MAJORITY • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Majority

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/mədʒˈɔrəti/ Listen

noun

Majority n. (pl. majorities)

The quality or condition of being major or greater; superiority. Specifically:

(a)

The military rank of a major.

(b)

The condition of being of full age, or authorized by law to manage one's own affairs.

The greater number; more than half; as, a majority of mankind; a majority of the votes cast.

Ancestors; ancestry. (Obs.)

The amount or number by which one aggregate exceeds all other aggregates with which it is contrasted; especially, the number by which the votes for a successful candidate exceed those for all other candidates; as, he is elected by a majority of five hundred votes. See Plurality.

To go over to the majority or To join the majority, to die.

See images of 'Majority'

Etymology of 'Majority'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Majority" Quotes from Famous Books

... belong, remember, to a nation which especially claims to practice the rules of fair play. I must beg to remind you of what I said in the garden. I started with a concession. I admitted—as every person of the smallest sense must admit—that a man will, in the great majority of cases, be all the fitter for mental exercise if he wisely combines physical exercise along with it. The whole question between the two is a question of proportion and degree, and my complaint of the present time is that the present time doesn't see it. Popular opinion in England ...

— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins

... this determination of the Commissioners, or rather of the majority of them—for Sir E. Wood, to his credit be it said, refused to agree in their decision—than meets the eye, the fact of the matter being that it was privately well known to them, that, though the Boer leaders might be willing to ...

— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard

... social organization. At the one end social hygiene may be regarded as simply the extension of an elementary sanitary code; at the other end it seems to some to have in it the glorious freedom of a new religion. The majority of people, probably, will be content to admit that we have here a scheme of serious social reform which every man and woman will soon be called upon to take some ...

— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... any other bid that competition was almost eliminated. With even unusually strong suits, only occasionally could a declaration valued at 12 be successfully combated by one valued at 8 or less, and the vast majority of hands were, ...

— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work

... Thurlow's undisguised intercourse with Mrs. Hervey, Lord Campbell says, "When I first knew the profession, it would not have been endured that any one in a judicial situation should have had such a domestic establishment as Thurlow's; but a majority of judges had married their mistresses. The understanding then was that a man elevated to the bench, if he had a mistress, must either marry her or put her away. For many years there has been no necessity for such an alternative." Either Lord Campbell had not the keen appetite for professional ...

— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

More quotes...