LEAVEN • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Leaven

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/lˈɛvən/ Listen

verb

Leaven v. t. (past & past part. leavened; pres. part. leavening)

To make light by the action of leaven; to cause to ferment. "A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump."

To imbue; to infect; to vitiate. "With these and the like deceivable doctrines, he leavens also his prayer."

noun

Leaven n.

Any substance that produces, or is designed to produce, fermentation, as in dough or liquids; esp., a portion of fermenting dough, which, mixed with a larger quantity of dough, produces a general change in the mass, and renders it light; yeast; barm.

Anything which makes a general assimilating (especially a corrupting) change in the mass. "Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy."

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Etymology of 'Leaven'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Leaven" Quotes from Famous Books

... evil leaven has seven names in Scripture. It is called evil, the foreskin, uncleanness, an enemy, a scandal, a heart of stone, the north wind; all this signifies the malignity which is concealed and impressed ...

— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal

... act of courage in those days, my dear boys, for a little fellow to say his prayers publicly even at Rugby. A few years later, when Arnold's manly piety had begun to leaven the school, the tables turned; before he died, in the schoolhouse at least, and I believe in the other houses, the rule was the other way. But poor Tom had come to school in other times. The first few nights ...

— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... like a little leaven, was leavening the whole neighborhood, and truly it seemed so. To her those two weeks of association with Marion had been a joy. In the congenial surroundings of the shop she found it easy to live in to-day, leaving the future to unfold as it would. Her shorthand book lay unopened; ...

— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard

... and still more in Bishops Andrews and Hackett, there is a strong Patristic leaven. In Jeremy Taylor this taste for the Fathers and all the Saints and Schoolmen before the Reformation amounted to a dislike of the divines of the continental Protestant Churches, Lutheran or Calvinistic. ...

— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... multitude of raw recruits into the semblance of a regular army. Competent instructors and trained leaders were few in the extreme, and the work had to be left in inexperienced hands. One Stonewall Jackson was insufficient to leaven a ...

— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

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