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Obsolete   Listen
adjective
Obsolete  adj.  
1.
No longer in use; gone into disuse; disused; neglected; as, an obsolete word; an obsolete statute; applied chiefly to words, writings, or observances.
2.
(Biol.) Not very distinct; obscure; rudimental; imperfectly developed; abortive.
Synonyms: Ancient; antiquated; old-fashioned; antique; old; disused; neglected. See Ancient.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Obsolete" Quotes from Famous Books



... and after all that has been said of Plants and Salleting, formerly in great esteem, (but since obsolete and quite rejected); What if the exalted Juice of the ancient Silphium should come in, and challenge the Precedency? It is a [43]Plant formerly so highly priz'd, and rare for the richness of its Taste and other Vertues; that as it was dedicated to Apollo, and hung up in ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn

... to designate her to those who should assemble to witness the punishment as a wanton, and thus to put her to shame, and draw upon her the scorn and derision of the populace. They found some old and obsolete law which authorized such a punishment. The sentence was carried into effect on a Sunday. The unhappy criminal was conducted through the principal streets of the city, wearing a night-dress, and carrying a lighted taper in her hand, between rows of spectators ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... Doctor Johnson, punning was regarded as obsolete, it was still prevalent in the United States and so up to a late date. Mr. Lincoln was ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams

... this kind of military activity we must go back to the days of Tiglath Pileser, Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh. The United States should adopt the standard of speed in war which belongs to the twentieth century A.D.; we should not be content with, and still less boast about, standards which were obsolete in ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... worldly people, are perpetually sacrificing to ideals. And what is more, quite superior, virtuous people, religious in the best sense of the word, are apt to have, besides the ostensible and perhaps rather obsolete one of churches and meeting-houses, another cultus, esoteric, unspoken but acted upon, of which the priests and casuists are ladies'-maids ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... into which the Bible had been translated by the zealous missionary, James Evans, back in the fifties. On long winter nights at Fort Dickey, Peter Rainy had taught his superior to read and write in this obsolete fashion. ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... character and relations of the two races being taken into account, we must pronounce one of sound and far-reaching statesmanship, notwithstanding that an advance of population altogether unprecedented in history has already made much of it obsolete, and rendered necessary a general re-adjustment of ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker

... the reign of Philip III., others in that of John IV. of Portugal, who reigned in 1640; there were 24-pounders of George II.'s day, and Russian naval guns; the bulk of the extraordinary medley being obsolete brass engines which required from seven to ten minutes ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett

... of himself and his Muse as out of date and rusty. But there seems no sufficient reason for removing the date of the composition of these lines to an earlier year than 1393; and poets as well as other men since Chaucer have spoken of themselves as old and obsolete at fifty. A similar remark might be made concerning the reference to the poet's old age "which dulleth him in his spirit," in the "Complaint of Venus," generally ascribed to the last decennium of Chaucer's life. If ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward

... restored many of the original readings. His knowledge of Elizabethan literature was turned to good account in the explanation and illustration of the text. He claims to have read above eight hundred old English plays "to ascertain the obsolete and uncommon phrases." But when we have spoken of his diligence, we have spoken of all for which, as an editor, he was remarkable. Pope had good reason to say of him, though he gave the criticism a ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith

... of AIGUILLE, a needle; the obsolete English form is "aglet''), originally a tag of metal, often made of precious metals and richly chased, attached to the end of a lace or ribbon, and pointed, so as to pass more easily through eyelet holes. The term was, in time, applied to any bright ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... very remarkable writer. But it is not Lady Culross's literature that so much interests us and holds us, it is her religion; and it is its depth, its intensity, and the way it grows in winter. After a long and racy introduction, sometimes difficult to decipher, from its Fife idioms and obsolete spelling, she goes on thus: 'Did you get any heart to remember me and my bonds? As for me, I never found so great impediment within. Still, it is the Lord with whom we have to do, and He gives and takes, casts down and raises up, kills ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte

... a successful sorcerer and fortune-teller of old Lynn, has figured in obsolete poems, plays, and romances. She lived in a cottage at the foot of High Rock, where she was consulted, not merely by people of respectability, but by those who had knavish schemes to prosecute and who wanted to learn in ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... harmony therewith. Even when in word the supporters of classics put forward the secondary uses, in deed they belie themselves. Excellence in teaching is held by them to consist, in the first instance, in the power of accurate interpretation,—as if that obsolete use were still the use. If a teacher does this well, he is reckoned a good teacher, although he does little or nothing for the other ends, which in argument are treated as the reason of his existence. Indeed, this is the kind of teaching that ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... Marshall notes that this species "builds a globular nest of moss and hair and feathers in thorny bushes. The eggs we found were pinkish white, with a ring of obsolete brown spots at the larger end. Size 0.55 by 0.43. Lays ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume

... by Mr. NICHOLAS TRÜBNER. I am not aware that he had any assistance in writing it. I mention this because I have never met with any person who was so equally familiar with obscure and obsolete old German facetious literature (as the text indicates), and at the same time with Americanisms. I should say that in all of the later ballads, or at least in fully one half of all in the book, the author was indebted to him for ideas, suggestions, ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland

... addressing himself to his doubting friend, "the acceptance as fact of what we have deduced in our previous meetings must render the God of orthodox theology quite obsolete. But, as a compensation, it gives to us the most enlarged and beautiful concept of Him that we have ever had. It ennobles, broadens, purifies, and elevates our idea of Him. It destroys forever our belittling view of Him as but a magnified human character, full of wrath and caprice and angry ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... here to accomplish certain good By obvious means, and keep tradition up Of free assemblages, else obsolete, In this poor chamber: nor without effect Has friend met friend to counsel and confirm, As, listening to the beats of England's heart, We spoke its wants to Scotland's prompt reply By these her delegates. Remains alone That word grow deed, as with God's help it shall— ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... for the Class of Americans called Africans," a book unsurpassed in ability and comprehensiveness by any of the innumerable later works on the same subject,—works which would not even now supersede it, except that its facts and statistics have become obsolete. Time and the progress of the community at length did her justice once more, and her charming "Letters from New York" brought all her popularity back. Turning away, however, from fame won by such light labors, she devoted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... makes it more than ever necessary that the ban of excommunication should be passed upon him. Especially, as those uninstructed in the Faith, are under the delusion that the penalty of excommunication has become more or less obsolete, and we have now an opportunity for making publicly known the truth that it still exists, and may be used by the Church in extreme situations, when judged ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... knowledge and wisdom from age to age. The worthwhile thoughts which some of our early members gave us may be purloined by me and made to sparkle again in today's light, even though the early members' general idea is obsolete. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various

... modern cookery books are made up with pages cut out of obsolete works, such as the "Choice Manual of Secrets," the "True Gentlewoman's Delight," &c. of as much use, in this age of refinement, as the following curious passage from "The Accomplished Lady's Rich Closet of Rarities, ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner

... half-animal, half-romantic, and therefore not quite real. This relation, even while it has ceased to exist more and more in fact, has still continued to express itself aesthetically; and in art it has become a mere obsolete nuisance. One may care nothing for art and yet long to be rid of the meaningless frivolities of our domestic art. One may wish to clear them away as so much litter and trash; and this clearance is ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock

... extremes flutter all the great sisterhood of shallops, sloops, pinks, schooners, snows, the almost obsolete batteau and periagua, the gundelow with its picturesque lateen sail, and all the winged host that are now merely names in New ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery

... organize the movement for communal dietetics, by means of which our children's children are all to be fed on properly cooked food, scientifically prepared, and delivered hot at a nominal price. She will banish dyspepsia from the land, make obsolete the household drudge, and eliminate the antique kitchen from twenty million homes. Perhaps they will put up a statue in ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... was a rude combination of a lever for the removal of rocks, a spade to cut the earth, and a foot-plough to turn it. We annex an illustration of this curious and now obsolete instrument. It weighed about eighteen pounds. In working it, the" upper part of the handle, to which the left hand was applied, reached the workman's shoulder, and being slightly elevated, the point, shod with iron, was pushed into the ground horizontally; the soil being ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... need for a worthy book of sound hygienic and medical facts for the non-medical people. The Ideal Book for this mission should be compact in form, but large enough to give the salient facts, and give these in understandable language; it must not be "loaded" with obsolete and useless junk of odds and ends which have long ceased to be even interesting; it must carry with it the stamp of genuine reliability; it should treat all the ordinary and most common forms of ailments and accidents; ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... which established the supremacy of Parliament, the last trace of the judicial negative disappeared. From that time on the right of Parliament to be the constitutional judge of its own powers has not been seriously questioned. Even the veto power of the King soon became obsolete, though in theory ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith

... more from the small society of the countryside. For his part, when he was not "mooning" in the beloved fields and woods of happy memory, he shut himself up with books, reading whatever could be found on the shelves, and amassing a store of incongruous and obsolete knowledge. Long did he linger with the men of the seventeenth century; delaying the gay sunlit streets with Pepys, and listening to the charmed sound of the Restoration Revel; roaming by peaceful streams with Izaak Walton, and the great Catholic divines; enchanted with the portrait ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... Oh, fy! Mr. Mockmode! what a rustical expression that is! 'Bless me!' You should upon all such occasions cry, Dem me! You would be as nauseous to the ladies as one of the old patriarchs, if you used that obsolete expression. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... lbs. benzene), are placed, and the acids added in small portions at a time, the workmen commencing with the first, and adding a small quantity to each in turn, until the nitration was complete. This process was a dangerous one, and is now obsolete. The first nitro-benzene made commercially in England, by Messrs Simpson, Maule, and Nicholson, of Kennington, in 1856, was by this process. Now, however, vertical iron cylinders, made of cast-iron, are used ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford

... Barbarian, bond and free, as their brethren. Hence neither fine nor imprisonment can induce them to learn the use of arms, so as to become qualified to fight against these, or to shed their blood. And this principle of love is not laid as it were upon the shelf, like a volume of obsolete laws, so that it may be forgotten, but is kept alive in their memories by the testimony which they are occasionally called to bear or by the sufferings they undergo by distraints upon their property, and sometimes by short imprisonments, for ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... 'An obsolete restriction of free contract,' said the General. He stamped his foot, and in a second a file ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang

... descending into these we passed through the various buildings, in one of which a party of men were engaged in disgorging and preparing wine for shipment. In another we noticed one of those heavy beam presses for pressing the grapes which the more intelligent manufacturers regard as obsolete, while in a third was the cuve vat, holding no more than 2,200 gallons. In making their cuve the firm commonly mix one part of old wine to three parts of new. An indifferent vintage, however, necessitates the admixture of a larger proportion of the older growth. ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly

... secretly preserved, many natives set to work to write out in this new alphabet the contents of their ancient records. Much was added which had been brought in by the Europeans, and much omitted which had become unintelligible or obsolete since the Conquest; while, of course, the different writers, varying in skill and knowledge, produced works of very ...
— The Books of Chilan Balam, the Prophetic and Historic Records of the Mayas of Yucatan • Daniel G. Brinton

... into. If any one will take the trouble to consult Perrault's Cendrillon in the original French, he or she will find that Cinderella went to the ball with her feet encased in "des pantoufles de vair." Now, vair means grey or white fur, ermine or miniver. The word is now obsolete, though it still survives in heraldry. The translator, misled by the similarity of sound between "vair" and "verre," rendered it "glass" instead of "ermine," and Cinderella's glass slippers have become a British tradition. What would "Cinderella" be as a pantomime without the scene where ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... abrupte truncata, imperforata, cornea; spira plana, tenui; anfractibus quatuor, planis, ultimo permagno, postice acute angulato, transversim obsolete striato; apertura oblongo-truncata; labio antice valde tortuoso; labro ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart

... good fathers of families say: "Children should be accustomed to eat everything." In just the same way, moral training is put outside its rightful sphere—a fatal confusion. When ideas of this order, now happily obsolete, obtained, fathers would allow their children to fast all day, if they refused a dish they disliked at the mid-day meal, forbidding them anything but the rejected portion, which became ever colder and more disgusting, until at last hunger weakened the child's will and ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... knew nothing of this event. The High Priest offered the evening sacrifice unaware that it was rendered obsolete by the coming of the true Sacrifice, and Caesar slept that night without a dream that a Rival had been born who would uproot his empire and erect a worldwide kingdom. Earth was unconscious of this birth, but heaven knew it. There was holy ecstacy in all the shining ranks above, and "angels seem, ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden

... supposes "now there is no man, of whatever sect or opinion, but has read his immortal poem, and has its finest scenes by heart." It is this fact which embarrasses me, however, for how am I to rehabilitate a certain obsolete characteristic figure without quoting from Parini, and constantly wearying people with what they know already so well? The gentle reader, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... denote the tall bear-and-raccoon-skin "caps" worn by foot-guards and fusiliers, and the full dress feather bonnet of Highland infantry. Cylindrical busbies were formerly worn by the artillery engineers and rifles, but these are now obsolete in the regular army, though still worn by some territorial and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... "I don't know. Happiness is a subjective matter. You are happy if you think yourself so. As for me, I cultivate an obsolete mood—the old-fashioned humor of melancholy. I don't suppose now that a light-hearted, French kind of chap like you can understand, in the least, what those fine, crusty old ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various

... institutions—which logically grew out of the Christian idea of mediation, as the oak naturally grows out of the acorn, and which wonderfully reconciled liberty with authority, freedom with order, the finite with the infinite—have become more and more obsolete, and less and less understood. They have crumbled away like the stately columns of a magnificent but neglected cathedral. They have become dead branches that must be lopped off. They are rubbish that must be removed—relics of monarchy or aristocracy, cunningly devised ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... 1719, telling the tale of a yesterday's tragedy in Russia, should throw the time back by a hundred and fifty years, should change the scene to Scotland (the heart of the sorrow would be Mary's exile), and, above all, should compose a ballad in a style long obsolete. This is not the method of the popular poet, and such imitations of the old ballad as Hardyknute show that literary poets of 1719 had not knowledge or skill enough to mimic the antique manner ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang

... controverted. It forms part of the report of these well-known and trusted Socialists to their comrades in Russia and elsewhere. The claim that the elections to the Constituent Assembly were held on the basis of an obsolete register, before the people had a chance to become acquainted with the Bolshevist program, and that so long a time had elapsed since the elections that the delegates could not be regarded as true representatives ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... said, "for anything that is upside down to what it is now, for the total destruction of obsolete and effete monuments, for exchanging new principles for those that are worn out with age, for showing that fundamental truths are not made by empire-builders, that the world is God's Kingdom, not man's, that God is the only monarch whose ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... was it thus ascertained that at least one species of Sarracenia allures flies to their ruin than it began to appear that—just as in the case of Drosera—most of this was a mere revival of obsolete knowledge. The "insect-destroying process" was known and well described sixty years ago, the part played by the sweet exudation indicated, and even the intoxication perhaps hinted at, although evidently ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... overview: Romania began the transition from Communism in 1989 with a largely obsolete industrial base and a pattern of output unsuited to the country's needs. The country emerged in 2000 from a punishing three-year recession thanks to strong demand in EU export markets. Despite the global slowdown in 2001-02, strong domestic activity in construction, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... that the upward path was never intended to be easy. The scriptural passages to this effect you can find all through the gospels and epistles, and I need not quote them to you. I will, however, tell you honestly that many are of the opinion that these passages are now obsolete, being applicable only to the first centuries, or to especially critical times in the history of the church. I cannot share that view, but, lest I seem too old-fashioned, will merely quote the ringing words of our own Dr. Hitchcock, that "no man ever enters heaven save on his shield." ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... were obsolete As means against a foe, Till, bored by uniform defeat, Some genius ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling

... of the peasantry, Jeff says, whereever they goes; an' then clods pursoocs Jeff an' the others, from start to finish, with hoes an' rakes an' mattocks an' clothes-poles an' puddin'- sticks an' other barbarous an' obsolete arms, an' never lets up ontil Jeff an' Morgan all' their gallant comrades is ag'in safe in the arms of their ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis

... nearly obsolete, is used only in the first and the third person of the past tense. Quoth I said I. Other forms nearly obsolete are sometimes met in literature; as, "Methinks I scent the morning air"; "Woe worth the day." ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg

... extent of her sway. Hers is perhaps the only industry whose statistics of to-day are obsolete to-morrow, so rapid is its growth. In 1895 the value of the few hundred cars produced in the United States was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; in 1910 the year's output of approximately ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... this point of view, the animal world is an intellectual Creation, complete in all its parts, and coherent throughout; and when we find, that, although these ancient types have become obsolete and been replaced by modern ones, yet there are always a few old-fashioned individuals, left behind, as it were, to give the key to the history of their race, as the Gar-Pike, for instance, to explain ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various

