REGULATE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Regulate

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/rˈɛgjəlˌeɪt/ Listen

verb

Regulate v. t. (past & past part. regulated; pres. part. regulating)

To adjust by rule, method, or established mode; to direct by rule or restriction; to subject to governing principles or laws. "The laws which regulate the successions of the seasons." "The herdsmen near the frontier adjudicated their own disputes, and regulated their own police."

To put in good order; as, to regulate the disordered state of a nation or its finances.

To adjust, or maintain, with respect to a desired rate, degree, or condition; as, to regulate the temperature of a room, the pressure of steam, the speed of a machine, etc.

To regulate a watch or To regulate a clock, to adjust its rate of running so that it will keep approximately standard time.

Synonyms: To adjust; dispose; methodize; arrange; direct; order; rule; govern.

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Etymology of 'Regulate'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Regulate" Quotes from Famous Books

... got to do a little manoeuvrin'. Don't you fret, J'rome, an' don't you go to frettin' of your mother. I'll take an extra lot of shoes from Cy Robinson; he can think Belinda's goin' to bind—she never has—or he can think what he wants to; I ain't goin' to regulate his thinkin'; an' you come to me for shoes in future. Only you keep dark about it. Don't you let on to nobody, except your mother, an' she needn't know the whys an' wherefores. I've let out shoes before ...

— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... bestow the strictest attention on the smaller parts of ecclesiastical government. In the last agonies of England he will bring in a bill to regulate Easter offerings; and he will adjust the stipends of curates, when the flag of France is unfurled on the hills of Kent.[46]... Whatever can be done by very mistaken notions of the piety of a Christian, and by very wretched imitations of the eloquence of Mr. Pitt, ...

— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell

... very particular in all his arrangements and orderings. He disliked leaving things vague or undetermined and never allowed slovenliness or makeshifts. He had a well-defined code to regulate his relations with others and theirs with him. In this he was different from the generality of his countrymen. With the rest of us a little carelessness this way or that did not signify; so in our dealings with him we had to be anxiously careful. It was not so much the little ...

— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore

... vex me by talking like a child. After the education I have tried to provide for you, I had a right to hope you would at least regulate your tongue by a little common-sense. Do you not know that I have given up my profession, everything, in order to come to do ...

— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed

... checks—not fixed, or rigid rules, as they are sometimes interpreted to be, but nice allowances of excess or defect, to be discovered, weighed, and determined by individual reason, in the audit of each man's conscience, according to the strength or weakness of the passions he may have to regulate. ...

— Notes and Queries, Number 186, May 21, 1853 • Various

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