Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Overthrow; defeat.
  • noun Disfigurement; disguise.
  • To disfigure; deform; distort; disguise.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun obsolete Overthrow; defeat.
  • noun obsolete Disfigurement; deformity.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun defeat, overthrow, ruin
  • noun disfigurement, defacing

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

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Examples

  • So, the neat new features that the phone manufacturers come up with bluetooth–geez Verizon, JUST getting a bluetooth phone NOW? and you defeature it to make more money?

    Motorola fesses upto v710 problems 2004

  • And pure perfection with impure defeature — how far those may be to blame, it is not my work to inquire.

    Unspoken Sermons Third Series 1824-1905 1889

  • Even had we, however, a perfect and trustworthy transcript of Shakespeare's original sketch for this play, there can be little doubt that the rough draught would still prove almost as different from the final masterpiece as is the soiled and ragged canvas now before us, on which we trace the outline of figures so strangely disfigured, made subject to such rude extremities of defacement and defeature.

    A Study of Shakespeare Algernon Charles Swinburne 1873

  • All was coloured with admiration of his beauty and grace, and mingled with boundless pity for their sad overclouding and defeature!

    Thomas Wingfold, Curate George MacDonald 1864

  • All was coloured with admiration of his beauty and grace, and mingled with boundless pity for their sad overclouding and defeature!

    Thomas Wingfold, Curate V1 George MacDonald 1864

  • And pure perfection with impure defeature -- how far those may be to blame, it is not my work to inquire.

    Unspoken Sermons Series I., II., and II. George MacDonald 1864

  • Poetry, Fable, History, watch over the land: it is a sepulchre; Death is within and around it; Decay writes defeature upon every stone; but the Past sits by the tomb as a mourning angel; a soul breathes through the desolation; a voice calls amidst the silence.

    Godolphin, Complete Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton 1838

  • Amidst all that humbles and scathes; amidst all that shatters from their life its verdure, smites to the dust the pomp and summit of their pride, and in the very heart of existence writeth a sudden and "strange defeature," -- they stand erect, -- riven, not uprooted, -- a monument less of pity than of awe!

    The Disowned — Complete Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton 1838

  • History, watch over the land: it is a sepulchre; Death is within and around it; Decay writes defeature upon every stone; but the Past sits by the tomb as a mourning angel; a soul breathes through the desolation; a voice calls amidst the silence.

    Godolphin, Volume 4. Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton 1838

  • a spirit which Satan had bound, the schoolmaster caught sight, -- caught from its commonness, its grimness, its defeature, inspiration and uplifting, for there he beheld the oppressed, down trodden, mire fouled humanity which the man in whom he believed had loved because it was his father's humanity divided into brothers, and had died straining to lift back to the bosom of that Father.

    The Marquis of Lossie George MacDonald 1864

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