Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adverb One after another; in a series.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Serially or seriately; so as to be or make a series; one after another.

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

  • adverb In regular order; one after the other; severally.

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

  • adverb One after another, in order; taking one topic or subject at a time in an order; sequentially.
  • adjective Point by point; sequential.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adverb in a series; one after another

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Medieval Latin seriātim, from Latin seriēs, series; see series.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Medieval Latin seriatim, from Latin seriēs ("row, chain").

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Examples

  • The board's budget is often approved through a process called seriatim in which the five commissioners sign off on a proposal one by one in sequence.

    Audit Watchdog, Chinese Counterparts Restart Inspection Talks Andrew Ackerman 2012

  • And, moving on to the topic of this post, Saturday's term was seriatim, which is defined as:

    Define That Term #25 2006

  • And, moving on to the topic of this post, Saturday's term was seriatim, which is defined as:

    Sui Generis--a New York law blog: 2006

  • TAUBMAN: They supported it seriatim, which is one after another.

    Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (Part 2) 2003

  • But it may be that the effect is not the same in the magazine because of the variety in the authorship, and because it would be impossibly jolting to read all the short stories in a magazine 'seriatim'.

    Literature and Life (Complete) William Dean Howells 1878

  • But it may be that the effect is not the same in the magazine because of the variety in the authorship, and because it would be impossibly jolting to read all the short stories in a magazine 'seriatim'.

    Some Anomalies of the Short Story (from Literature and Life) William Dean Howells 1878

  • Comparisons between Faith Matters and NCS cannot be made precisely, as the NCS asked about four racial groups in seriatim: What percentage of your congregation is white?

    American Grace Robert D. Putnam 2010

  • Or if the point is that the minority is in danger of not being heard, a rule which allowed 40 (or 30?) members to require a further debate within a generous bu fixed limit (X more days) (once not seriatim) should do.

    Matthew Yglesias » Harkin Reintroduces Filibuster Reform 2010

  • Ravel's exclusive publishing arrangement notwithstanding, it's not uncommon for musical works to be published over time by different publishers and subsequently freighted with the conflicting, sometimes overzealous or heavy-handed input of seriatim editors reflecting shifting interpretative mores.

    Four Lost Measures Found Anne S. Lewis 2011

  • Well, he did more than that; God knows what he said to them, privatim et seriatim, over the next two days, but it dam 'near caused a mutiny.

    THE NUMBERS 2010

Comments

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  • Words like this and frisson make me wonder where exactly lies the line between English words and borrowed foreign words. Opinions?

    September 22, 2008

  • Latin words and phrases have long been well integrated in the discourse of particular fields (especially law, medicine, and academic scholarship) but are not used all that much in vernacular English (off the top of my head, the only common Latin phrases I can think of are versus, vice versa, per se, ad hoc, ad infinitum and ad nauseum, but of course there are more). But as I said, these have been around for centuries and have a well-deserved place in the language. Whether you consider them "English" or not really depends on how you define English. For me, it's enough that a word is widely used and understood by native speakers and established writers.

    The question of when a foreign borrowing becomes naturalized (i.e. when we stop putting it in italics or in quotation marks) is an interesting one. English is a very absorbent language and a hefty chunk of it is made of borrowings that no one really considers to be borrowings anymore (e.g. "flower" and "color"). The naturalization can happen pretty quickly, sometimes in just a few years (e.g. "junta" and "chic"), though some words never quite lose their foreignness (cf. "naïve" vs. "naïf" or "motive" vs. "motif" vs. "leitmotif").

    September 22, 2008