... those obsolete elderly persons who quote Shakespeare. "Ah, well," he said, "your mother is like Kent in King Lear—she's too old to learn. Is she as fond as ever of lace? and as keen as ever after a bargain?" He handed ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins

... condemn women to obscurity and detail for their field of exertion, while men usurp the extended one of public usefulness. And a good case may be made out on this very point. Yet the conclusions are false and pernicious, and the prejudices which we now smile at as obsolete are truths of nature's own imparting, only wanting the agency of comprehensive intelligence to make them valuable, by adapting them to the present state of society. For, as one atom of falsehood in first principles nullifies a whole theory, so one principle, fundamentally true, suffices ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady

... were soon taught manners. The office of critic is now, in fact, virtually extinct; the taste for tickling and slapping is universal and imperative; classic appeals to the intellect, and passions not purely domestic, have grown obsolete. There are captains of the legions, but no critics. The mass ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... misconception. It was not happily chosen; for these Pre-Raphaelites, instead of being three centuries behind their times, are fully up with the day in which they live. Pre-Raphaelitism was not intended to mean, as it might seem to imply, the going back to worn-out and obsolete methods of painting, the resort to past modes of representation; it does not mean the adoption of the artistic forms, traditions, or rules of the old painters; it does not mean the seeking of inspiration from the works of any other men; but, in theory ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... some frank conversation with his Majesty about the "Arbitration Commission" then sitting at Brunswick, and European affairs in general. Conversation which is carefully preserved for us in the Brigadier's Despatch of the morrow. It never was intrinsically of much moment; and is now fallen very obsolete, and altogether of none: but as a glance at first-hand into the dim old thoughts of Friedrich Wilhelm, the reader may take it ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle

... which have been applied to our rural architecture, are in the English style of farm and country houses of two or three centuries ago; so, in that particular, we acknowledge the better taste and judgment of our ancestors. True, modern luxury, and in some particulars, modern improvement has made obsolete, if not absurd, many things considered indispensable in a ruder age. The wide, rambling halls and rooms; the huge, deep fire-places in the chimneys; the proximity of out-buildings, and the contiguity of stables, ricks, and cattle-yards—all ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen

... however, contained all the rhymes so well known at the present day, since every decade has added its quota to the mass of jingles attributed to "Mother Goose." Some of the earlier verses have become entirely obsolete, and it is well they have, for many were crude and silly and others were coarse. It is simply a result of the greater refinement of modern civilization that they have been relegated to oblivion, while the real gems of the collection will doubtless live ...
— Mother Goose in Prose • L. Frank Baum

... ridicule for daring to write you privately ['that you would be d——d,' omitted by accident] one would say, Why have anything to do with such a testy person? [Wrong word; no testy person can manage cool and consecutive ridicule. Quaere, what is this word? Is it anything but a corruption of the obsolete word tetchy of the same meaning? Some think touchy is our modern form of tetchy, which I greatly doubt]. My answer is, the poor man is lamentably ignorant; he is not only so, but 'out of the way' [quite true; my readers ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... habitual meaning; a far more difficult and perplexing task, and for which the mere semblance of eschewing pedantry seems to me an inadequate compensation. Where, indeed, it is in our power to recall an unappropriate term that had without sufficient reason become obsolete, it is doubtless a less evil to restore than to coin anew. Thus to express in one word all that appertains to the perception, considered as passive and merely recipient, I have adopted from our elder classics the word sensuous; because sensual ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... Darwin wrote of it (ii. 260) "One cannot expect fairness in a reviewer;" nor has it even taken to heart what my friend Swinburne declared (anent its issue of December 15, '83) "clumsy and shallow snobbery can do no harm." Like other things waxing obsolete it has served, I hasten to confess, a special purpose in the world of letters. It has lived through a generation of thirty years in the glorification of the mediocrities and in pandering to the impish taint of poor human nature, the ungenerous passions of those who abhor the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... Palmerston died. Had he taken the precautions usual at the age of eighty, he might have lived longer, but in private as in public life, he despised caution. He was one of those statesmen whom modern critics, on the watch for the partially obsolete and with the complexity of present problems always before them, tend to depreciate. He had the first quality which is necessary for popularity: he was readily intelligible. In addition he was prompt, combative, and magnanimous; shrewd, but never ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... very pleasant one, though filled with injunctions of the most obsolete from the Misses Blake as to their behavior, etc. The fact is, that the two old maids are so puffed out with pride at the thought that they will presently introduce to the county the handsome lad and beautiful girl ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown

... of the Stum'-[i]ks, or Bulls, became obsolete more than fifty years ago. Their dress was very fine,—bulls' ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell

... marched with a kind of implacable futility, along the roadway underneath him. He was, he says, moved to join them, but instead he remained watching. They were a dingy, shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part incapable of any but obsolete and superseded types of labour. They bore a few banners with the time-honoured inscription: 'Work, not Charity,' but ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... in chemistry, (an obsolete term,) means a most pure and universal menstruum or dissolvent, with which some chemists have pretended to resolve all bodies into their first elements, and perform ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... opposition to the Chinamen, which resulted in the driving off of York's Mongolian laborers; it was York who built the wagon-road and established the express which rendered Scott's mules and pack-trains obsolete; it was Scott who called into life the Vigilance Committee which expatriated York's friend, Jack Hamlin; it was York who created the "Sandy Bar Herald," which characterized the act as "a lawless outrage," and Scott as a "Border Ruffian"; it was ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... of Harrington's other notions:—"The way propounded [Milton's] is plain, easy, and open before us: without intricacies, without the introducement of new or obsolete forms or terms, or exotic models,—ideas that would effect nothing, but with a number of new injunctions to manacle the native liberty of mankind; turning all virtue into prescription, servitude, and necessity, to the great impairing ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... you in the core of the living rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away it stretches its winding galleries, their roofs dripping into streams where fishes have been swimming and spawning in the dark until their scales are white as milk and their eyes have withered out, obsolete and useless. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... made by M. de Praun fell by some chance into the hands of Count de Veltheim, under whose direction they were published at Strasburg, in 1789, with no other alterations than the correction of the obsolete and vicious orthography of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... for he would either have to fight (and this he was quite determined not to do) or be pointed at by the finger of scorn as the man who had refused to do so, and this was nearly as unthinkable as the other. Bitterly he blamed himself for having made a friend (and worse than that, an enemy) of one so obsolete and old-fashioned as to bring duelling into modern life.... As far as he could be glad of anything he was glad that he had taken a single, not ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... against her? On this new system of optimism, it is so much the better: so much the further are we removed from the contact with infectious despotism. No longer a thought of a barrier in the Netherlands to Holland against France. All that is obsolete policy. It is fit that France should have both Holland and the Austrian Netherlands too, as a barrier to her against the attacks of despotism. She cannot multiply her securities too much; and as to our security, it is to be found in hers. Had we cherished ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... of pronunciation is now rapidly becoming obsolete, and for very good reasons. But it is the basis of the pronunciation of the many classical derivatives in English; and therefore it is highly important that we should understand precisely what it ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt

... own natural hair. Short black trousers clung like attached old servants round his wizen legs; and rusty black gaiters hid all they could of his knobbed, ungainly feet. Black crape added its mite to the decayed and dingy wretchedness of his old beaver hat; black mohair in the obsolete form of a stock drearily encircled his neck and rose as high as his haggard jaws. The one morsel of color he carried about him was a lawyer's bag of blue serge, as lean and limp as himself. The one attractive feature in his clean-shaven, weary ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... since, is, to-day, almost obsolete. He has only produced a current record of facts, and places, at the period he wrote. This is especially the case with ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young

... perfectly well, the main portion of the entire Yucca Flats area was devoted solely to research on the new space drive which was expected to make the rocket as obsolete as the blunderbuss—at least as far as space travel was concerned. Not, Malone thought uneasily, that the blunderbuss had ever been used for ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett

