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Substantive   /sˈəbstəntɪv/   Listen
Substantive

noun
1.
Any word or group of words functioning as a noun.



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"Substantive" Quotes from Famous Books



... is used in the singular, both by Mir Amman and the original author, Amir Khusru according to a well-known rule in Persian syntax, viz., "a substantive accompanied by a numerical adjective dispenses with the plural termination," as "haft roz," "seven days," not "haft rozha. The Persian term darwesh, in a general sense, denotes a person who has adopted what by extreme courtesy ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli

... alacrity, liveliness, vigour, and in this sense the expression is harsh. Perhaps we may read,—with good lift, with good will, with sincere zeal for my service. I should have proposed,—with good lief, in the same sense, but that I cannot find lief to be a substantive. With good life may however mean, with exact presentation of their several characters, with observation strange of their particular and distinct parts. So we say, he acted to ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson

... and which he understands moderately well. In 1903 he was promoted Brigadier-General, being subsequently gazetted as the Commander of the 2nd Division of Regulars (Chang Pei Chun) of Hupeh. He also constantly held various subsidiary posts, in addition to his substantive appointment, connected with educational and administrative work of various kinds, and has therefore a sound grasp of provincial government. He was Commander-in-Chief of the 8th Division during the famous military manoeuvres of 1906 at Changtehfu in Honan province, ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale

... were unmarketable elements; which is just the reason why you have it here so briefly told. But his wonder has still kept growing; and I think the reader's will also, if he consider it ripely. For now he sees why I speak of the little people as of substantive inventors and performers. To the end they had kept their secret. I will go bail for the dreamer (having excellent grounds for valuing his candour) that he had no guess whatever at the motive of the woman—the hinge of the whole well-invented plot—until the instant of that highly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... delighted in Shakspeare represents the Latin participle delectus (from deligere), "select, choice, exquisite, refined." This sense will suit all the passages cited by MR. HICKSON, and particularly the last. If this be so, the suggested derivations from the adjective light, and from the substantive light, fall to the ground: but MR. HICKSON will have been right in distinguishing Shakspeare's delighted from the participle of the usual verb to delight, delectaregratify. The roots of the two are distinct: that of the former being leg-ere ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 39. Saturday, July 27, 1850 • Various

... Surely that horror of utter solitude is one of the elements of His passion grave and sorrowful enough to be named by the side of the other bitterness poured into that cup, even as it was pain enough to form a substantive feature of the great prophetic picture: 'I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... characteristic of the hero and heroine, as well as of some of the other persons. Its literary feature partakes, we fear, too much of that Northern trait which, by minutely describing things and delineating individuals as matters of substantive importance in themselves, rather than as subordinate to general interest, has a tendency to induce a feeling of ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat was good enough ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... I discovered several paragraphs underlined in pencil, and concluding that the underlining had been done by Paul Harley, I read them with particular care. They were as follows: "According to Hesketh J. Bell, the term Obeah is most probably derived from the substantive Obi, a word used on the East coast of Africa to denote witchcraft, sorcery, and fetishism in general. The etymology of Obi has been traced to a very antique source, stretching far back into Egyptian mythology. A serpent in the Egyptian language was ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer

... "I-uns couldn't get shet of un less'n I-uns married un." "Have you'uns seed any stray shoats?" asked a passer: "I-uns's uses about here." "Critter" means an animal—"cretur," a fellow-creature. "Longsweet-'nin'" and "short sweet'nin'" are respectively syrup and sugar. The use of the indefinite substantive pronoun un (the French on), modified by the personals, used demonstratively, and of "done" and "gwine" as auxiliaries, is peculiar to the mountains, as well on the Wabash and Alleghany, I am told, as in Tennessee. The practice of dipping—by which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various

... and love annihilated? Personal intelligence, affection, identity, are inseparable components of the idea of a soul. And what method is there of crushing or evaporating these out of being? What force is there to compel them into nothing? Death is not a substantive cause working effects. It is itself merely an effect. It is simply a change in the mode of existence. That this change puts an end to existence is an assertion against analogy, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... style." But in general, between troubadour poetry and the popular poetry of folk-lore, a great gulf is fixed, the gulf of artificiality. The very name "troubadour" points to this characteristic. Trobador is the oblique case of the nominative trobaire, a substantive from the verb trobar, in modern French trouver. The Northern French trouvere is a nominative form, and trouveor should more properly correspond with trobador. The accusative form, which should have persisted, was superseded by the [10] nominative trouvere, ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor

... strange-speaking neighbours as 'barbarian,' that is 'stammering,' or even as 'dumb.' So the Russians call their neighbours the Germans njemets, connected with njemo, indistinct. The old name Slovene, Slavonians, is probably a derivative from the substantive which appears in Church Slavonic in the form slovo, a word; see Thomsen's Russia and Scandinavia, p. 8. Slovo is closely connected with the old Slavonic word for 'fame'— slava, hence, no doubt, the explanation of Slave favoured ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench

... own penalty, the designation which they shared with so many distinguished persons in history became a byword on the lips of envious persons and small boys, by which they wished to express effeminacy and the substantive of the "stuck-up." "D'ye take me fur a bank clurk?" was a form of repudiation among corner loafers as forcible as ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... is observed on the surface only, the grain otherwise possessing that pure white colour characteristic of Neradol D tanned leather. Further, it may be noted that leathers tanned—with Neradol D fix basic coal-tar dyes excellently, whereas acid and substantive dyestuffs are fixed with ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser

... couplet I have just sent (half an hour ago) must take place, in spite of delay or cancel; let me see the proof early to-morrow. I found out murmur to be a neuter verb, and have been obliged to alter the line so as to make it a substantive, thus: ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... Mysticism as implying the substantive union of the soul with God was the distinguishing feature of the pantheistic religious creeds of India, as it was also of some of the Greek philosophical systems. In the Middle Ages, while many of the ablest exponents of Scholasticism were also distinguished mystics, ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... upon the stage a red-haired, laughing-hyena faced, fustian-coated biped, exclaiming—'My name is Wall! I have a substantive amendment to move to the resolution now proposed—('Go off, off! ooh, ooh, ooh! turn him out, out, out!') We are met in a place where religion is taught (groans). Well, then, we are met where they ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various

... doctrines to which I refer are (1) the doctrine or concept of Federalism; (2) the doctrine of the Separation of Powers; (3) the concept of a Government of Laws and not of Men, as opposed especially to indefinite conceptions of presidential power; (4) and the substantive doctrine of Due Process of Law and attendant conceptions of Liberty. What I proposed to do is to take up each of these doctrines or concepts in turn, tell something of their earlier history, and then project against ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... coyote folk tales have been many. The majority of retellers from western Indians include Coyote. One of the very best is Frank B. Linderman, in Indian Why Stories and Indian Old-Man Stories. These titles are substantive: Old Man Coyote by Clara Kern Bayliss (New York, 1908, OP), Coyote Stories by Mourning Dove (Caldwell, Idaho, 1934, OP); Don Coyote by Leigh Peck (Boston, 1941) gets farther away from the Indian, is more juvenile. The Journal of American ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... gravely point out that the habit of striking bears as large as a horse with a school-slate was equally dangerous to the slate (which was also the property of Tuolumne County) and to the striker; and that the verb "to swot" and the noun substantive "snoot" were likewise indefensible, and not to be tolerated. Thus admonished Jimmy Snyder, albeit unshaken in his faith in ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte

... the party in opposition. The Maryland House of Delegates, in January, 1814, adopted a memorial, in which it was said that "The claim of impressment, which has been so much exaggerated, but which was never deemed of itself a substantive cause of war, has been heretofore considered susceptible of satisfactory arrangement in the judgment of both the commissioners, who were selected by the President then in office to conduct the negotiation ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan

... contingency in which the meaning of the word extradition may not be sufficiently expressed by the verb to deliver up, or the substantive restitution? ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various

... of that prorogation, the twenty-sixth of May, 1679, is a great era in our history. For on that day the Habeas Corpus Act received the royal assent. From the time of the Great Charter the substantive law respecting the personal liberty of Englishmen had been nearly the same as at present: but it had been inefficacious for want of a stringent system of procedure. What was needed was not a new light, but a prompt and searching remedy; and such a remedy the Habeas Corpus Act supplied. The ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... do not exist apart from matter as separate existences and substantives, spiritual or immaterial; so the Goodness, Wisdom, Justice, Mercy, and Benevolence of God are not independent existences, personify them as men may, but attributes of the Deity, the adjectives of One Great Substantive. But we know that He must be Good, True, Wise, Just, Benevolent, Merciful: and in all these, and all His other attributes, Perfect and Infinite; because we are conscious that these are laws imposed on us by the very nature of things, necessary, and without which the Universe ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... and halt between two opinions in the matter. Sometimes I think it is because they were made by a man for men; sometimes, again, I think there is an abstract reason for it, and there is something more substantive about a woman than ever there can be about a man. I can conceive a great mythical woman, living alone among inaccessible mountain-tops or in some lost island in the pagan seas, and ask no more. Whereas if I hear of a Hercules, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... character, and partly because, as will be seen, it was more continuous. I must, however, warn my readers against a possible illusion of perspective. To Fitzjames himself the legal career always represented the substantive, and the literary career the adjective. Circumstances made journalism highly convenient, but his literary ambition was always to be auxiliary to his legal ambition. It would, of course, have been injurious to his prospects at the bar had it been supposed that the case was inverted; and ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... subsequent dye bath. But, whether the action is chemical or merely physical, the fact remains that all adjective dyes need this preparation of the fibre before they will fix themselves on it. The use of a mordant, though not a necessity, is sometimes an advantage when using substantive dyes. ...
— Vegetable Dyes - Being a Book of Recipes and Other Information Useful to the Dyer • Ethel M. Mairet

