OF NECESSITY • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Of necessity

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/əv nəsˈɛsəti/ Listen

noun

Necessity n. (pl. necessities)

1.

The quality or state of being necessary, unavoidable, or absolutely requisite; inevitableness; indispensableness.

2.

The condition of being needy or necessitous; pressing need; indigence; want. "Urge the necessity and state of times." "The extreme poverty and necessity his majesty was in."

3.

That which is necessary; a necessary; a requisite; something indispensable; often in the plural. "These should be hours for necessities, Not for delights." "What was once to me Mere matter of the fancy, now has grown The vast necessity of heart and life."

4.

That which makes an act or an event unavoidable; irresistible force; overruling power; compulsion, physical or moral; fate; fatality. "So spake the fiend, and with necessity, The tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deeds."

5.

(Metaph.) The negation of freedom in voluntary action; the subjection of all phenomena, whether material or spiritual, to inevitable causation; necessitarianism.

Of necessity, by necessary consequence; by compulsion, or irresistible power; perforce.

Synonyms: See Need.

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Etymology of 'Of necessity'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Of necessity" Quotes from Famous Books

... that finishing, and rounding, and 'tuneful planetting' of the poet's creations, which is produced of necessity by the smooth tendencies of their energy or inward working, and the harmonious dance into which they are attracted round the orb of the beautiful. Poetry, in its complete sympathy with beauty, must, of necessity, leave no sense of the beautiful, and no power over its forms, unmanifested; ...

— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... women lie at the very heart of the war and I know how much stronger that heart will beat if you do this just thing and show our women that you trust them as much as you in fact and of necessity depend upon them. ...

— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... that one was epoch-making. Heretofore, surrounded by a common, an alien danger, compelled at a second's warning to band together for life itself, all men were brothers. Now, with the passing of the red peril, with eradication of necessity for any manner of restraint, an abandon of licence, of recklessness, born of the wild life, of overflowing animal vitality insufficiently employed, swept the land like a contagion. Unique in the history of man's development was this the era of the cowboy, ...

— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge

... Beyond the bare fact that he was there, he had not been mentioned. Mellersh had had to be mentioned, because of his obstructiveness, but she had carefully kept him from overflowing outside the limits of necessity. ...

— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim

... capitals and pronounced with awe. Had he been able by a most rigorous observance of all the rules laid down by God and Man to make certain of living in a future state of beatitude I would have felt sorry for him still, as he would be compelled, of necessity, to miss many of the joys of this world; still his future then—though in a hard and grinding measure—would have lain in his own hands. But whether he became a Pirate or a Preacher was all one; he had been born to go to Heaven or Hell and nothing that he could do could ...

— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various

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