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Incontinency   Listen
noun
Incontinency, Incontinence  n.  
1.
Incapacity to hold; hence, incapacity to hold back or restrain; the quality or state of being incontinent; lack of continence; failure to restrain the passions or appetites; indulgence of lust; lewdness. "That Satan tempt you not for your incontinency." "From the rash hand of bold incontinence."
2.
(Med.) The inability of any of the animal organs to restrain the natural evacuations, especially urination, or defecation, so that the discharges are involuntary; as, incontinence of urine.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Incontinency" Quotes from Famous Books



... Stockholm, I must not close this chapter without saying a few words about its morals. It has been called the most licentious city in Europe, and, I have no doubt, with the most perfect justice. Vienna may surpass it in the amount of conjugal infidelity, but certainly not in general incontinence. Very nearly half the registered births are illegitimate, to say nothing of the illegitimate children born in wedlock. Of the servant-girls, shop-girls, and seamstresses in the city, it is very safe to say that scarcely ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... innermost recesses of society; and the spirits of a great majority of the citizen being in that combustible state in which a feeble spark will suffice to kindle a formidable conflagration, the whole Colony was inflamed and distracted by the incontinence of ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... membrane. It is often absent in children soon after birth; while it may remain entire after copulation. Hence, the presence of the hymen does not absolutely prove virginity; nor does its absence prove incontinence, although its presence would be prima facie evidence ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... is abstinence from killing, lying, stealing, incontinence, and from receiving gifts. It is almost equivalent to the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... security to himself. D'Artagnan suggested that he should send word to his wife, so that she might not be anxious about him, but Planchet replied with much sagacity that he was very sure his wife would not die of anxiety through not knowing where he was, while he, Planchet, remembering her incontinence of tongue, would die of anxiety ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... of thing British freedom in those chaotic days; and when our Continental rivals were not jeering at the grotesqueness of it, they were lauding this particular form of madness to the skies, as well they might, seeing that our insensate profligacy and incontinence meant their gain. The cause of a foreigner, good, bad, or indifferent—that was the cause Clement Blaine most loved to champion in his journal. An attack upon anything British, though the author of it might ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... long time what you must do. You have sense enough: don't give way to drunkenness and incontinence of speech; don't give way to sensual lust; and, above all, to the love of money. And close your taverns. If you can't close all, at least two or ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... thought of that tyrannous incontinence, needed however for man's race on earth, and of the ways of God which ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... from an opinion of the Attorney General of Maryland, shows some of the consequences of this "forbidding to marry." "A slave has never maintained an action against the violator of his bed. A slave is not admonished for incontinence, or punished for fornication or adultery; never prosecuted for bigamy." Again, God has written his commandment, that children should honor their parents. How, then, can He approve of a system, which ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... Chastity, Continence, and Purity. Therefore they call the lawfull use of Wives, want of Chastity, and Continence; and so make Marriage a Sin, or at least a thing so impure, and unclean, as to render a man unfit for the Altar. If the Law were made because the use of Wives is Incontinence, and contrary to Chastity, then all marriage is vice; If because it is a thing too impure, and unclean for a man consecrated to God; much more should other naturall, necessary, and daily works which all ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... greatest evils to the state at any time—to wit, Critias and Alcibiades—were both companions of Socrates—Critias the oligarch, and Alcibiades the democrat. Where would you find a more arrant thief, savage, and murderer (5) than the one? where such a portent of insolence, incontinence, and high-handedness as the other? For my part, in so far as these two wrought evil to the state, I have no desire to appear as the apologist of either. I confine myself to explaining what this intimacy of theirs with ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon

... a variety of such reasons and pretensions. What is legally fixed on the Continent of Europe, is here left to the caprice and greediness of the Sheikhs, and the liberality or stinginess of the trader. As to incontinence, this is more a secret crime. But the sexual habits of the Touaricks, and their domestic amours, are purity itself, compared to the sensuality which disfigures and saps the vitals of society in all the southern ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... gastro-intestinal canal and on the respiratory and circulatory systems renders its use inadvisable when disease of these organs is present. Its action on the spinal cord has been employed with success in cases of tetanus, whooping-cough, urinary incontinence, and strychnine poisoning. In the latter case twenty grains in "normal saline" solution may be directly injected into a subcutaneous vein, but not ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... present. Lebyadkinwas the only one who might have chattered, not so much from spite, for he had gone out in great alarm (and fear of an enemy destroys spite against him), but simply from incontinence of speech-But Lebyadkin and his sister had disappeared next day, and nothing could be heard of them. There was no trace of them at Filipov's house, they had moved, no one knew where, and seemed to have vanished. Shatov, of whom I wanted to inquire about Marya Timofyevna, would not ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... add other observations. The life of shepherds gives birth to irregular loves. The morals of weavers were horribly decried in Greece. The Italians have given birth to a proverb concerning the lubricity of lame women. The Spanish, in whose veins are found many mixtures of African incontinence, have expressed their sentiments in a maxim which is familiar with them: Muger y gallina pierna quebrantada [it is good that a woman and a hen have one broken leg]. The profound sagacity of the Orientals in the art of pleasure is altogether expressed by this ordinance of the caliph ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac

... beyond that of Shelley, arraigned it. In both we find vehemence and substantial honesty; but, in the one, there is a dominant faith, tempered by pride, in the "caste of Vere de Vere," in Freedom for itself—a faith marred by shifting purposes, the garrulous incontinence of vanity, and a broken life; in the other unwavering belief in Law. The record of their fame is diverse. Byron leapt into the citadel, awoke and found himself the greatest inheritor of an ancient ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... called, by Clement of Alexandria, the Moses of Athens; the philosopher of the Christians, by Arnobius; and the god of philosophers, by Cicero—Athenaeus accuses of envy; Theopompus of lying; Suidas of avarice; Aulus Gellius, of robbery; Porphyry, of incontinence; and Aristophanes, of impiety. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... devising one shameless pleasure after another, insensibly plunges into unmentionable debauchery, experienced in every form of brutal lust." The jealous Roman husband's furious desire to prevent the consequences of his wife's incontinence was by no means well served by the use of such agents; on the contrary, the women themselves profited by the arrangement. By means of these eunuchs, they edited the morals of their maids and hampered the sodomitical hankerings, active or otherwise, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... men of sound sense, regretted the almost fatal incontinence which, in the year of his greatest private troubles, led his friend to make a parade of them before the public. He speaks more than once of his unhappy tendency to exhibit himself as the dying gladiator, and even ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... shadow" for lack of less subservient auditor, and though, as the years pass, I find that I become more loose of soul and in broad daylight indulge the liberty of muttering my affairs and addressing animals and plants and of confiding secrets to the chaste moon—poets and dramatists term such incontinence of speech soliloquy and employ it for the utterance of edifying inspiration—it is because it is impossible to be ever quite alone. Not so very long ago in Merrie England if a person muttered to himself it was enough on which to establish a charge of wizardry; but it is also said that real witches ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... find the symptoms produced by difficulty in making water owing to the length of the prepuce and the extreme narrowness of its orifice, which may even be scarcely large enough to admit the head of a pin. This congenital phimosis is, I may add, not an infrequent occasion of incontinence of urine in children, and is also an exciting cause of the habit of masturbation, owing to the discomfort and irritation which it constantly keeps up. In every case, therefore, where any difficulty attends the passing or the retention of the urine, or where the practice ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... amount of inquiry into this subject, that I can find no proofs whatsoever of Tasso's having made love to Leonora; though I think it highly probable. I believe the main cause of the duke's proceedings was the poet's own violence of behaviour and incontinence of speech. I think it very likely that, in the course of the poetical love-making to various ladies, which was almost identical in that age with addressing them in verse, Torquato, whether he was ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt

... the good and religious abbot of Alba-domus, his opinion of a certain woman whom he had seen; upon which the holy man confessed, with tears in his eyes, his predilection for her, and received from three priests the discipline of incontinence. For as that long and experienced subtle enemy, by arguing from certain conjectural signs, may foretell future by past events, so by insidious treachery and contrivance, added to exterior appearances, he may sometimes ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis

... hence she had always behaved towards the foundling with rather more kindness than ladies of rigid virtue can sometimes bring themselves to show to these children, who, however innocent, may be truly called the living monuments of incontinence. ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject; to run them into verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose." There was in Spenser a facility for turning to account all material, original or borrowed, an incontinence of the descriptive faculty, which was ever ready to exercise itself on any object, the most unfitting and loathsome, as on the noblest, the purest, or the most beautiful. There are pictures in him which seem meant to turn our stomach. Worse than that there are pictures which ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... the friars was not general and by no means the chief ground, if any, for hostility against them; the frailties of the few simply weakened the prestige of all and broke the pedestal of their moral superiority. My own investigations convinced me that the friars' incontinence was generally regarded with indifference by the people; concubinage being so common among the Filipinos themselves it did not shock them in the pastor's case. Moreover, women were proud of the paternity of their children begotten in their ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... secreted by the kidneys (whose cavity is even at this day named pelvis by Anatomists) runs into the bladder; which, by reason of the relaxation of its sphincter, as if the pitcher were broken at the fountain head, is not able to retain its contents a sufficient time. Hence an incontinence or dribbling ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead

... and habits than the Castle of Falkland, while her Highness the Duchess of Rothsay abides there. She hath charged the said reverend brothers so to deal with the young woman as may give her a sense of the sin of incontinence, and she commendeth thee to confession and penitence.—Signed, Waltheof, by command of an high and mighty Princess"; ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... Geronimo de Legazpi to take this office (who in the event of the absence of Licentiate Andres de Alcaraz will be senior auditor), would not be few; for as yet he is a person who has not exhibited the capacity and qualities required for it. On the contrary a certain incontinence has been noted in his morals. With the scandal and bad example of that and certain inclinations in the administration of justice, and complaints from persons to whom he has failed to return money which he received from them ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various

... l'Academie des Inscriptions, tom. iv. p. 161—227. Notwithstanding the honors and rewards which were bestowed on those virgins, it was difficult to procure a sufficient number; nor could the dread of the most horrible death always restrain their incontinence.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... first-fruits, fearing that manifold misfortunes would befall them if they broke this rule. When he left his residence to visit other places within his jurisdiction, all married people had to observe strict continence the whole time he was out; for it was supposed that any act of incontinence would prove fatal to him. And if he were to die a natural death, they thought that the world would perish, and the earth, which he alone sustained by his power and merit, would immediately be annihilated. Amongst the semi-barbarous nations of the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... Dugdale, that in the reign of Henry the Second, the nuns of Amsbury abbey in Wiltshire were expelled from that religious house on account of their incontinence. And to exhibit in the most lively colors the total corruption of monastic chastity, bishop Burnet informs us in his "History of the Reformation," that when the nunneries were visited by the command of Henry the VIII. "whole houses almost, were ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous

... now fancied that his domestic felicity was complete; but, soon after his marriage, it was discovered that his wife had formerly led a dissolute life, and had been unfaithful also to her royal master. When the proofs of her incontinence were presented to him, he burst into a flood of tears; but soon his natural ferocity returned, and his guilty wife expiated her crime by death on the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... troubled with incontinence of urine at night, and who wet their beds, an infusion, or tea, of the St. John's Wort is an admirable preventive medicine, which will stop ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... back, recalled Adam to the sense of his burden. He was to go into the study immediately. "I can't think what that strange person's come about," the butler added, from mere incontinence of remark, as he preceded Adam to the door, "he's gone i' the dining-room. And master looks unaccountable—as if he was frightened." Adam took no notice of the words: he could not care about other people's business. But when he entered the study and ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... but many of them were empty save for dust and the spider. By night there was the clash of steel and the cries of brawlers straying restlessly from inn to inn. Where once gentility abode was now but a rancid and rude incontinence. But here David found housing commensurate to his scant purse. Daylight and candlelight found him at ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... his devotion was increased by these innocent pleasures. The heat of the climate inflames the blood of the Arabs; and their libidinous complexion has been noticed by the writers of antiquity. [159] Their incontinence was regulated by the civil and religious laws of the Koran: their incestuous alliances were blamed; the boundless license of polygamy was reduced to four legitimate wives or concubines; their rights both of bed and of dowry were ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... martyrdom for saints invented by the Pope's son. And his father pardoned him the deed, and others as bad, by a secret bull, absolving him from all pains and penalties that he might have incurred through youthful frailty or human incontinence!" ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... reproves him; Piety and Exercise add their efforts to reform him, but discover him to be as much knave as fool. The two latter hold him while Discipline lays on the whip, till he affects contrition; but he is soon wheedled into a relapse by Idleness, Incontinence, and Wrath, who, however, profess to hold him in contempt. Wrath gives him the Vice's sword and dagger, and they all promise him the society of Nell, Nan, Meg, and Bess. Fortune then endows him with wealth; he takes Impiety, Cruelty, and Ignorance into his service; Impiety stirs ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... care of the little boy; the squire was too jealous of the child's exclusive love for that, and one of the housemaids was employed in the actual physical charge of him; but he needed some one to listen to his incontinence of language, both when his passionate regret for his dead son came uppermost, and also when he had discovered some extraordinary charm in that son's child; and again when he was oppressed with the uncertainty of Aimee's long-continued ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... cried Madge wi' the Fiery Face, who had just been loosed from the 'jougs,' wherein she had been confined for 'kenspeckle incontinence.' 'Up wi' the clarty callant! Let him swing like a corby craa i' ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease

... her arms helplessly stretched out, her face unseen. Every now and then a thrill ran through her body: she was talking to herself all the time with incessant low incontinence of words. ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell

... sentimentalists, and others, who do their worst to uphold the common and rather bestial opinion in favour of reckless propagation, and who, if they do not advocate the despatch of children to public institutions, still encourage a selfish incontinence which ultimately falls in burdens on others than the offenders, and which turns the family into a scene of squalor and brutishness, producing a kind of parental influence that is far more disastrous and demoralising than the absence of it in public institutions can ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... Lord Scudamore, wife of Henry Somerset, Duke of Beaufort; from whom she was divorced for adultery with Lord Talbot. She was afterwards married to Colonel Fitzroy, natural son of the Duke of Grafton. [The duke Having clearly proved the incontinence of his wife, obtained a divorce in ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... conversation, better or worse. In the rest is no hope. Stille, Borck are accomplished military gentlemen; but of tacit nature, reflective, practical, rather than discursive, and do not waste themselves by incontinence of tongue. Stille, by his military Commentaries, which are still known to soldiers that read, maintains some lasting remembrance of himself: Borck we shall see engaged in a small bit of business before long. As to Munchow, the JEUNE MORVEUX of an Adjutant, he, though his manners are ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... ruin. My respect for marriage led to the discovery of my misconduct. The scandal must be expiated; I was arrested, suspended, and dismissed; I was the victim of my scruples rather than of my incontinence, and I had reason to believe, from the reproaches which accompanied my disgrace, that one can often escape punishment by being guilty of a ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... they flourish most; where, in the beams Of warm encouragement, and in the eye Of public note, they reach their perfect size. Such London is, by taste and wealth proclaimed The fairest capital in all the world, By riot and incontinence the worst. There, touched by Reynolds, a dull blank becomes A lucid mirror, in which nature sees All her reflected features. Bacon there Gives more than female beauty to a stone, And Chatham's eloquence to marble lips. Nor does the chisel occupy alone ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper

... the language of a man who thinks that he has been injured. He proceeds to describe the course of his conduct, and the train of his thoughts; and, because he has been suspected of incontinence, gives an account of his own purity: "That if I be justly charged," says he, "with this crime, it may come upon me ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... The sisters often listened for the report of a pistol in the dead of the night, till watchful eye and hearkening ear grew heavy and dull with the perpetual strain upon their nerves. In the mornings young Bronte would saunter out, saying, with a drunkard's incontinence of speech, "The poor old man and I have had a terrible night of it; he does his best—the poor old man! but ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell

... Doctor Horace Bianchon; Comte Bagos de Feredia, who died so tragically, having been a lodger in her house. She was also interviewed by the author, who, under the name of Valentine, gave on the stage of the Gymnase-Dramatique the story of the incontinence and punishment of Josephine de Merret. This Vendome tavern-keeper pretended also to have lodged some princesses, M. Decazes, General Bertrand, the King of Spain, and the Duc and Duchesse of d'Abrantes. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... destroyed all these monuments of science and religion, which his predecessor Henry III had raised with so much zeal, and tyrannically treated the successors of those who had been received with so much benevolence. The strange revolution which the incontinence and heresy of this prince brought about in England, reduced the Friars Minor, and all other missionaries, to the necessity of running greater risks in endeavoring to maintain the remnant of faith, than what they had ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe

... representing very ordinary people, who are presumed to be interesting in the picture, because the text tells a story about them. Of this least lively form of modern sensational work, however, I shall have to speak on other grounds; meantime, I am concerned only with its manner; its incontinence of line and method, associated with the slightness of its real thought, and morbid acuteness of irregular sensation; ungoverned all, and one of the external and slight phases of that beautiful Liberty which we are proclaiming ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... specified. (1) God-like virtue, or reason impelling as well as directing. (2) The highest human virtue, expressed by Temperance [Greek: sophrosynae]—appetite and passion perfectly harmonized with reason. (3) Continence [Greek: egkrateia] or the mastery of reason, after a struggle. (4) Incontinence, the mastery of appetite or passion, but not without a struggle. (5) Vice, reason perverted so as to harmonize entirely with appetite or passion. (6) Bestiality, naked appetite or passion, without reason. Certain prevalent opinions are ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... was so poignant and timely. She was still young and naive, with some girl's freshness. But she did not want any more the fight, the battle, the control, as he, in his incontinence, still did. She was so natural, and he was ugly, unnatural, in his inability to yield place. How hideous, this greedy middle-age, which must stand in the way of life, like ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... thy mind, Not so accustom'd? or what other thoughts Possess it? Dwell not in thy memory The words, wherein thy ethic page describes Three dispositions adverse to Heav'n's will, Incont'nence, malice, and mad brutishness, And how incontinence the least offends God, and least guilt incurs? If well thou note This judgment, and remember who they are, Without these walls to vain repentance doom'd, Thou shalt discern why they apart are plac'd From these fell spirits, and ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... fall a victim to the proprietor, the manager or some of the superintendents of the store; and there have been cases of this kind heard in the courts, in one of which the proprietor not only seduced the girl, but married her, afterwards obtaining a divorce because of her incontinence. Sometimes the lapse of these girls from the paths of virtue is accompanied with exceptional hardships. The young lady is beautiful as well as good perhaps, and the pride of her idolizing parents, who have taught her that she is ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... In which they flourish most; where, in the beams Of warm encouragement, and in the eye Of public note, they reach their perfect size. Such London is, by taste and wealth proclaim'd The fairest capital of all the world; By riot and incontinence the worst. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... affair of passion. Luther had come to middle age when it was brought about, when temptations of that kind lose their power; and among the many accusations which have been brought against his early life, no one has ventured to charge him with incontinence. His taking a wife was a grave act deliberately performed; and it was either meant as a public insult to established ecclesiastical usage, or else he considered that the circumstances of the time ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... some classic platitude; anyone who knew him might have foretold the speech into which he presently broke. He did this in the refectory where there was a convenient step up at the end. Beginning with the customary confession of incontinence, "could not let the occasion pass," he declared that he would not detain them long, but he felt that everyone there would agree with him that they shared that day in no slight occasion, no mean enterprise, that here was one of the most promising, one of the most momentous, ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells



Words linked to "Incontinency" :   elimination, excretion, evacuation, excreting, incontinence



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