Definitions

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

  • verb Simple past tense and past participle of desist.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Again he desisted from the egg, studying them with sharp eyes as if to fathom their financial status.

    CHAPTER I 2010

  • Again he desisted from the egg, studying them with sharp eyes as if to fathom their financial status.

    Chapter 1 1913

  • The eager Confederates drove them with horrid carnage a mile across the plain, and only desisted from the pursuit when they came under the fire of the Federal batteries across the river.

    The Battle of Fredericksburg 1863

  • It appears that it was not until several shots had actually struck her that the Star of the West desisted from the attempt to convey reinforcements to Fort Sumter.

    Foreign and Colonial News. 1861

  • Constantine, as the barbarians of the Euxine, who in the preceding age had poured their armaments into the heart of the Mediterranean, soon desisted from the exercise of piracy, and despaired of forcing this insurmountable barrier.

    The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 1206

  • The West, from Rome to Britain, was called into action; the kings of Poland and Bohemia obeyed the summons of Conrad; and it is affirmed by the Greeks and Latins, that, in the passage of a strait or river, the Byzantine agents, after a tale of nine hundred thousand, desisted from the endless and formidable computation.

    The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 1206

  • Alaric had faithfully asserted the just pretensions of the republic to the provinces which were usurped by the Greeks of Constantinople: he modestly required the fair and stipulated recompense of his services; and if he had desisted from the prosecution of his enterprise, he had obeyed, in his retreat, the peremptory, though private, letters of the emperor himself.

    The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 1206

  • Mr. Griffith Donne's principal trial was the existence of an elderly maiden aunt, who did not approve of him, and was in the habit of expressing her disapproval in lengthy epistolary correspondence, invariably tending to severe denunciation of his mode of life, and also invariably terminating with the announcement that unless he "desisted" (from what, or in what manner, not specified) she should consider it her bounden duty to disinherit him forthwith.

    Vagabondia 1884 Frances Hodgson Burnett 1886

  • For some time she endeavoured to outbrave me; neither the fiddler nor she desisted; but at last she gave over, and the musician laid aside his instrument. . .

    A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010

  • Or if it desisted from all rhetoric suggesting that it can solve its budget woes by further cutting Pentagon spending.

    A Republican Foreign Policy Bret Stephens 2011

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