sophistical

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“
Accordingly he wrote a long, sophistical, absurd opinion, in which he mixed up the law of nations and the "laws of war," and emerged out of the fog very accurately at the precise point at which he was expected to arrive.

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Definitions (3)

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  1. Pertaining to a sophist or to sophistry; using or involving sophistry; quibbling; fallacious. Whom ye could not move by sophisticall arguing, them you thinke to confute by scandalous misnaming. Milton, Church-Government, i. 6.
  2. Sophisticated; adulterated; not pure. There be some that commit Fornication in Chymistry, by heterogeneous and sophistical Citrinations. Howell, Letters, I. vi. 41.

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Examples (50)

  • But there were those twenty “clever, wicked, sophistical, and immoral French books” that she read in eighteen-forty. —  The Three Brontes
  • Accordingly he wrote a long, sophistical, absurd opinion, in which he mixed up the law of nations and the “laws of war,” and emerged out of the fog very accurately at the precise point at which he was expected to arrive. —  Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II
  • That she should have tolerated them at all is a stain upon her character, as his sophistical plea for them is a stain upon Froude's. —  The Life of Froude
  • They are like the rest, clever, wicked, sophistical, and immoral. —  The Life of Charlotte Bronte Vol. 1
  • Often he had found the theologians quibbling and sophistical, more anxious to “evade adverse reasonings” and establish foregone conclusions than to arrive at the truth. —  The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649
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Etymologies (1)

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  1. from Middle English *sofistical (in the adverb); from sophistic + -al.
 

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