... the Treasonable Practices Bill. Declaring the planning or levying war within the kingdom to be an act of substantive treason, it imposed dire penalties on those who devised evil against the King, who sought to coerce Parliament or help the invaders. Even those who spoke or wrote against the constitution came under the penalties for treason and might be transported ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... own emotions ignores the objectivity of Shakespeare's dramatic work. All phases of feeling lay within the scope of his intuition, and the successive order in which he approached them bore no explicable relation to substantive incident in his private life or experience. In middle life, his temperament, like that of other men, acquired a larger measure of gravity and his thought took a profounder cast than characterised it in youth. The highest ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... repent, and, to be just to him, there often follows some improvement. Again, the sins of the religious diarist are of a very formal pattern, and are told with an elaborate whine. But in Pepys you come upon good, substantive misdemeanours; beams in his eye of which he alone remains unconscious; healthy outbreaks of the animal nature, and laughable subterfuges to himself that always command belief ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... is as widely extended as the English language is beyond the limits of Germany. The rival religion of the Brahmins expelled it. Which of the two was the older is uncertain. Still more difficult is it to determine how far each is a separate substantive mythological growth, or merely a modification of ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham

... that the substantive changes made in the special legislation in 1954 have been beneficial, and we strongly recommend that they be retained. The Indecent Publications Act 1910, as it previously stood, dealt with sex and with sex alone, and ...
— Report of the Juvenile Delinquency Committee • Ronald Macmillan Algie

... our kindly associations with the old Iliad, that once was our most cherished companion, or our most looked-for prize, merely because Buttmann, Loewe, and Liddell have made us so much more accurate as to amphikupellon being an adjective, and not a substantive. Far be it from us to defend the faults of Pope, especially when we think of Chapman's fine, bold, rough old English;—far be it from, us to hold up his translation as what a translation of Homer might be. But we can ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... my interlocutor, "should always precede the substantive, for we should never utter the name of God without first giving Him ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... expresses ideas, simple, abstract, general and medicative; it is an abstraction in the substantive. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... shows the long-suffering nature of the poor blind players at this compulsory game of national football that they should ever for one moment permit so monstrous an assumption—permit the idea that one single player may wield a substantive voice and vote to outweigh tens of thousands of ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... The master troubled his head very little about that; and we still less. We should have been greatly surprised by the novelty and the forbidding look of such words in the grammatical jargon as substantive, indicative and subjunctive. Accuracy of language, whether of speech or writing, must be learnt by practice. And none of us was troubled by scruples in this respect. What was the use of all these subtleties, when, on coming ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... commonly divided, to begin by distinguishing from names of every description, those words which are not names, but only parts of names. Among such are reckoned particles, as of, to, truly, often; the inflected cases of nouns substantive, as me, him, John's; and even adjectives, as large, heavy. These words do not express things of which any thing can be affirmed or denied. We can not say, Heavy fell, or A heavy fell; Truly, or A truly, was asserted; Of, or ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... is," said Dorsenne again, jocosely, "that in the father's dictionary the word has another meaning: Conversion, feminine substantive, means to him income.... But let us reason a little, Countess. Why do you think it sad that the daughter should see her father's character in her own light?... You should, on the contrary, rejoice at it.... And why do you find it melancholy that this adorable saint should be the daughter of a ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget

... Plato, or as Plato says. Our English writers to the end of the reign of Charles II or somewhat later, employed it either in the original sense, or Platonically, or in a sense nearly correspondent to our present use of the substantive, Ideal; always however opposing it, more or less to image, whether of present or absent objects. The reader will not be displeased with the following interesting exemplification from Bishop Jeremy Taylor. "St. ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... of this chapter is to define certain governing principles. The substantive parts of the subject can be more clearly presented further ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... come upon two more words unknown to Shakespeare; {256} besiege, as a noun substantive, and ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... that it was led to adopt on the plea of ameliorating its lot."[148] On lui fit adopter! But who were the on, and how did they work? With what instruments and what fulcrum? Never was the convenience of this famous abstract substantive more fatally abused. And if religion, government, and opinion had all aggravated the miseries of the human race, what had lessened them? For the Encyclopaedic school never attempted, as Rousseau did, to deny that the world had, as a matter of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... Ahu. In this instance the article still finds itself disunited from its substantive. To-day we have ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... feelings which accompany an act or state, or the characteristic which permanently accompanies a person or thing, may be expressed by a substantive with the preposition "kun": ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman

... form a summary guide to the vast and varied contents of the Dictionary and its Supplement. Every name, about which substantive biographic information is given in the sixty-three volumes in the Dictionary or in the three Supplementary Volumes, finds mention here in due alphabetical order. An Epitome is given of the leading facts ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang

... construction of common sentences and his use of common words. Clarendon himself is not harder or more tortuous. Even in purely narrative parts, which ought to flow most easily, the understanding of the reader can seldom keep pace with his eye. Cyclopean epithets are piled together almost at random on any substantive which will have the complaisance to receive them. The choice of expression and metaphor is sometimes such as almost to rival the achievements of Castlereagh in his happiest hour. We have people existing, "not as individual names on paper, but simply ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various

