HUMANITIES • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Humanities

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/hjumˈænɪtiz/ /jumˈænɪtiz/ Listen

noun

Humanity n. (pl. humanities)

1.

The quality of being human; the peculiar nature of man, by which he is distinguished from other beings.

2.

Mankind collectively; the human race. "But hearing oftentimes The still, and music humanity." "It is a debt we owe to humanity."

3.

The quality of being humane; the kind feelings, dispositions, and sympathies of man; especially, a disposition to relieve persons or animals in distress, and to treat all creatures with kindness and tenderness. "The common offices of humanity and friendship."

4.

Mental cultivation; liberal education; instruction in classical and polite literature. "Polished with humanity and the study of witty science."

5.

pl. (With definite article) The branches of polite or elegant learning; as language, rhetoric, poetry, and the ancient classics; belles-letters. Note: The cultivation of the languages, literature, history, and archaeology of Greece and Rome, were very commonly called literae humaniores, or, in English, the humanities,... by way of opposition to the literae divinae, or divinity.

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Etymology of 'Humanities'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Humanities" Quotes from Famous Books

... Lane to University Avenue, but the community refused to countenance any such impious trifling with tradition. And besides, Madison prided herself then as now on being a college that taught the humanities in all soberness, according to ideals brought out of New England by its founders. The proposed change caused an historic clash between town and gown in which the gown ...

— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... power to inspire hate or love. Had he been a degree greater, a trifle more ambitious, or had circumstances isolated him in politics, he would have been an even lonelier and loftier figure than Washington, for our Chief had one or two redeeming humanities; as it was, he stood to a few as a character so perfect that they marvelled, while they deplored his lack of personal influence. But his intellect is in the rank which stands just beneath that of the men of genius revealed by history, and he hangs like ...

— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... countess, Dick the Scholar took Harry Esmond under his special protection, and would examine him in his humanities, and talk to him both of French and Latin, in which tongues the lad found, and his new friend was willing enough to acknowledge, that he was even more proficient than Scholar Dick. Hearing that he had learned them from a Jesuit, in the praise of whom and whose ...

— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... of age he was ready to enter college, though he had received little aid in his studies, except when some schoolmaster who was versed in the humanities chanced to be hired for the winter. But his uncle was not able to support him at any respectable university, and the lad's prospects for such an education as he desired seemed to be none of ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various

... intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religions, The power, the beauty, and the majesty, That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain, Or forest, by slow stream, or pebbly spring, Or chasms and watery depths: all ...

— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

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