ATONE • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Atone

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/ətˈoʊn/ Listen

verb

Atone v. t.

To set at one; to reduce to concord; to reconcile, as parties at variance; to appease. (Obs.) "I would do much To atone them, for the love I bear to Cassio."

To unite in making. (Obs. & R.) "The four elements... have atoned A noble league."

To make satisfaction for; to expiate. "Or each atone his guilty love with life."

Atone v. i. (past & past part. atoned; pres. part. atoning)

To agree; to be in accordance; to accord. (Obs.) "He and Aufidius can no more atone Than violentest contrariety."

To stand as an equivalent; to make reparation, compensation, or amends, for an offense or a crime. "The murderer fell, and blood atoned for blood." "The ministry not atoning for their former conduct by any wise or popular measure."

See images of 'Atone'

Etymology of 'Atone'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Atone" Quotes from Famous Books

... too feeble to fly, and would not come into the Capitol to consume the food that might maintain fighting men; but most of them were filled with a deep, solemn thought that, by offering themselves to the weapons of the barbarians, they might atone for the sin sanctioned by the Republic, and that their death might be the saving of the nation. This notion that the death of a ruler would expiate a country's guilt was one of the strange presages abroad in the heathen world of that ...

— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge

... thoughts of their guilt. I wish, on the contrary, to brighten these hours by the reflection that I have enjoyed the affection of a lovely woman, and that our union would have been an uninterrupted course of happiness, but for errors which I was too late to acknowledge and atone for. This thought wrings tears from my eyes, though your generous heart pardons me. But this is no time to revive the recollection of my errors and of your wrongs. What thanks I owe to ...

— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott

... members of the opposite race; and his sense of the wrongs he had suffered, as well as the general frontier indifference to crimes committed against others, made him slow in punishing similar outrages by his own people. The Watauga settlers discountenanced wrong being done the Indians, and tried to atone for it, but they never hunted the offenders down with the necessary mercilessness that alone could have prevented a repetition of their offences. Similarly, but to an even greater degree, the good Indians ...

— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt

... Jean Merle," he answered with a melancholy smile, "Jean Merle, and no one else. I come back with no claims, and they must never know me. Why should I cross their path and blight it? I cannot atone for the past in any way, except by keeping away forever from them. I shall injure no one by continuing ...

— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton

... serpent-like attributes of the Italian; he attacked him on every occasion on which a 'wit combat' was possible: he gracefully showed Mazarin off in his true colours. With ease he annihilated him, metaphorically, at his own table. Yet De Grammont had something to atone for: he had been the adherent and companion in arms of Conde; he had followed that hero to Sens, to Nordlingen, to Fribourg, and had returned to his allegiance to the young king, Louis XIV., only because ...

— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton

More quotes...