... more certain; and the intermediate steps are very clear. From dies, comes diurnus. Diu is, by inaccurate ears, or inaccurate pronunciation, easily confounded with giu; then the Italians form a substantive of the ablative of an adjective, and thence giurno, or, as they make it, giorno; which is readily contracted into giour, or jour' He observed, that the Bohemian language was true Sclavonick. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... has his full share of faults, and though the owner of a style, is capable of excruciating offences. His habitual use of the odious word "individual" as a noun-substantive (seven times in three pages of 'The Romany Rye') elicits the frequent groan, and he is certainly once guilty of calling fish the "finny tribe." He believed himself to be animated by an intense hatred of the Church of Rome, and disfigures ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... sitting very upright. "You still go on the old assumption that woman was made for you. It is all the same story: one man says she is for his pleasure, another for his servant, and you, for—for his refinement. You would all have us adjectives. Now I defy you to prove that woman is not a substantive, created for herself." ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of recreation," he said, "which was once a monastery. There is a park between it, and the palace which is called Huytal; but why it is called Huytal, I am sure I don't know." His researches in the English language had not enabled him to recognize the adjective and substantive out of which the abstruse compound White-Hall ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... distinctly written, looks at first like acomie, but is no doubt the word acornie (French, acorne, horned), which Jamieson defines as a substantive, meaning 'apparently a drinking vessel with ears or handles.' He quotes from Depredations on the Clan Campbell, p. 80: 'Item, a silver cup with silver acornie, and horn spoons and trenchers.' It ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder

... Son is a neuter substantive to which the adjective agrees; the poet refers it to the person. Of the same kind is that which is said by Dione ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... masterpiece, her eye, Where, within call, the Loves and Graces lie? Who can forget her smile, devoid of art, Her heavenly sweetness and her frozen heart? How easy thus forever to compound, And ring new changes on recurring sound; How easy, with a reasonable store Of useful epithets repeated o'er, Verb, substantive, and pronoun, to transpose, And into tinkling metre hitch dull prose. But I—who tremble o'er each word I use, And all that do not aid the sense refuse, Who cannot bear those phrases out of place Which rhymers stuff into a vacant space—Ponder my scrupulous ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... the same opinion in rather stronger terms; Mr. Simpson, after having let a variety of expletive adjectives loose upon society without any substantive to accompany them, tucked up his sleeves, and began to ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... the Zapotec name therefore appears to be very doubtful. In Cordova's vocabulary, as given by Ternaux-Compans, "fleche" is given as the meaning of quii-lana. In Tzotzil gtox signifies "to split, break off, break open, to chop." In Maya we have tok; which, as a substantive, Perez explains by "pedernal, la sangria;" as a verb it signifies "to bleed, let blood." In this dialect tox denotes "to drain, ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas

... to the law which made slavetrading felony. But there was not the smallest injustice in enacting that the Central Criminal Court should try felonies committed long before that Court was in being. In Torrington's case the substantive law continued to be what it had always been. The definition of the crime, the amount of the penalty, remained unaltered. The only change was in the form of procedure; and that change the legislature was perfectly ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the Hon. Kali Churn Banerjee, a leading native Christian in that land, made before the Bombay Missionary Conference, begging the missionaries to cease emphasizing, as he said, "adjectival" Christianity and to dwell more upon "substantive" Christianity before the people of India. It is a sad fact that we carry there our Western shibboleths, our antiquated controversies, and our sectional jealousies. Most of these are not only unintelligible in India; they ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones

... bodies participating in motions of extraordinary complexity, but of one type. But now let the emphasis be placed upon the determining causes rather than upon the moving bodies themselves. In other words, let the bodies be regarded as attributive and the forces as substantive. The result is a radical alteration of the mechanical scheme and the transcendence of common-sense imagery. This was one direction of outgrowth from the work of Newton. His force of gravitation prevailed between bodies separated by spaces of great magnitude. Certain of the followers ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... revert to their father, but seem, in the bank-books of their remembrance, to have transferred all the stock of filial affection into their mother's name. Mr. Bagnet is one of these. Perhaps his exalted appreciation of the merits of the old girl causes him usually to make the noun-substantive "goodness" of the ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... and tones, the whole, the very being, of which words and acts are but the partial manifestation. Methinks that in this way the play might add enormously to the suggestiveness, the delight and dignity of life; play-acting might become a substantive art, not a mere spoiling of the work of poetry. Methinks that if this happened, or happened often, my friend and I, who also hates the play.... But it seems probable, on careful consideration, that my friend and I are conspicuously devoid of the dramatic faculty; which being the ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee

... them. The French, I believe, have only one, musical; for though, like ourselves, they have made substantives of the Greek [Greek: mousike] (sc. [Greek: techne]), [Greek: phusike], &c., in all other cases they retain the Greek form of the adjective, as in physique, substantive and adjective, while we generally have pairs of adjectives, as philosophic, philosophical; extatic, extatical; &c. Some may think this an advantage; ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various

