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Obverse   Listen
adjective
Obverse  adj.  Having the base, or end next the attachment, narrower than the top, as a leaf.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Obverse" Quotes from Famous Books



... serves me here. This Lion is distinctly a beautiful coin, admirably made, with its value in fine, clear letters circling the obverse side, and a head thereon—of Newton, as I live! One detects American influence here. Each year, as we shall find, each denomination of coins celebrates a centenary. The reverse shows the universal goddess of the Utopian ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... awakening. That sanguine visage, with its prominent chin, flaring moustaches, and eyebrows raised rather V-shaped above his closed eyes, wore an expression of cheery defiance even in sleep; and perhaps no face in all London was so utterly its obverse, as that of this dark, soft-haired woman, delicate, passive, and tremulous with pleasure at sight of the only person in the world from whom she felt she might learn of Miltoun, without ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... obverse of the letter is then lost, and about a quarter of the upper part of the ...
— Egyptian Literature

... the ground upon which my wooden house had stood we found, at a depth of from nine to nineteen inches, eighteen copper and two silver medals; one of the latter is of Marcus Aurelius. The other is a tetra-drachm of the island of Tenedos; on the obverse, to the right, is the head of Jupiter, to the left that of Juno, both having one neck in common, like the heads of Janus. The head of Jupiter is crowned with laurels, that of Juno has a wreath or crown. Upon ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... to belong to the reign of Wijayo Bahu, A.D. 1071, Prakrama I., A.D. 1153, the Queen Lilawatte, A.D. 1197, King Sahasamallawa, A.D. 1200, Darmasoka, A.D. 1208, and Bhuwaneka Bahu, A.D. 1303. These coins have one and all the same device on the obverse,—a rude standing figure of the Raja holding the trisula in his left hand, and a flower in the right. His dress is a flowing robe, the folds of which are indicated rather than imitated by the artist; and on the reverse the same figure is seated, the name in Nagari characters ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... I can find of a single lion or leopard appearing upon a coin without the harp, is a coin (a half-florin) of Edward III., on the obverse of which appears a leopard crowned, with a banner of the arms of England fastened to his neck, and flowing back ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various

... it a rule to inspect the hospitals himself, and he directed a daily visit by a captain and by the surgeons of the ships from which patients were sent, thus keeping the sick in touch with those they knew, and who had in them a personal interest. An odd provision, amusingly illustrative of the obverse side of the admiral's character, was that the visiting captain should be accompanied by a boatswain's mate, the functionary charged with administering floggings, and, "if they find the patients do not conduct themselves properly and orderly, they are to ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... held to the light and read from the obverse side, as the message was written from ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission

... a yellow sun in the center having 40 rays representing the 40 Kirghiz tribes; on the obverse side the rays run counterclockwise, on the reverse, clockwise; in the center of the sun is a red ring crossed by two sets of three lines, a stylized representation of the roof of the ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... older than you—wiser than you, if wisdom be the fruit of the tree of knowledge. You know but one side of the medal, Hypatia, and the fairer; I have seen its reverse as well as its obverse. Through every form of human thought, of human action, of human sin and folly, have I been wandering for years, and found no rest—as little in wisdom as in folly, in spiritual dreams as in sensual brutality. I could not rest ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley

... none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... artistic blemish, since they do not logically belong in the scheme of the story; and yet they (and their fellows in other books of Daudet's) testify to his effort to get the truth and the whole truth into his picture of Paris life. Mora and Felicia Ruys and Jenkins, these are the obverse of the medal, exposed in the shop-windows that every passer-by can see. The Joyeuse girls and their father are the reverse, to be viewed only by those who take the trouble to look at the under side of things. They are samples of the simple, gentle, honest ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... signed by the engineer of the works; and on the obverse was written, "The bearer, Ruby Brand, is serving as a blacksmith in the erection ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne

... God, and so shuts him out from the source of power. For if you will think for a moment, you will see that the faith which the New Testament, in conformity with all wise knowledge of one's self, preaches as the one secret of power, has for its obverse—its other side—diffidence and self-distrust. No man trusts God as God ought to be trusted, who does not distrust himself as himself ought to be distrusted. To level a mountain is the only way to carry the water across where it stood. You can, by mechanism and locks, take a canal up to the top ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... 'The Son of Man,' no doubt, is equivalent to 'Messiah'; but it is more, as revealing at once Christ's true manhood and His unique and complete manhood, in which the very ideal of man is personally realised. It can never be detached from His other name, the 'Son of God.' They are the obverse and reverse of the same golden coin. He asserts His power over the Sabbath, as enjoined upon Israel. His is the authority which imposed it. It is plastic in His hands. The whole order of which it is part has its highest purpose in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... to work powerfully. Indeed, is it not often the condition upon which great and sustained power of action depends? The medal must have two sides. "Danton," says Carlyle, "was a great nature that could rest." Were not the force and terror of his performance the obverse fact? I do not now mean, however true it would be, to say that without rest physical resources would fail, and action be enfeebled in consequence; I mean that the soul which wants the attitude of repose wants the condition of power. There is a petulant and meddlesome industry which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various