... to control his troops. The Parliament, regarding them as mere tools of tyranny, had not been disposed to give such power by statute. James indeed had induced his corrupt and servile judges to put on some obsolete laws a construction which enabled him to punish desertion capitally. But this construction was considered by all respectable jurists as unsound, and, had it been sound, would have been far from effecting ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... "Takiyah" Pers. Arak-chin; the calotte worn under the Fez. It is, I have said, now obsolete and the red woollen cap (mostly made in Europe) is worn over the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... monarchs of old had needed no such ceremonial backing to their very practical incursions into ministerial debate. What we have to notice is that the ceremony had survived, while the other thing—the practice of substantial interference—had become obsolete. ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... between the sharp teeth of the orator's scathing retort. Mr. Garrison—"Not a slave-holding or a slave-breeding Jesus. (Sensation.) The slaves believe in a Jesus that strikes off chains. In this country Jesus has become obsolete. A profession in him is no longer a test. Who objects to his course in Judaea? The old Pharisees are extinct, and may safely be denounced. Jesus is the most respectable person in the United States. (Great sensation and ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... convents in the wild, and of fervent populations supplying the want of education by love, and apprehending in form and symbol what they cannot read in books. Our rules and our rubrics have been altered now to meet the times, and hence an obsolete discipline ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... her party. But though she went to the Salem Chapel that afternoon, and consoled herself that she could secure the bench of bishops from any audacious invasion of Frank Wentworth's hopes, it is true, notwithstanding, that Miss Leonora sent her maid next morning to London with certain obsolete ornaments, of which, though the fashion was hideous, the jewels were precious; and Lucy Wodehouse had never seen anything so brilliant as the appearance they presented when they returned shortly after reposing upon beds of white ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... that he, who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem,'—we pronounce that such a prose has its own grandeur, but that it is obsolete and inconvenient. But when we find Dryden telling us: 'What Virgil wrote in the vigour of his age, in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write,'—then ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... angriest looks and gestures. Whippings were not frequent; but when they took place, the correction was performed in a private room adjoining, whence we could only hear the plaints, but saw nothing. This heightened the decorum and solemnity." He then describes the ferule—"that almost obsolete weapon now." "To make him look more formidable—if a pedagogue had need of these heightenings—Bird wore one of those flowered Indian gowns formerly in use with schoolmasters, the strange figures upon which ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... character as possible. An exception has been made, however, in the case of such Romance words as were in use in England during the age of the romances of chivalry, and which would help to land a Romance coloring; these have been frequently employed. Very few obsolete words have been used, and these are explained in the notes, but the language has been made to some extent archaic, especially in dialogue, in order to give the impression of age. At the request of the publishers the Introduction Sketch has been shorn of the ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown

... political antiquary, went back five hundred years to find the model for his new state; for, seeing that the highest office of the Roman commonwealth had remained at all times a kingship restricted by a number of special laws, the idea of the regal office itself had by no means become obsolete. At very various periods and from very different sides— in the decemviral power, in the Sullan regency, and in Caesar's own dictatorship—there had been during the republic a practical recurrence to it; indeed by a certain logical ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... thirteen shillings and sixpence sterling per head. The curricle was presently superseded by a series of fat yellow coaches, one of which—nearly a century later, and long after that pleasant mode of travel had fallen obsolete—was the cause of much mental tribulation (1. Some idle reader here and there may possibly recall the burning of the old stage-coach in The Story of a Bad Boy.) to the writer ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... progress of the fine arts in this country, as they present most curious and important specimens of early drawing, painting, and poetry. The old English plate was a square piece of wood, which indeed is not quite obsolete at the present hour. The improvement upon this primitive plate was a circular platter, with a raised edge; but there were also thin, circular, flat plates of beech-wood in use for the dessert or confection, and they were gilt and painted upon one side, and inscribed ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker

... enlightened and executive or speculative man is an obvious part of the history of his own times, his chronicle must have a certain significance and value. Raleigh, when he wrote the "History of the World" in prison, gave hints by which subsequent and less obsolete annalists have wisely profited. The scholar and the patriot coalesced in the mind of Camden, prompting him to rescue and conserve the materials of English history and note the fading traditions,—a purely antiquarian service, which only those ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... 1914, just a few weeks before the European war. Since that time Greco-Turkish relations have been neither better nor worse. It must be said here that these relations had their origin, not in the obsolete London Treaty of May, 1913, but in the Treaty of Athens, signed in December, 1913, between the two countries, and covering in a general way the more essential points of the outstanding questions between the two parties, excluding, ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times