... association that successively presents itself. In the present case, much time was lost in mentally taking the word in, owing to the quiet unobtrusive way in which I found it necessary to bring it into view, so as not to distract the thoughts. Moreover, a substantive standing by itself is usually the equivalent of too abstract an idea for us to conceive properly without delay. Thus it is very difficult to get a quick conception of the word "carriage," because there are so many different kinds—two-wheeled, four-wheeled, open and closed, ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... query about "Providence," my answer to which must depend upon what my questioner means by that substantive, whether alone, or qualified by the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley

... are numerous instances of the use of "knoll" as an alternative form of the verb "to knell;" but Byron seems, in this passage, to be the authority for "knoll" as a substantive.] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... was in the habit of using the adjective for the substantive, especially fair for fairness; one ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... hydropikos, which is not to be met with anywhere else in the New Testament, nor in the non-medical Greek literature of that time, though the word is of frequent occurrence as a designation for a person suffering from dropsy (and always, as in Luke, the adjective for the substantive), in Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Galen ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... Shelley 'on no better warrant than the exigency of the rhyme.' There can be little doubt that 'uprest' is simply an overlooked misprint for 'uprist'—not by any means a nonce-word, but a genuine English verbal substantive of regular formation, familiar to many from its employment by Chaucer. True, the corresponding rhyme-words in the passage above referred to are 'nest,' 'possessed,' 'breast'; but a laxity such as 'nest'—'uprist' is quite in Shelley's manner. Thus in this ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... swelling.] (on pronouncing which one had to join one's fingers together, and to put a particular emphasis upon the two sh's in the word) meant anything fresh, healthy, and comely, but not elegant; a substantive used in the plural meant an undue partiality for the object which it denoted; and so forth, and so forth. At the same time, the meaning depended considerably upon the expression of the face and the ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy

... unsophisticated observer. Reid's explanations are unfortunately mingled up with his controversy against the old hypothesis of ideas or images of things perceived in the mind—an hypothesis combated by him with unnecessary vehemence—but this detracts little from their substantive correctness or utility. This strange notion of images emanating from the external object, entering the mind, and being there perceived, was, after all, in its origin, rather a physical than a metaphysical hypothesis. The ancient speculator upon the causes of things felt, as we feel at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various

... concept of function. Both of these are what may be called dynamic concepts, rather than static; they envisage natural phenomena not as things but as processes and largely to this fact is due their pre-eminent explanatory value. Through the "wish" the "thing" aspect of mental phenomena, the more substantive "content of consciousness," becomes somewhat modified and reinterpreted. This "wish," which as a concept Freud does not analyze, includes all that would commonly be so classed, and also whatever would be called impulse, tendency, desire, purpose, attitude, and the like, not including, however, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... give way to others. More than one construction might, no doubt, be placed on this curious fact; but hardly any construction can be placed on it which does not in some way connect Grimald with the publication. It may be added that, while his, Surrey's, and Wyatt's contributions are substantive and known—the numbers of separate poems contributed being respectively forty for Surrey, the same for Grimald, and ninety-six for Wyatt—no less than one hundred and thirty-four poems, reckoning the contents of the first and ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... applied and as containing part of his life, like his hair, spittle and the rest of his body. He would have used names for a long period before he had any word for a name, and his first idea of the name as a part of the substantive body to which it is applied has survived a more correct appreciation. Thus if one knew a person's name one could injure him by working evil on it and the part of his life contained in it, just as one could injure him through the clippings of his hair, his spittle, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... Azeri displaced persons in the process. Both sides have generally observed a Russian-mediated cease-fire in place since May 1994, and support the OSCE-mediated peace process, now entering its fourth year. Nevertheless, Baku and Xankandi (Stepanakert) remain far apart on most substantive issues from the placement and composition of a peacekeeping force to the enclave's ultimate political status, and prospects for a ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency

... Christ could have spoken such words as these of my text if He had simply thought of His death as a Plato or a John Howard might have thought of his, as being the close of his activity for the welfare of his fellows. Unless Christ's death has in it some substantive value, unless it is something more than the mere termination of His work for the world, I see not how the words before us can be interpreted. If His death is His glorifying, it must be because in that death something is done which was not completed by the life, however fair; by the words, however ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... and other writers not unfrequently use the adjective for the substantive: thus, in ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various

... English word "maze," signifying a labyrinth, probably comes from the Scandinavian, but its origin is somewhat uncertain. The late Professor Skeat thought that the substantive was derived from the verb, and as in old times to be mazed or amazed was to be "lost in thought," the transition to a maze in whose tortuous windings we are ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney

... is an example of absolute divergence of meaning, inherited from the Latin; but as they are different parts of speech, I allow their plea of identical derivation and exclude them from my list. On the other hand, the substantive beam is an example of such a false homophone as I include. Beam may signify a balk of timber, or a ray of light. ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges

... his taste in the elegantiae literarum. He was, nevertheless, a man of many strange notions. It is well known that about the commencement of the eighteenth century, in our English books, printed in the mother country, the substantive words were almost always begun with a capital; the like practice obtained in many newspapers; but Longworth, not content with the partial change which time had brought about, of sinking these prominent and advantageous upper case type, waged a war of extermination ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... not preserved the title pages of this volume, but have instead moved dates to each essay's end and included any necessary title-page material in the heading area of the first substantive page. ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater

... it will be often well to admit the license of using a substantive for epithet, (as one says rock-bird or sea-bird, and not 'rocky,' or 'marine,') in Latin as well as in English. We thus greatly increase our power, and assist the brevity of nomenclature; and we gain the convenience of using the second term by itself, when we wish to ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin

... College, to recite badly; to make a poor recitation. From the substantive bull, a blunder or contradiction, or from the use of the word as a prefix, signifying large, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... Spencer's excellent expression of "the survival of the fittest." This, however, had not occurred to me till reading your letter. It is, however, a great objection to this term that it cannot be used as a substantive governing a verb; and that this is a real objection I infer from H. Spencer continually using the ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... to mislead our readers in their conceptions of any of our characters, and we therefore feel it necessary to add that the adjective, in the preceding agnomen of Mr. Van der School, was used in direct reference to its substantive. Our orthodox friends need not be told that all the merit in this world is comparative; and, once for all, we desire to say that, where anything which involves qualities or characters is asserted, we must be understood to ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... far more valuable than glass must have been meant." "Chumbatan," Prof. Wilson supposed to be the Pali equivalent to the Sanskrit chumbakam, "the kisser or attractor of steel;" the question he says is whether wajira is to be considered an adjective or part of a compound substantive, whether the phrase is a diamond-magnet pinnacle, or conductor, or a conductor or attractor of the thunderbolt. In the latter case it would intimate that the Singhalese had a notion of lightning conductors, Mr. DE ALWIS, however, and Mr. GOGERLY agree that chumbaka ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... very old, word, but it is well known, and I have no doubt as to its having come from the Gipsy. In Rommany, all the world over, cova means "a thing," but it is almost indefinite in its applicability. "It is," says Pott, "a general helper on all occasions; is used as substantive and adjective, and has a far wider scope than the Latin res." Thus covo may mean "that man;" covi, "that woman;" and covo or cuvvo, as it very often does in English, "that, there." It sometimes appears in the word acovat, or this. There is no expression more frequent in a Gipsy's ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland

... to steady;—as a substantive, a comprehensive mind. A man is said to "lose his ballast" when his judgment fails him, or he ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... expresses the sense of the verb in a substantive form, the participles in an adjective form; as "To rise early is healthful." "An early rising man." ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin

... infinite number of differentiations of itself. In the universe, therefore, the only principle which is indifferentiable is this "I am that I am" and the manifold modes of manifestation can only exist in reference to it. The eternal ignorance consists in this, that as there is but one substantive, but numberless adjectives, each adjective is capable of designating the All. Viewed in time the most permanent object or mood of the great knower at any moment represents the knower, and in a sense binds it with limitations. In ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... smidhum illustrate this. Smidh-um, the dative plural of smidh, is equivalent in meaning to the English to smiths; or to the Latin fabr-is. Smidhum, however, is a single Anglo-Saxon word (a substantive, and nothing more); whilst its English equivalent is two words (i.e., a substantive with the addition of a preposition). The letter s, in smiths, shows that the word is plural. The -um, in smidhum, does this and something more. It is the sign of the dative case plural. The -um in smidhum, ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham

... glanced helplessly at Aunt Ri, who promptly responded: "Naow, honey, don't yeow talk. 'Tain't good fur ye; 'n' Feeleepy 'n' me, we air in a powerful hurry ter git yer strong 'n' well, 'n' tote ye out er this—" Aunt Ri stopped. No substantive in her vocabulary answered her need at that moment. "I allow ye kin go 'n a week, ef nothin' don't go agin ye more'n I see naow; but ef yer git ter talkin', thar's no tellin' when yer'll git up. Yeow jest shet up, ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson

... and has his full share of faults, and, though the owner of a style, is capable of excruciating offences. His habitual use of the odious word 'individual' as a noun-substantive (seven times in three pages of The Romany Rye) elicits the frequent groan, and he is certainly once guilty of calling fish the 'finny tribe.' He believed himself to be animated by an intense hatred of the Church of Rome, and disfigures many of his pages by ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... Stewart, maintain that all terms, as at first employed, are expressive of individual objects. I quote from Adam Smith. 'The assignation,' he says, 'of particular names to denote particular objects, that is, the institution of nouns substantive, would probably be one of the first steps toward the formation of language.... The particular cave whose covering sheltered them from the weather, the particular tree whose fruit relieved their hunger, the particular fountain whose water allayed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... under the conditions and after the intervals mentioned all six subjects recall movement couplets better than verb couplets. In view of the small difference here and of his whole record, however, M is probably to be classed as indifferent in both substantive and ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... meaning fragment, and the masculine Greek noun, sauros, meaning reptile. The specific name, serratidens, is formed from the Latin serratus, meaning serrate, and the masculine Latin noun, dens, meaning tooth. The specific name is used as a substantive in apposition ...
— Two New Pelycosaurs from the Lower Permian of Oklahoma • Richard C. Fox

