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repugnancy. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
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English
Etymology
From repugnant + -cy.
Pronunciation
Noun
repugnancy (countable and uncountable, plural repugnancies)
- The quality of being repugnant: offensiveness, repulsion.
1644, Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex, London: John Field, Quest. VIII, page 49:[…] howsoever nature dictates, that government is necessary for the safety of the society, yet every singular person, by corruption and selfe-love, hath a naturall aversenesse and repugnancie to submit to any; every man would be a King himselfe […]
1673, Hannah Woolley, “Some choice Observations for a Gentlewomans Behaviour at Table”, in The Gentlewomans Companion, London: Dorman Newman, page 70:If you be carved with any thing […] which you do not like, conceal (as much as in you lieth) your repugnancies, and receive it however: And though your disgust many times is invincible, and it would be insufferable tyranny to require you should eat what your stomach nauseates; yet it will shew your civility to accept it, though you let it lye on your plate, pretending to eat, till you meet with a fit opportunity of changing your plate, without any palpable discovery of your disgust.
1893, Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, “The Common Toad”, in Our Reptiles and Batrachians, London: W.H. Allen, page 118:Even Pennant, with all his repugnancy to the toad, could not be induced to favour the popular belief in its poisonous character.
- The quality of being repugnant: (logical) opposition, contradiction, incompatibility.
1559, William Cuningham, The Cosmographical Glasse, Book 2:For if the paralleles be of this nature, that howe muche the nearer we are th’equinoctiall, so muche the greater is the heate: and howe muche the furder remoued from th’equinoctiall, so muche the colder the qualitie of the aire is: there must seme a manifest repugnancie, betwixt Auicenne, & the Geographers.
- 1710, George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, Dublin: Jeremy Pepyat, pp. 175-176,
- this Notion is the Source from whence do spring, all those Amusing Geometrical Paradoxes, which have such a direct Repugnancy to the plain, common Sense of Mankind, and are admitted with so much Reluctance, into a Mind not yet debauched by Learning
1773, William Hazlitt, An Essay on the Justice of God, London: J. Johnson, page 16:The first man, Adam, experienced no kind of repugnancy between the divine justice and the divine mercy.
- (archaic) Resistance, fighting back.
c. 1605–1608, William Shakespeare, “The Life of Tymon of Athens”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio), London: Isaac Iaggard, and Ed Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, :Why do fond men expose themselves to battle,
And not endure all threats? sleep upon’t,
And let the foes quietly cut their throats,
Without repugnancy?
See also
repugnance