... receive degradingly low marks, or fail to be promoted. And very much of what goes by the name of "discipline," and prides itself upon opposing the doctrines of a soft pedagogy and upon upholding the banner of effort and duty, is nothing more or less than just this appeal to "interest" in its obverse aspect—to fear, to dislike of various kinds of physical, social, and personal pain. The subject-matter does not appeal; it cannot appeal; it lacks origin and bearing in a growing experience. So the ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey

... issued in addition to the Medal already noticed in our pages, a Medallion of the lamented Poet and Novelist, from Chantrey's bust. It is, we think, the obverse of the Medal, with bronzed circular frame work bearing the motto suggested by Sir Walter. Though handsome, it is an economical memorial of one whose amiable talents must endear him to every fireside ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various

... rendered a great service to the expedition. I am commissioned to present you with a gold medal from our king in recognition of the great help you have given us.' With these words Nansen handed to Trontheim a very large gold medal with a crown on it. On the obverse is the following inscription: 'Oscar II., King of Norway and Sweden. For the Welfare of the Brother-Nations.' And on the reverse: 'Reward for valuable service, A. I. Trontheim.' Along with this Nansen also gave Trontheim a written testimonial as to the admirable manner in which he had carried ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... an orphan since his birth; a mother meant simply a giver of life, and a father meant, even less. Until he had read the reverse and obverse sides of life, his sense of morality had lain dormant and untilled. Such was his misfortune. The solitary relative he laid claim to was an aged aunt, his father's sister. For her he had purchased a beautiful place in the town of ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath

... in bronze, of the lamented Baronet, has been published from the establishment of Mr. Parker, (medallist, and the originator of some ingenious improvements in the construction of lamps), in Argyle-place. The obverse is from Chantrey's celebrated Bust of Sir Walter, and the reverse a graceful female figure, with the inscription, "to great men;"—designed by R. Stothard, Esq., the venerable Academician, and engraved by his son, A.J. Stothard, Esq. The profile of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various

... scriptural warranty. The Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse assert the existence of the devil, of his demons and of Hell, as plainly as they do that of God and his angels and Heaven. It is plain that the Messianic and the Satanic conceptions of the writers of these books are the obverse and the reverse of the same intellectual coinage. If we turn from Scripture to the traditions of the Fathers and the confessions of the Churches, it will appear that, in this one particular, at any rate, time has brought ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... the unenlightened self-esteem of a horse in it. 'She's got a horse-face,' Ursula said to herself, 'she runs between blinkers.' It did seem as if Hermione, like the moon, had only one side to her penny. There was no obverse. She stared out all the time on the narrow, but to her, complete world of the extant consciousness. In the darkness, she did not exist. Like the moon, one half of her was lost to life. Her self was all in her head, she did not know what it was spontaneously to run or move, like ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... and rank of the recipient stamped upon the edge. A clasp bearing the words "Fenian Raid, 1866" (crossing a scarlet and white ribbon) surmounts the medallion bearing the vignette of Queen Victoria on one side, and on the obverse a design emblematic of the Dominion of Canada. For those who served in 1870 the same medal was granted, with lettering to correspond, while to the volunteers who were on duty on both occasions, an extra clasp was issued, to denote service in both 1866 and 1870. ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald

... parables aside, I am unable to understand how anyone with a knowledge of mankind can imagine that the growth of science can threaten the development of art in any of its forms. If I understand the matter at all, science and art are the obverse and reverse of Nature's medal, the one expressing the eternal order of things, in terms of feeling, the other in terms of thought. When men no longer love nor hate; when suffering causes no pity, and the tale of great deeds ceases to thrill, when the lily of the field shall seem no longer ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... The obverse side of the case appears in British hindrances to the free emigration of artisans during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Laws forbade any British subject who had been employed in the manufacture of wool, cotton, iron, brass, steel, or any other metal, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... His victories are recorded—with an irony perhaps not wholly accidental—beneath the Asokan inscription on the Allahabad pillar. Of his zeal for Hinduism we have a convincing proof in gold coins of his reign that preserve on the obverse in the figure of the sacrificial horse a record of the Asvamedha, which he again revived. Strange to say, however, his fame has never been so popular as that of his son, Chandragupta II., Vikramadytia, the Sun of Power, who reigned in turn ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... he looked towards me. "Do you know, Nikhil," he said, "I believe Sandip is not irreligious—his religion is of the obverse side of truth, like the dark moon, which is still a moon, for all that its light has gone over ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore

... two rows of cases. He was deeply moved. I thought he was about to make a raid upon them, attracted after his kind by the 'auri sacra fames', by the yellow gleam of those ancient coins, the names, family, obverse and reverse of which he knew by heart. But ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

... with a yellow sun in the center having 40 rays representing the 40 Kyrgyz tribes; on the obverse side the rays run counterclockwise, on the reverse, clockwise; in the center of the sun is a red ring crossed by two sets of three lines, a stylized representation of the roof ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... the brain, they are attended with a succession of the same ideas in the mind. Thus we see that the tendency of ideas to recur in the same order as that in which they have previously occurred, is merely an obverse expression of the fact that lines of wave-movement in the brain become more and more permeable by use. So it comes that a child can learn its lessons by frequently repeating them; so it is that all our knowledge is accumulated; and so it is that ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes

... Obverse: Area. "There is no ilh but Allah: He is one: He hath no partner." Circle. "Mohammed is the Messenger of Allah who hath sent him with the true Guidance and Religion that he manifest ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... sufficient, which formed the links between the Israel of the present and its better future. Over against the vain confidence of the multitude Isaiah had hitherto brought into prominence the darker obverse of his religious belief, but now he confronted their present depression with its bright reverse; faint-heartedness was still more alien to his nature than temerity. In the name of Jehovah he bade King Hezekiah be of good courage, and urged that he should by no means surrender. The Assyrians would ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... faults and extravagances, and they are many, are only the obverse of his greatness. Magnitude and splendour of language when the thought is too shrunken to fill it out, becomes mere inflation. He was a butt of the parodists of the day. And Shakespeare, though he honoured ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... of Roman coinage was the as, subdivided almost indefinitely, and originally weighing a pound. This ponderous coin subserved a purpose which our penny does to-day. It had upon the obverse the double-headed Janus, and upon the reverse the keel of a ship, rudely done, but answering the requirements of the light, juvenile gambling known as pitching coppers. Capita aut navem, 'Heads or the ship,' the Roman boys cried, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... Bath and Tunbridge Wells, and in their best days drew an amazing army of gay people to the spot. The earliest mention of the spring is in the time of Charles II., when a halfpenny token with the words "Dorothy Rippin at the well in Hampsted" on the obverse was issued. In 1698 Susanna Noel with her son Baptist, third Earl of Gainsborough, gave the well, encompassed by six acres of ground, to the poor of Hampstead. It was in the beginning of the eighteenth ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... found at Starvation Cove, is of pewter, and may be described as a token commemorative of the launch of the steamship 'Great Britain', by Prince Albert, in July, 1843. The obverse bears a portrait of His Royal Highness, around it ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder

... potent between four groups of small crosses pates, three crosses in each group), while his chasuble is seme de lys and also charged with a lion rampant—the arms of the house of Beaumont. The obverse of the Seal of MARGARET, daughter of PHILIP the Hardy, King of France, the second Queen of our EDWARDI., illustrates this usage in the instance of ladies: No. 316. Upon her tunic the Queen has emblazoned the three lions of her royal husband; on her right ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell

... are as close together as the opposite sides of a sheet of cloth. The sublime is the obverse of the tapestry with the figures heroic, saintly or sensuous, in battle or temple or bower, in conquest, love, martyrdom, adoration. The reverse of the tapestry is a matter of knots and tufts, broken patterns, ludicrous accidents ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... of all men that not I, but Rabbi Baer, was appointed by him to be his successor. For although my acquaintance with the Baal Shem did not tend to increase my admiration for his chief disciple, I never expressed my full mind on the subject to the Master, for he had early enjoined on me that the obverse side of the virtue of Humility is to think highly of one's fellow-man. "He who loves the Father, God, will also love ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... evidence afforded by the famous Hammurabi Code (circa 2000 B.C.)—a body of laws, civil and religious, many of which relate to the medical profession. This extraordinary document is a black diorite block 8 feet high, once containing 21 columns on the obverse, 16 and 28 columns on the reverse, with 2540 lines of writing of which now 1114 remain, and surmounted by the figure of the king receiving the law from the Sun-god. Copies of this were set up in Babylon "that anyone ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... interest of the Nonjuring schism was political rather than religious; and its roots go out to vital events of the past. At the bottom it is the obverse side of the Divine Right of kings that they represent. That theory, which was the main weapon of the early secular state against the pretensions of Rome, must naturally have commanded the allegiance of members of a church which James I, its main exponent, had declared of vital import to his very ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... for ourselves the lurid splendours; and surely no more awful picture of the Judgment was ever painted than we have here in the "Dies Irae," "Tuba minim," "Rex tremendae," and the "Confutatis." The method of showing the obverse of the medal first, and then astonishing us with the sudden magnificence of the other side, is an old one, and was an old one even in Mozart's time, but he uses it with supreme mastery, and results ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... revolution of a people should coincide with the emancipation of a special class of bourgeois society, it is necessary for a class to stand out as a class representing the whole of society. Thus further involves, as its obverse side, the concentration of all the defects of society in another class, and this particular class must be the embodiment of the general social obstacles and impediments. A particular social sphere must be identical with the notorious crime of society as a whole, in such wise that ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx

... by the Chronicler to his favourites have none of them any historical effect, but merely serve to add a momentary splendour to their reigns. Merit is always the obverse of success. Joram, Joash, Ahaz, who are all depicted as reprobates, build no fortresses, command no great armies, have no wealth of wives and children; it is only in the case of the pious kings (to the number of whom even ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen



Words linked to "Obverse" :   head, choice, coin, alternative, side, reverse



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