... yellow lane of light running out from Golden Gate, there came a vessel, sailing straight for harbour. She was an old-fashioned cruiser, carrying guns, and when she passed another vessel she hoisted the British flag. She looked like a half-obsolete corvette, spruced up, made modern by every possible device, and all her appointments were shapely and in order. She was clearly a British man- of-war, as shown in her trim-dressed sailors, her good handful of marines; but her second and third lieutenants seemed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... battleship, the Canopus, two armored cruisers, the Good Hope and the Monmouth, the light cruiser Glasgow, and an armed liner, the Otranto. None of these vessels had either great speed or heavy armament. The equipment of the Canopus, indeed, was obsolete. Admiral Cradock's squadron arrived at Halifax on August 14th, thence sailed to Bermuda, then on past Venezuela and Brazil around the Horn. It visited the Falkland Islands, and by the third week of October ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... in the measure of his verse, and in the harmony, simplicity, and variety of his composition. Antique expressions I have avoided; admitting, however, some old words, where they seemed to suit the subject: but I hope none will be found that are now obsolete, or in any degree not intelligible to a reader of ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... you this drink of my verses, Of learning made lovely with lays, Song bitter and sweet that reheares The deeds of your eminent days; Yea, in these evil days from their reading Some profit a student shall draw, Though some points are of obsolete pleading, And ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... after this there commences cold towards the sex; and that cold is succeeded by a kind of fastidiousness approaching to loathing, is well known, although but little talked of. That this is the case with such adulterers in hell, I have heard at a distance, from the sirens, who are obsolete venereal lusts, and also from the harlots there. From these considerations it follows, that adulterous love makes a man (homo) more and more not a man (homo) and not a man (vir) and that conjugial love makes a man more and more a man (homo) ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... greatly within two generations. Today the Bible is so little read that the language of the Authorized Version is rapidly becoming obsolete; so that even in the United States, where the old tradition of the verbal infallibility of "the book of books" lingers more strongly than anywhere else except perhaps in Ulster, retranslations into modern English ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... knowledge of Italian, a language not altogether unknown to any of the family: she therefore resolved to learn French immediately; for which purpose the interpreter, for whose child she had stood godmother during these stormy times, and who now, therefore, as a gossip,[Footnote: The obsolete word, "gossip," has been revived as an equivalent for the German, "/gevatter/." But it should be observed that this word not only signifies godfather, but that the person whose child has another person for godfather (or godmother) is that ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... by the word 'people,' and hence did not aim at exactly the same goal. The French Revolution of the eighteenth century upset the outward form of the Dutch Commonwealth; it did away with ancient and more or less obsolete fetters, which proved no longer strong enough to support the growth of political life, though still sufficiently strong to hinder it. It could do nothing for, and add nothing to, the profound love of liberty and ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough

... Waddington was a prisoner in the King's Bench, for forestalling hops; and as he had conducted his defence before the court with great energy and considerable talent; and, as he was convicted upon an old obsolete statute, he was not esteemed guilty of any moral crime. I had imbibed a notion that the debtors in the prison were generally a set of swindlers, and I was, therefore, anxious to avoid their society, or having anything to do with them; which feeling, however ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt

... STRAPPADO, an obsolete military punishment by drawing a culprit to the top of a beam and then letting him drop the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... character of Cloten has been pronounced by some unnatural, by others inconsistent, and by others obsolete. The following passage occurs in one of Miss Seward's letters, vol. iii p. 246: "It is curious that Shakspeare should, in so singular a character as Cloten, have given the exact prototype of a being whom I once knew. The unmeaning frown of countenance, the shuffling gait, the burst ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... crux of it. The plutonium bomb, from a military standpoint, was as obsolete as the flintlock musket had been at the time of the Second World War. He reviewed, quickly, the history of weapons-development since the beginning of the Atomic Era. The emphasis, since the end of the Second ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper

... has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings. Date entries have been normalized. Obvious typographical errors in punctuation have been fixed. Corrections [in brackets] in the text ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton

... school of latitudinarianism so fashionable nowaday on both sides of the Atlantic, doubtless Mr. Laurance deems his adopted countrywoman a nervous puritanical prude; and upon my primitive and wellnigh obsolete ideal of social decorum and propriety, upon my lofty standard of womanly delicacy and manly honour, I can patiently tolerate none of the encroachments with which I have recently been threatened. Just here, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson



Words linked to "Obsolete" :   noncurrent



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