SENILITY • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Senility

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/sənˈɪləti/ Listen

Senility

noun

Mental infirmity as a consequence of old age; sometimes shown by foolish infatuations. Synonyms: dotage, second childhood.

The state of being senile.

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Etymology of 'Senility'

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"Senility" Quotes from Famous Books

... lost a princely property at the play-table, and by a piece of good fortune of rare occurrence to gamesters, and unparalleled generosity, the proprietors of the salon allowed him a pension to support him in his miserable senility, just sufficient to supply him with a wretched lodging—bread, and a change of raiment once in every three or four years! In addition to this he was allowed a supper—which was, in fact, his dinner—at the gaming house, whither he went every night at about eleven o'clock. Till supper-time (two o'clock ...

— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... of the early twelfth century and the sturdy materialism of the late sixteenth lies the Classical Renaissance. Whatever happened, happened between those dates. And all that did happen was nothing more than a change from late manhood to early senility complicated by a house-moving, bringing with it new hobbies and occupations. The decline from the eleventh to the seventeenth century is continuous and to be foreseen; the change from the world of Aurelian to the world of Gregory the Great is catastrophic. Since ...

— Art • Clive Bell

... of age and those diseases of the system that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you lengthen and lengthen the years that stretch between the passionate tumults of youth and the contractions of senility. Man who used to weaken and die as his teeth decayed now looks forward to a continually lengthening, continually fuller term of years. And all those parts of him that once gathered evil against him, the vestigial structures and odd, ...

— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... me for my father! and when he discovered his mistake, how composedly he welcomed me in my own person! Was that the extreme of senility? or was it a subtile assertion of the fact, that he who keeps in the vanguard of the age in a certain sense contains his father—the past—within himself, and is a distinct person chiefly by virtue ...

— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... laugh—a queer metallic "Ha! ha! ha!" with reverberations in it from the days of Pitt and the Congress of Vienna—was heard no more in Piccadilly; Lord John Russell dwindled into senility; Lord Derby tottered from the stage. A new scene opened; and new protagonists—Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli—struggled together in the limelight. Victoria, from her post of vantage, watched these developments with that passionate and personal interest which she invariably ...

— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

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