... has made a gift of $50 to the Intercollegiate Menorah Association. The sum is taken from the Associate Membership Fund of the Society. This Fund consists of the dues of associate members (graduates), "which shall be used exclusively for the substantive work of the Society" (Harvard Menorah Constitution, Article IV, section 4). The control of this Fund is in the hands of an advisory committee, consisting of the President of the Society and two associate members designated by the Executive Council ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... been made the Sphinx of this particular occasion. Every one has determined to put you off the scent. The word, among other acceptations, has that of mal [evil], a substantive that signifies, in aesthetics, the opposite of good; of mal [pain, disease, complaint], a substantive that enters into a thousand pathological expressions; then malle [a mail-bag], and finally ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac

... &c., must have their liberty; but of tang it should be noted that, though the verb may raise no inconvenience, yet the substantive has a very old and well-established use in the sense of a projecting point or barb (especially of metal), or sting, and that this demands respect and recognition. It is something less than prong, and is the proper word for the metal point that fixes ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English

... sophomore year, whom everybody knew and liked, but who was not very much interested in study. He got along as he best could by his native wits and such little application as he found absolutely necessary. One day we were reciting in Lowth's Grammar. The Bishop says that in English the substantive singular is made plural for the most part by adding s. Professor Channing called up this classmate of mine, who stated this as follows: "The author says that the distinction between nouns in the singular and plural is ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... usage? Upon a reference to the services which were to be performed at the ceremony of the coronation, it was clear, from the separate rights held upon the performance of particular kinds of attendance upon the queen, that her part of the ceremony was substantive, independent, and principal; that her right was clearly within herself, and not dependent upon the mere will of the King. So essential, indeed, was it that she should be crowned with all the forms of pomp which belonged to ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip

... respectfully but earnestly insists that not only was it issued by him in the performance of what he believed to be an imperative official duty, but in the performance of what this honorable court will consider was, in point of fact, an imperative official duty. And he denies that any and all substantive matters in the said first article contained, in manner and form as the same are therein stated and set forth, do by law constitute a high misdemeanor in office within the true intent and meaning of the Constitution of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson

... entirely supported by the merit of the actor; in which case, it signifies very little whether there be any sense in it or no. Now, your reading play is of a different stamp, and must have wit and meaning in it. These latter I call your substantive, as being able to support themselves. The former are your adjective, as what require the buffoonery and gestures of an actor to be joined with them to shew ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding

... decisions have recently been made by the Vice Chancellor. It seems that a Mr. Hartley deceased in 1843, left directions in his will that L300 should be set apart as a prize for the best Essay on "Natural Theology," treating it as a substantive science, and as adequate to constitute a true, perfect, and philosophical system of universal religion. It was ruled by the Vice Chancellor that this bequest was void, on account of the evident tendency ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... throughout his career, so that any competent critic can in a moment distinguish his later writing from his earlier by its compression of images in words, its forcible concretion of the various "parts of speech," its masterful corvee of nouns substantive to do the work of verbs, and so on. Even in very early work such as Venus and Adonis we cannot but note this gift of vision, how ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... termination; and then adieu to all that in our declensions distinguishes the gender, and the number of things we would speak: adieu, in the verbs, to all which might explain the active person, how and in what time it acts, if it acts alone or with others: in a word, with the Chinese, the same word is substantive, adjective, verb, singular, plural, masculine, feminine, &c. It is the person who hears who must arrange the circumstances, and guess them. Add to all this, that all the words of this language are reduced to three hundred and a few more; that they are pronounced in so many different ways, that they ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... doubt that upon more mature consideration MR. THORPE will see that it could not be a substantive that was intended; and, as he admits my conjecture to be specious, that he will, in the course of his very useful labours, ultimately find it not only specious but correct. Meanwhile, I submit to his consideration, that beside the analogy of the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various

... Island made the nation acutely aware of the safety risks posed by nuclear power plants. In response, the President established the Kemeny Commission to review the accident and make recommendations. Virtually all of the Commission's substantive recommendations were adopted by the Administration and are now being implemented by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Congress adopted the President's proposed plan for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Safety Oversight ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... of the most ingenious books of the season, and independently of its place as a volume of the Family Library, it has substantive claims which we trust will not he overlooked. It is from the graceful pen of Sir David Brewster, who possesses, in a high degree, the peculiar talent of investing scientific inquiries with the charm of popular delight; in short, of making science easy, and often conveying ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various

... literature of the Jewish Canon, down to Jeremiah and Zephaniah, knows absolutely nothing. The verb QR there used invariably and exclusively of the BURNING of fat or meal, and thereby making to God a sweet-smelling savour; it is never used to denote the OFFERING OF INCENSE, and the substantive QRT as a sacrificial term has the quite general signification of that which is burnt ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... design or emblem, often combined with a motto or legend. "Device" and its doublet "devise" come from the two Old French forms devis and devise of the Latin divisa, things divided, from dividere, to separate, used in the sense of to arrange, set out, apportion. "Devise," as a substantive, is now only used as a legal term for a disposition of property by will, by a modern convention restricted to a disposition of real property, the term "bequest" being used of personalty (see WILL). This use is directly due to the Medieval Latin meaning of dividere ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... "eating," "walking," "speaking" words such as "rain," "sunrise," "lightning," which do not denote what would commonly be called actions. These words illustrate, incidentally, how little we can trust to the grammatical distinction of parts of speech, since the substantive "rain" and the verb "to rain" denote precisely the same class of meteorological occurrences. The distinction between the class of objects denoted by such a word and the class of objects denoted by a general name such ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell

... the termination of the present state there is nothing to prevent the flowing of an equal bliss impartially over all. The substantive faculties and forces of the soul are always good and right: only their action is perverted to evil.13 This perversion will cease with the accidents of the present state; and thus death is the door to salvation. God's desires and intentions ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... these productions, and in medical lectures generally, to overstate the efficacy of favorite methods of cure, and hence the premium offered for showy talkers rather than sagacious observers, for the men of adjectives rather than of nouns substantive in the more ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... is meant obeying their tendencies, following up the suggestions nascently present in them, working in the direction in which they seem to point, clearing up the penumbra, making distinct the halo, unravelling the fringe, which is part of their composition, and in the midst of which their more substantive kernel of subjective content seems consciously to lie. Thus I may develop my thought in the Paley direction by procuring the brown leather volume and bringing the passages about the animal kingdom before the ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... important distinction in the social position of the two parallel systems. Among the Semang people, their totemic belief and custom do not carry with them a superstructure of society. They form the substantive cult of the scattered social groups, which are kinless groups dependent upon ties local in character and derived from the conscious use of the facts of nature surrounding them. Among the Arunta people, on the contrary, ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... the inquest jury brought out various facts of a substantive character, but calculated rather to complicate than to unravel the mystery. The butler swore that on the very day of the murder he had served his master a half-pint of arsenic at lunch. But he claimed that this was quite a usual happening with his master. On cross-examination ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock

... chin which stands for "gold" as a substantive may also stand, as in English, for an adjective, and for a verb, "to gold," i.e. to regard as gold, to ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles

... a sentence are: some name for the object of thought (to which the general term substantive may be given); some word or group of words to make assertion concerning the substantive (general term, assertive); and, in case of an incomplete assertive, one of the above given completions of its meaning (object complement, attribute ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... the causes of juvenile delinquency. What applies in other communities, and in other aspects of juvenile delinquency, must apply with much the same force in this Dominion as elsewhere, and to the sexual deviant as to all other juvenile delinquents. In searching for the real or substantive cause it must be borne in mind that juvenile delinquency, of the type now being considered, is a new feature of modern life and a facet of juvenile delinquency which does not appear to have engaged the attention ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.

... college clock was beginning to strike ten. He had scarcely got into the passage, and closed the door after him, when a roar as of a bereaved spirit rang through the room opposite, followed by a string of words, the only intelligible one being the noun-substantive "globe", and the next moment the door opened and Moriarty came out. The last stroke of ten was just ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse

... by a constituency who paid his expenses. Dorothea could have liked nothing better, since wrongs existed, than that her husband should be in the thick of a struggle against them, and that she should give him wifely help. Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done—not even Sir James Chettam, who went no further than the negative ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... person, you mean?" asked the lady. Her tone and accent made the substantive sound criminal. It almost hissed, the ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood

... voting with the government in favour of the removal of Jewish disabilities. No ordinary degree of moral courage was needed for such a step by the member for such a constituency. 'It is a painful decision to come to,' he writes in his diary (Dec. 16), 'but the only substantive doubt it raises is about remaining in parliament, and it is truly and only the church which holds me there, though she may seem to some to draw me from it.' Pusey wrote to him in rather violent indignation, for Mr. Gladstone was the only ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... myself can noun substantive stand, Impose on my Owners, and save my own land; You call me masculine, feminine, neuter, or block, Be what will the gender, sirs, hic, haec, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... only one with our nature intellectually, but in all ways; it is the path of the spirit in all things. Moreover, emotion is in itself simple; it does not need generalization, it is the same in all. It is rather a means of universalizing the refinements of the intellect, the substantive idealities of imagination, by enveloping them in an elementary, primitive feeling which they call forth. Poetry, therefore, especially deals, as Wordsworth pointed out, in the primary affections, the elementary passions ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... speak the soliloquy last night?' 'Oh, against all rule, my lord—most ungrammatically. Betwixt the substantive and the adjective, which should agree together in number, case, and gender, he made a breach thus, stopping, as if the point wanted settling; and betwixt the nominative case, which your lordship knows ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... produce such a condensation of the original work as may recall its contents to those who have read it, and may serve those who are now reading it in the place of a full body of marginal notes. Mr. Mill's conclusions on the true province and method of Logic have a high substantive value, independent even of the arguments and illustrations by which they are supported; and these conclusions may be adequately, and, it is believed, with much practical utility, embodied in an epitome. The processes of reasoning on which they depend, can, on the other ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing



Words linked to "Substantive" :   adjective, word, substantival, essential, noun, law, meaningful, jurisprudence



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