtue is acquired in an instant, but step by step. Barrow. Descent is the title whereby a man, on the death of his ancestor, acquires his estate, by right of representation, as his heir at law. Blackstone.

place of what is removed; to rectify. Mar not the thing that can not be amended. Shak. An instant emergency, granting no possibility for revision, or opening for amended thought. De Quincey. We shall cheer her sorrows, and amend her blood, by wedding her to a Norman. Sir W. Scott. To amend a bill, to make some change i…

NO2, used in medicine as a heart stimulant and a vasodilator. The inhalation of its vapor instantly produces flushing of the face.

An instrument for the instantaneous self-recording or printing of time. Knight.

Double location; the state or power of being in two places at the same instant; -- a miraculous power attributed to some of the saints. Tylor.

A single respiration, or the time of making it; a single act; an instant. He smiles and he frowns in a breath. Dryden.

The force of a blow; shock; collision. "And heavy brunt of cannon ball." Hudibras. It is instantly and irrecoverably scattered by our first brunt with some real affair of common life. I. Taylor.

e primarily of this form: to find how the change in some variable quantity alters at each instant the value of a quantity dependent upon it. -- Exponential calculus, that part of algebra which treats of exponents. -- Imaginary calculus, a method of investigating the relations of real or imaginary quantities by the us…

In two figures having relative motion, one of the two curves which are the loci of the instantaneous center.

ammer raised and ready to fire; -- said of firearms, also, jocularly, of one prepared for instant action. -- At half cock. See under Half. -- Cock feather (Archery), the feather of an arrow at right angles to the direction of the cock or notch. Nares.

A brief time; an instant; as, to be with one in a crack. [Eng. & Scot. Colloq.]

or around a military prison, to cross which involves for a prisoner the penalty of being instantly shot. -- Dead load (Civil Engin.), a constant, motionless load, as the weight of a structure, in distinction from a moving load, as a train of cars, or a variable pressure, as of wind. -- Dead march (Mus.), a piece of…

The act of delaying; postponement. [R.] My grief, joined with the instant business, Begs a deferment. Suckling.

to seize upon the vacant, unoccupied, and derelict minds of his [Chatham's] friends; and instantly they turned the vessel wholly out of the course of his policy. Burke. A government which is either unable or unwilling to redress such wrongs is derelict to its highest duties. J. Buchanan.