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Archaic   /ɑrkˈeɪɪk/   Listen
Archaic

adjective
1.
So extremely old as seeming to belong to an earlier period.  Synonyms: antediluvian, antiquated.  "Antediluvian ideas" , "Archaic laws"
2.
Little evolved from or characteristic of an earlier ancestral type.  Synonym: primitive.  "Primitive mammals" , "The okapi is a short-necked primitive cousin of the giraffe"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Archaic" Quotes from Famous Books



... be levelled before the pavement was laid. In the deepest part of the excavations, however, inscribed clay tablets and fragments of stone vases are still found, though the cuneiform characters upon them are of a very archaic type, and sometimes even retain ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... for many years. With tastes such as his came the habit, or rather the fixed determination, never to paint or engrave any but sacred subjects. Puffs and cliques are his abomination. His ideal is the archaic rendered by modern methods. An artist of this type can but obtain the half-grudging esteem of his own profession, and of the few critics who really understand something about art. Gladly, and with absolute disdain, he leaves to others the applause of the mob, the gilded ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

... derived from Christian priests, it must be admitted that it has changed wonderfully on the way. It is to me very heathen, grimly archaic, and with the strong stamp of an original. Its resemblance to the Norse is striking. Either the Norsemen told it to the Eskimo and the Indians, or the latter to the Norsemen. None know, after all, what was ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland

... from Williams College says, "We speak of a person whom we despise as being a nuts." This word is used in the Yorkshire dialect with the meaning of a "silly fellow." Mr. Halliwell, in his Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, remarks: "It is not applied to an idiot, but to one who has been doing ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... This venerable but archaic political system did not survive the war. Beside the loyalties inspired by the war tribal devotion to a party chief seemed a trivial concern. Canadians, who gave first place to the need of getting on with the ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe

... However archaic and conventional it may sound, it is the literal fact that young Scott Brenton was led into the ministry by the prayer of his widowed mother. Furthermore, the prayer was not made to him, but offered in secret and in all sincerity at ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... Germany has saved her from that destruction. She was at once the most archaic and modern of states. She was Hohenzollern, claiming to be Caesar, and flaunting a flat black eagle borrowed from Imperial Rome; and also she was the most scientific and socialist of states. It is her science and her Socialism that have held ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... unequally developed in their several parts. Low gender systems appear with high tense systems, highly evolved case systems with slightly developed mode systems; and there is scarcely any one of these languages, so far as they have been studied, which does not exhibit archaic ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell

... was read by me during sleep, in an old book printed in archaic type. As with many other things similarly read by me, I do not know whether it is to be found in ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... being described by Proclus Diadochus (ca. 450), but the first general, though crude, planetary equatorium seems to have been described by Abulcacim Abnacahm (ca. 1025) in Granada; it has been handed down to us in the archaic Castilian of the Alfonsine Libros del saber.[22] The sections of this book, dealing with the Laminas de las VII Planetas, describe not only this instrument but also the improved modification introduced by Azarchiel (born ca. 1029, died ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price

... in Deuteronomy are the express basis of the legislation: it keeps itself carefully and strictly within the limits of the situation in the wilderness, for which in all seriousness it seeks to give the law. It has actually been successful, with its movable tabernacle, its wandering camp, and other archaic details, in so concealing the true date of its composition that its many serious inconsistencies with what we know, from other sources, of Hebrew antiquity previous to the exile, are only taken as proving that it lies far beyond all known history, and ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... arranging the details of his many campaigns, and superintending the innumerable affairs of his government, his minister was equally active in reorganizing the administration and in supporting his sovereign in his bitter struggle with the literary classes who advocated archaic principles, and whose animosity to the ruler was inflamed by the contempt, not unmixed with ferocity, with which he treated them. The empire was divided into thirty-six provinces, and he impressed upon the governors the importance of improving communications within their ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... content of all historic revelation is conditioned in the circumstances of the man to whom the revelation is addressed. It is clear that the whole matter of revelation is thus apprehended by Kant with more externality than we should have believed. His thought is still essentially archaic and dualistic. He is, therefore, now and then upon the point of denying that such a thing as revelation is possible. The very idea of revelation, in this form, does violence to his fundamental principle of the autonomy of the human reason and will. At many points ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... out of this ancient avenue, a contrast, yet a harmony; for, though her dress was modern, her person had a rare touch of the archaic, and fitted into the picture like a piece of beautiful porcelain, coloured long before the art of making fadeless colours ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... to similar laws. Where pottery is employed by peoples in very low stages of culture, its ornamentation will be of the simple archaic kind. Being a conservative art and much hampered by the restraints of convention, the elementary forms of ornament are carried a long way into the succeeding periods and have a very decided effect upon the higher stages. Pottery brought ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes

... hyphenation and use of accents and ligatures have been preserved as printed, with a few exceptions. Variable and archaic spelling has also been preserved. A full list of amendments and other notes follow ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius

... Transcriber's Note: | | | | This e-book contains archaic spelling which has not been | | modernized. To avoid confusion a list has been provided | | at the end of this ...
— Reminiscences of two years with the colored troops • Joshua M. Addeman

... with astonishment at the face of his wife, which seemed to rise from all sides of the parlor. Little studies of women of the people or ladies of the 18th century; water-colors of Moorish women; Greek women with the stiff severity of Alma-Tadema's archaic figures; everything in the parlor, everything he had painted, was Josephina, had her face, or showed traces of her with the vagueness ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... density of population and the greatest purity of race would more nearly indicate the center of dispersion; because purity of race is incompatible with long migrations, as we have seen, though in the native seat it may be affected by intrusive elements. When this purity of race is combined with archaic forms of language and culture, as among the Lithuanians of Aryan speech among the Baltic swamps, it may indicate that the locality formed a segregated corner of the early center of dispersion. It seems essential to such an original ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... your Girdle. 'To have an M under (or by) the Girdle' was a proverbial expression to have a courteous address by using the titles Mr., Mrs., Miss, &c. cf. Halliwell, Dictionary Archaic and Proverhial Words; 'M. ... to keep the term "Master" out of sight, to be wanting in proper respect.' cf. Eastward Hoe (1605), Jonson, Chapman, and Marston, iv, I: 'You might carry an M under your Girdle'; and not infrequently. Sir- (or Save-) Reverence is an old and very common colloquialism. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn

... affected an archaic style in his Sonnets and other verses. In the Preface to the second edition of Poems, etc., he writes, "I think that our Poetry has been continually declining since the days of Milton and Cowley ... and that the golden age of our language is in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron

... downwards from salvation because we have it, not that we may get it. And whatever 'good works' may mean, they are the consequences, not the causes, of 'salvation,' whatever that may mean. But they are consequences, and they are the very purpose of it. So says Paul in the archaic language of my text—which only wants a little steadfast looking at to be turned into up-to-date gospel—'We are His workmanship, created unto good works'; and the fact that we are is one great reason for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... stroke of the Cathedral bell died away. Other more distant bells still were sounding dimly, but save for the ceaseless hum of the traffic, no unusual sound now disturbed the archaic peace of ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer

... that the old religions were outgrown; that they were the belated leftovers of a bygone age and were not for modern minds; that a new religion fitted to our new needs alone would do. Suppose, however, that one should say: The English language is an archaic affair; it has grown like Topsy, by chance; it has carried along with it the forms of thinking of outgrown generations; it is not scientific; what we need is a new language built to order to meet ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... to your shape Apply his T-square and his tape, And wish that you were more archaic; Why should I care? I love you best For what no compasses can test, For graces not to be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various

... complete steel but bareheaded and unattended, rode slowly around the platform three times, "which they say was the custom in such solemnities of investiture," adds an eyewitness,[10] as though he considered the ceremony somewhat archaic. Then the candidate dismounted, received the mantle of the empire from an attendant, and slowly ascended the steps to the emperor's feet, while a new escutcheon, displaying the insignia of the freshly acquired fiefs, quartered on the Burgundian arms, was carried before him. Kneeling at the emperor's ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... preserving and publishing these texts seems to me to be manifest. They reveal to us the undoubtedly authentic spirit of the ancient religion; they show us the language in its most archaic form; they preserve references to various mythical cycli of importance to the historian; and they illustrate the alterations in the spoken tongue adopted in the esoteric dialect of the priesthood. Such considerations will, I trust, attract the attention of scholars to these ...
— Rig Veda Americanus - Sacred Songs Of The Ancient Mexicans, With A Gloss In Nahuatl • Various

... 'proudest princes VEIL their eyes,' where Lockhart himself agrees with the earlier editions in reading 'VAIL'. The restoration of the latter form needs no defence. The Elizabethan words in the Poem are not infrequent, giving it, as they do, a certain air of archaic dignity, and there can be little doubt that 'vail' was Scott's word here, used in its Shakespearian sense of 'lower' or 'cast down,' and recalling Venus as 'she ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott

... been used so deliberately that nothing was left for me to do but to translate it literally. The truth is that Strindberg was not striving to reproduce the actual language of the Period—a language of which we get a glimpse in the quotations from The Comedy of Tobit. Here and there he used archaic expressions (which I have sometimes reproduced and sometimes disregarded, as the exigencies of the new medium happened to require). At other times he did not hesitate to employ modern colloquialisms (most of which have been "toned down"). He did not regard local color or historical ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg

... brilliancy the vibrant faith of a people in the deific order of the world and in the way the ancients devised for keeping man in harmony with his universe. All his arts, therefore, are rooted in ancestral beliefs and in archaic ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett

... of ballads and minor pieces. Chatterton had no precise knowledge of early English, or even of Chaucer. His method of working was as follows: He made himself a manuscript glossary of the words marked as archaic in Bailey's and Kersey's English dictionaries, composed his poems first in modern language, and then turned them into ancient spelling, and substituted here and there the old words in his glossary for their modern equivalents. Naturally he made ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... enough to come across a team of oxen ploughing. The phenomenon is yearly becoming more rare; but within sight and sound of the Eastbourne expresses between Plumpton and Cooksbridge this archaic survival from a remote past is more likely to be seen ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes

... of fact, it is less formidable; or, if this be denied, everyone will admit that twenty pages of the "Canterbury Tales" are less formidable than twenty pages of the "Faerie Queene." I might bring several recent editors and critics to testify that, after the first shock of the archaic spelling and the final "e," an intelligent public will soon come to terms with Chaucer; but the unconscious testimony of the intelligent public itself is more convincing. Chaucer is read year after year by a large number of men and women. Spenser, in many respects a greater poet, is also ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... changed and are listed below. Author's archaic and variable spelling is preserved. Author's punctuation style is preserved. Passages in italics ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... what is peculiar to myself, and so of relatively trivial moment, dates and the order of events are of little importance. It occurred to me in the connection, that to give a human document of Puritan family life, and the development of a mind from the archaic severity of New England Puritanism to a complete freedom of thought, by a purely evolutionary process, without revolt or revulsion, might be worth doing. For what it is worth I have done it without much ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James

... cleft, din, earnest money, egg on, greenhorn, jack-of-all-trades, loophole, settled, ornate, to quail, ragamuffin, riff-raff, rigmarole, scant, seedy, out of sorts, stale, tardy, trash. How Halliwell ever came to class these words as archaic I cannot imagine; but I submit that any one who sets forth to write about the English of England ought to have sufficient acquaintance with the language to check and reject Halliwell's amazing classification. Does Mr. Tucker so despise British English as never to read an English book? How else is ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... common to the older and the newer England, but which the newer England has kept, while the older England has cast it aside." Such literature as had birth in New England adhered chiefly to the elder models, and has thus an archaic element that broader life and intercourse would have eliminated. The provincial stage, of feeble and uncertain, or stilled but equally uncertain expression was at hand, but for the first generation or so the colonists had small time to consider forms of speech. ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... doubtless remembered the many varieties of metre employed by Spenser in the Calendar, his verses already bear a stamp of their own. The long but impetuous lines, such as 'Trim up her golden tresses with Apollo's sacred tree', afford a striking contrast to the archaic romance-metre, derived from Sir Thopas and its fellows, which appears in Dowsabel, and it again to the melancholy, murmuring cadences of the lament for Elphin. It must, however, be confessed that certain of the songs in the 1593 edition were full ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton

... is thought a somewhat brusque word, lacking in polish. To use it frequently is a mark of lack of 'savoir-faire! Indeed to speak of it at all is as archaic as to speak of the Ichthyosaurus. But sin is a root-fact of the life of man. It is the office of the spiritual teacher to pluck out sin; to pierce the heart with a recognition of the enormity of sin, and of its far-reaching consequences; to stir the seared conscience, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... him in 1911, at the request of the Interstate Commerce Commission, Lane warned a group of high express officials gathered around him that unless they promptly coordinated their service more closely to the public requirements, revised their archaic practices, readjusted and simplified their rate systems so as to eliminate discriminations, the frequent collection of double charges and other evils, and gave the public a cheaper and a better service, the public would soon be demanding ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... errors have been corrected without note. Medical, scientific, archaic and variant spellings remain as printed, except for obvious errors noted at the end of the text. The oe ligature is shown as [oe], whilst [->] represents ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark

... that upon ancient vases the headgear of Bacchus is sometimes ornamented with the cross of four equal arms; that upon a Greek vase at Lentini, Sicily, an ancient representation of the Sun-God Hercules is accompanied by no less than three different kinds of crosses as symbols; and that upon an archaic Greek vase in the British Museum, the Svastika cross, the St. Andrew's cross, and the other and right angled cross of four equal arms, appear under the rays of the Sun. Nor should it be forgotten that though the Svastika cross has almost died ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons

... genuine; the sacrifices they are making are changing and softening them; but as yet they can scarcely be expected, as a class, to rejoice over the revelation—just beginning to dawn upon their minds—that victory for the Allies spells the end of privilege. Their conception of democracy remains archaic, while wealth is inherently conservative. Those who possess it in America have as a rule received an education in terms of an obsolete economics, of the thought of an age gone by. It is only within the past few years that our colleges and universities have begun to teach modern economics, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... communications inserted in No. 17., on the interpretation of Pokership, induces me to send you this query, in the hope of eliciting information, if not from the gentleman you there refer to, at least from some one or other of your numerous readers learned in Archaic words. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 20, March 16, 1850 • Various

... dozen fragments of whose place in the Twelve Tables we are ignorant. In nearly every instance these fragments consist of only one word or phrase, which later Latin antiquarians have preserved to illustrate an ancient spelling or to explain an archaic usage or to ...
— The Twelve Tables • Anonymous

... fond of saying, in the Universal Spirit. All know the great passage In St. Augustine's Confessions in which he describes how "the mysterious eye of his soul gazed on the Light that never changes; above the eye of the soul, and above intelligence."[7] There is nothing archaic in such an experience. Though its description may depend on the language of Neoplatonism, it is in its essence as possible and as fruitful for us to-day as it was in the fourth century, and the doctrine and discipline ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... impossible to use the compressed structure of sentences which is characteristic of Latin, and particularly of Luther's Latin. The work had to be condensed. German and English translations are available, but the most acceptable English version, besides laboring under the handicaps of an archaic style, had to be condensed into half its volume in order to accomplish the "streamlining" of the book. Whatever merit the translation now presented to the reader may possess should be written to the credit of Rev. Gerhardt Mahler ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther

... ring with beautifully modelled fauns' heads, another offered me a "Pickelhaube" small enough for Mustard-seed's wear, but complete in every detail, and inlaid with the bronze eagle from an Imperial pfennig. There are many such ringsmiths among the privates at the front, and the severe, somewhat archaic design of their rings is a proof of the sureness of French taste; but the two we visited happened to be Paris jewellers, for whom "artisan" was really too modest a pseudonym. Officers and men were evidently proud of their work, ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... n'en put venir a bout, 'he could never get through.' En is used here as the object, ce reste, to which it refers, precedes the verb for the sake of emphasis. Note n'en put, somewhat archaic for ne ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet

... Once we saw a curious sight. Two large motor-omnibuses with "Leipziger lokal-anzeiger" painted on their side went past, each taking about twenty-five German Beguine nuns to the battlefield, the contrast between this very modern means of transport and the archaic appearance of the nuns in their ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan

... sculpture and painting. The chief merit of the Delian Hymn is in the concluding description of the assembled Ionians, happy seafarers like the Phaeacians in the morning of the world. The confusions of the Pythian Hymn to Apollo make it less agreeable; and the humour of the Hymn to Hermes is archaic. All those pieces, however, have delightfully fresh descriptions of sea and land, of shadowy dells, flowering meadows, dusky, fragrant caves; of the mountain glades where the wild beasts fawn in the train of the winsome Goddess; and the high still peaks where Pan ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang

... fashion of modern thought there is something stiff, scholastic, archaic, rigid, and even Byzantine, about the words "truth," "beauty," "goodness," thus pedestalled side by side. But just as with the old-fashioned word "matter" and the old-fashioned word "soul," we must not be misled by a mere "superstition of ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... Purney to his unusual theory of enervated diction. How unusual it was can be judged by comparing with the then-current practices and theories of poetic diction his recommendation of monosyllables, expletives, the archaic language of Chaucer and Spenser, and current provincialisms—devices that Gay had used for burlesque—as means of producing the soft and ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney

... homelier beauty which instantly pierces the defences of the heart. Not diffident as we, but of a nature so infinitely absent and reserved that in the legend his wife must concoct a philter to remind him of his love, he is of all the pagans the best companion for our angrier moods. An archaic and elemental serenity is upon his language and thought, rebuking our unprofitable petulance; if emotion gains him he finds utterance in those tremendous periods "where single words seem to gather out of the deep and to ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... be placed fully at the service of the public, they nevertheless bridged the gap for the time being, and in formulating laws and making plans for the future I was inclined to say, "Blessed be nothing," as we were not hampered by useless employees or archaic equipment, but were left free to make a ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester

... White to describe certain aspects of his favourite Kansas; E.L. Godkin to review the dangers and the hopes of American democracy; Jacob Rues to tell about the Battle with the Slum; and W.G. Frost to reveal for the first time the archaic civilization of the Kentucky mountaineers. The latter article illustrated Page's genius at rewriting titles. Mr. Frost's theme was that these Kentucky mountaineers were really Elizabethan survivals; that ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... Pendleton's soft, anxious eyes the shadow darkened, as if for the first time she had grown suspicious of the traditional wisdom which she was imparting. But this suspicion was so new and young that it could not struggle for existence against the archaic roots of her inherited belief in the Pauline measure of her sex. It was characteristic of her—and indeed of most women of her generation—that she would have endured martyrdom in support of the consecrated doctrine of her ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... Welsh lexicographer on this matter. The word abred is archaic, as is the idea for which it stands; but as already said, very little has been lost of ideas which were once the property of kindred races; so here we have no exception to the general rule, though the word abred and the theory it represented come down to modern times ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen

... collection. The contents, after being preserved in memory, like the Vedas, for many generations, were written down by desire of the chiefs, when their language was first reduced to writing; and the book is therefore more than a century old. Its language, archaic when written, is now partly obsolete, and is fully understood by only a few of the oldest chiefs. It is a genuine Indian composition, and must be accepted as disclosing the true character of its authors. ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale

... is not to me English until it sloughs off the Germanic sentence-structure of Anglo-Saxon. Here lies, I think, the greatest difficulty in translating Old English literature. And it will not be successfully translated, I think, without the use of the syntax of some dialect that preserves an archaic sentence-structure. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... in the four big grey volumes beyond. They are an old-fashioned large-print edition of Boswell's "Life of Johnson." I emphasize the large print, for that is the weak point of most of the cheap editions of English Classics which come now into the market. With subjects which are in the least archaic or abstruse you need good clear type to help you on your way. The other is good neither for your eyes nor for your temper. Better pay a little more and have a book that ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... geography of Palestine and other tiresome details. For me, reading as I did, the whole of the New Testament was radiant with interest, a frankly human interest. There were many passages that I did not pretend to understand, sometimes because the English was obscure or archaic, and sometimes because my mind was not equal to it or my knowledge too small. Whatever may be the opinion of other people, mine is that the reading of the New Testament in the simplicity of childhood, with the flower of intuition not yet blighted, is one of ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan

... manipulated verse! Mountain, taking sadai in its archaic sense as in Assyrian and some Hebrew poems, Jud. v. 4, Deut. xxxii. 13 (see the writer's "Deut." in the "Camb. Bible for Schools") where it is parallel to highlands, rock and flinty rock. The following ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... Gorgie and Dalry, which the midday hooters filled with factory girls horned under their shawls with Hinde's curlers; yet made her remember also vases and friezes in museums where crimped, panoplied priestesses dispensed archaic rites. Her features were so closely moulded to the bone, her temples so protuberant, and her eyes sunk in such pits of sockets that one had to think of a skull, a skull found in hot sand among ruins. The ruins of some lost Nubian city, the mind ran on, for the fulness ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... fail to attain the position the art-genius and industry of her people entitle her to and must limp behind the progress of the world unless a very radical revision of the constitution is achieved. The disabilities which arise from an archaic survival are so great that they will affect China as adversely as Japan, and therefore should be ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale

... This book contains some archaic spelling, and unusual punctuation and capitalisation. All have been left as printed ...
— The Kingdom of Heaven; What is it? • Edward Burbidge

