acceptations

When a man has no longer anything but rags upon his body and vices in his heart, when he has arrived at that double moral and material degradation which the word blackguard characterizes in its two acceptations, he is ripe for crime; he is like a well-whetted knife; he has two cutting edges, his distress and his malice; so slang does not say

Les Miserables 2008

I should now proceed to examine the several degrees of our knowledge, but that it is necessary first, to consider the different acceptations of the word knowledge.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 2007

Ably has the same acceptations; he works, he plays, he teaches ably.

A Philosophical Dictionary 2007

An adjective term, which, like almost all others, has different acceptations as it is differently employed.

A Philosophical Dictionary 2007

Which shows that beauty, and the passion caused by beauty, which I call love, is different from desire, though desire may sometimes operate along with it; but it is to this latter that we must attribute those violent and tempestuous passions, and the consequent emotions of the body which attend what is called love in some of its ordinary acceptations, and not to the effects of beauty merely as it is such.

On the Sublime and Beautiful 2007

“Psyche,” signifying the sensitive soul — the soul of the senses; and hence it was that Love, the son of Aphrodite, had so much passion for Psyche, and that she loved him so tenderly; “Pneuma,” the breath which gave life and motion to the whole machine, and which we have rendered by “spiritus” — spirit — a vague term, which has received a thousand different acceptations: and lastly, “nous,” intelligence.

A Philosophical Dictionary 2007

I have given to the word “impotence” all the acceptations which it receives.

A Philosophical Dictionary 2007

Spirit, in chemistry, too, is a term which receives various acceptations, but always denotes the more subtile part of matter.

A Philosophical Dictionary 2007

I deny that I can abstract from one another, or conceive separately, those qualities which it is impossible should exist so separated; or that I can frame a general notion, by abstracting from particulars in the manner aforesaid - which last are the two proper acceptations of abstraction.

A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, by George Berkeley 2006

Do you not at length perceive that in all these different acceptations of MATTER, you have been only supposing you know not what, for no manner of reason, and to no kind of use?

Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous 2005