... regime and yet aloof from the worse follies of the demagogues who now rage in the country. Vastly less picturesque than Blasco Ibanez, he is nearer the normal Spaniard—the Spaniard who, in the long run, must erect a new structure of society upon the half archaic and half Utopian chaos now reigning in the peninsula. Thus his book, though it is addressed to Spaniards, should have a certain value for English-speaking readers. And so it ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... golden frame, and bearing the legend "Alfred mec heht gewyrcean" (Alfred ordered me made). This was discovered in 1693 in Newton Park, near Athelney, and through it one is enabled to touch the far-away life of a thousand years ago. But greater and more imperishable than this archaic gem is the gift that the noble King left to the English nation—a gift that affects the entire race of English-speaking people. For it was Alfred who laid the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... he was not wont to run after crowns, but to have crowns running after him. He trampled no less on that still more venerable religio loci which attached imperial rights to Rome. Together with this ancient piety, he swept the Holy Roman Empire into the dust-heap of archaic curiosities. By declaring his will to be crowned where he chose, he emphasized the modern state motto of L'etat, c'est moi, and prepared the way for a Pope's closing of a General Council by the word L'Eglise, c'est moi. Charles had sufficient reasons for acting as he did. The ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... latent in my own mind as to the cause of the Society's decay. Thoroughly at one with them still on the doctrine of the illuminating power of the Spirit in the individual conscience, he treated the archaic dress, the obsolete phraseology, the obstinate opposition to many innocent customs of the age, simply as anachronisms. He pointed with pride to the fact that our greatest living orator was a member of the Society; and claimed for the underlying principle ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... Examinations then were oral, not written; and, preoccupied though I was with my own difficulties, I could not but catch at times sounds of his. He was being questioned in grammar and in parsing, which I have heard—I do not know whether truly—are now looked upon as archaic methods of teaching; and the sentence propounded to him was, "Mahomet was driven from Mecca, but he returned in triumph." His rendering of the first words I did not hear, my attention not being arrested until "but," which proved to him a truly disjunctive conjunction. "But!" he ejaculated—"but!" ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan

... paintings, some of them not very bad in color and drawing. The altar, which is supported at the sides by twisted wooden pillars, carved with a knife, is hung with ancient sheepskins brightly painted. Back of the altar are some archaic wooden images, colored; and over the altar, on the ceiling, are the stars of heaven, and the sun and the moon, each with a face in it. The interior was scrupulously clean and sweet and restful to one coming in from the glare of the sun on the ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... was deeply interested in the Cathedral there, because it is possibly the only great Gothic structure of the kind in Europe which was completed in a single style during a single reign. Stonehenge was to me even more remarkable, because it is more mysterious. Its stupendous barbarism or archaic character, involving a whole lost cycle of ideas, contrasts so strangely with the advanced architectural skill displayed in the cutting and fitting of the vast blocks, that the whole seems to be a mighty paradox. This was the ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... issue, the truth lies somewhere between the two disputants. We do not think that Mr. Newman has made out his case that Homer was antiquated, quaint, and even grotesque to the Greeks themselves because his cast of thought and his language were archaic, or strange to them because he wrote in a dialect almost as different from Attic as Scotch from English. The Bible is as far from us in language and in the Orientalism of its thought and expression as Homer was from them; yet we are so familiar with it that it produces on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... discontent boils with passion and because it prevents his appreciating class differences, makes him a conservative element in our national life, but one always big with the danger of a blind servitude to traditions and archaic social judgments. The thinking of the farmer may be either substantial from his sense of personal sufficiency or backward from his lack of contact. The decision regarding his attitude is made by the influences that ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves

... roofs of tule, nor was there a tree on the sand hills encircling the stronghold. But in this early springtime—the summer of the peninsula—the hills showed patches of verdure, and all the low white buildings were covered by a network of soft dull green and archaic pink. The Castilian rose, full and fluted, and of a chaste and penetrating fragrance, hung singly and in clusters on the pillars of the dwellings, on the barracks and chapel, from the very roofs; bloomed upon bushes as high as young ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... prayer-book and ministers as the best substitute it knew for a wholesome dwelling and sufficient wages. Theology was not much in the way of an old heathen who reduced all religions save Mohammedanism to the transmuted presentation of the archaic solar myth, and who thought Buddhism far ahead of every other creed; but he liked the man Alick, if the parson bored him, and he was caressing a plan which he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... bearing to warrant its appearance here, and compels us to travel an inconveniently long distance back in the context to find an antecedent to the 'his' and 'him' of our text. It seems to be more in consonance, therefore, with the archaic style of the whole narrative, and to yield a profounder and worthier meaning, if we recognise the boldness of the metaphor, and take 'sin' as the subject of the whole. Now all this puts in concrete, metaphorical shape, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... he thought, she looked surprisingly noble. Her large grave features made her appear like an old monument in a street of Palace Hotels; and he marvelled at the mysterious law which had brought this archaic face out of Apex City, and given to the oldest society of Europe a ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton

... privilege to behold today, in the Boston Navy Yard, this gallant frigate preserved as a heritage, her tall masts and graceful yards soaring above the grim, gray citadels that we call battleships. True it is that a single modern shell would destroy this obsolete, archaic frigate which once swept the seas like a meteor, but the very image of her is still potent to thrill the hearts and animate the courage ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine

... Chavannes. The paintings of the South Transept represent episodes in the early history of France. Chronologically speaking, they begin from the east central corner. Choir, Death of Ste. Genevieve, and Miracles before her Shrine, by Laurens. Apse of the tribune, fine modern (archaic) mosaic, by Hebert, representing Christ with the Guardian Angel of France, the Madonna, Jean d'Arc, and Ste. Genevieve. Stand under the dome to observe the proportions of the huge, bare, unimpressive building. Left, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... literature in an early stage of development, and many of the characteristics of a youthful production, it is yet the first book of modern times which has such quality as to possess perpetual contemporaneousness. It has become in part archaic, but it does not become antiquated. It is the first book in a modern tongue in which prose begins to have freedom of structure, and ease of control over the resources of the language. It shows a steady progress in Dante's mastery of literary art. The stiffness and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... typographical errors have been corrected without note. Archaic and dialect spellings have been retained. Greek text has been transliterated and is shown between {braces}. The oe ligature has ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... the room they went, and Eloquent felt that never before had he realised the true delight of dancing. He was very careful, very accurate, and his partner set herself to imitate exactly his archaic style of dancing, so that they were a model of deportment to the whole room. But it was only for a brief space that this poetry of ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker

... made a great to-do about the matter. The affair was just serio-comic enough to attract nation-wide attention. And the story was a good one—the story of the anarchist-shoemaker who invoked the use of archaic, reactionary laws, in his battle against his less radical antagonists, the Single Taxers ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... is characterised by the use of old words and forms (especially in the speeches). He makes use of alliteration, extensively employs the Historic Infinitive, and shows a partiality for conversational expressions which from a literary point of view are archaic. His abrupt unperiodic style of writing (rough periods without particles of connexion) has won for Sallust his reputation for brevity. His style is, however, the expression of the writer's character, direct, incisive, emphatic, and outspoken; to have been ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... supreme genius of Schwanthaler. These chambers, eight in number, are painted in encaustic, with subjects from the Greek poets, of which Schwanthaler supplied the designs. The ante-chambers are devoted to Orpheus and Hesiod, and the ornaments are in the oldest Greek style; severely simple; archaic, but not rude; the figures of the friezes in outline, and without relief. The saloon of reception, on the contrary, is Homeric; and in its colouring, design, and decoration, as brilliant, as free, and as flowing as the genius of the great Maeonian. The chamber ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli

... of development to which all things are subject. It would be foolish, nay, impossible, to try to resuscitate an old form of art. Foolish, because the art itself would have lost all except its archaic charm or interest; impossible, because conditions have so completely changed that the attempt would be merely the galvanizing of a corpse, ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... A substance trapped inside IC packages that enables them to function (also called 'blue smoke'; this is similar to the archaic 'phlogiston' hypothesis about combustion). Its existence is demonstrated by what happens when a chip burns up —- the magic smoke gets let out, so it doesn't work any more. See {smoke test}, {let the ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10

... all institutions, especially among barbarians, the Ainos have suffered Japanese influence to intrude itself. It is Japanese rice-beer, under its Japanese name of sake, which they offer in libations to their gods. Their very word for "prayer" seems to be archaic Japanese. A mediaeval Japanese hero, Yoshitsune, is generally allowed to be held in religious reverence by them. The idea of earthquakes being caused by the wriggling of a gigantic fish under the earth is shared by the Ainos with the Japanese and ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain

... been given a more lively appearance. "In A.D. 1813, I was twenty-two years old," he begins earnestly and goes on with every appearance of calm, horrible industry. Don't imagine, however, that there is anything archaic in my find. Diabolic ingenuity in invention though as old as the world is by no means a lost art. Look at the telephones for shattering the little peace of mind given to us in this world, or at the machine guns for letting with dispatch life out of our bodies. Now-a-days any blear-eyed ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad

... its quota of wild roses in the hedgerows, just as archaic June had done. Thermidor covered the barren cornfields with its flaming mantle of scarlet poppies, and Fructidor, though now called August, still tipped the wild sorrel with dots of crimson, and laid the first wash of tender ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... sense for the general bearings of this or that epoch; he had a firm, warm confidence in the future implied and adumbrated by this past; he had a feeling for the ceremonial in all eminent occasions. He had, too, a knack at archaic costume and knack enough at the idiom in which his contemporaries believed their forebears had expressed themselves. And he had, besides all these qualities needed to make his records heroic, the quality of moral earnestness ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... against the cession of Gibraltar; he took keen interest in the settlement of New South Wales; his arrangements for the government of Canada deserve far higher praise than they have usually secured; and his firmness in repelling the archaic claims of Spain to the shores of the Northern Pacific gained for his people the future colony of British Columbia. Cherishing a belief in the pacific nature of Bonaparte's policy at the time of the Treaty of Amiens, he condoned the retrocession of the Cape of Good Hope and of Malta, on ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... planners would never be able to put it into a strait-jacket,—cunning and prudence would never have it to themselves. Why, that little boy downstairs, with the candlelight in his eyes, when it came to the last cry, as they said, could "carry on" for ever! Ideals were not archaic things, beautiful and impotent; they were the real sources of power among men. As long as that was true, and now he knew it was true—he had come all this way to find out—he had no quarrel with Destiny. Nor did ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather

... | Transcriber's Note: | | | | A number of obvious typographical errors have been corrected | | in this text, while archaic spelling has been maintained. | | For a complete list, please see the bottom of this document. | ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck

... seems certain that political "muscle" and respectability for the legitimate conservationist viewpoint is shaping up fast enough that it will be able to dissipate the worst threats—the grabbing and the spoiling, the ignorance and the archaic attitudes, the onward shove of brute technology for technology's own sake rather than for man's—before they have forced mankind on into the gray sterility of life that ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior

... any other American. His gift of figurative speech—that essential that distinguishes literature from mere correct writing—rivals that of any writer in any country, language or time. Brann's compass of words, idioms and phrases harks back to the archaic and reaches forward ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... century. The houses huddle up to the church, and hide the lines of the tower. Now it stands out clear, less picturesque than it was in the time of Bocardo prison. Within the last two years the windows have been cleared, and the curious and most archaic pillars, shaped like balustrades, may be examined. It is worth while to climb the tower and remember the times when arrows were sent like hail from the narrow windows on the foes who approached Oxford from ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang

... while in several of the Spanish-American states the Indian blood is dominant and the majority of the population speak an Indian tongue, perhaps itself, as with the Quichuas, once a culture-tongue of the archaic type. Whether in Paraguay one tongue will ultimately drive out the other, and, if so, which will be the victor, it is yet too early to prophesy. The English missionaries and the Bible Society have recently published parts of the Scriptures in Guarany and in Asuncion a daily paper is published ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... her unambitious purpose) make as fit a garment for her thought as was ever devised upon English looms. If this is style, then Jane Austen possesses it, as have very few of the race. There is just a touch of the archaic in it, enough to give a quaintness that has charm without being precious in the French sense; hers are breeding and dignity without distance or stiffness. Now and again the life-likeness is accentuated by a sort of undress which goes ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... Araha[.m]tanain namo Siddhana sa[.m] 60 [Footnote: In reading the first figure as 60, I follow Sir A. Cunningham. I have never seen the sign, in another inscription. The characters of the inscription are so archaic that this date may refer to an earlier epoch than ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler

... for privacy is an archaic emotion," Miss Metford remarked sententiously, as she struck ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie

... bedfellow! Your chamber was the steaming Nile! And with your curved archaic smile you watched his ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde

... understands Milton here. It is true that upland used to mean country, as uplanders meant countrymen, and uplandish countrified (see Nares and Wb.), but the other meaning is older than Milton (see Halliwell's Dict. of Archaic Words), and Johnson, Keightley, and others are probably right in considering "upland hamlets" an instance of it. Masson, in his recent edition of Milton (1875), explains the "upland hamlets" as "little villages among the slopes, away from ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray



Words linked to "Archaic" :   old, early



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