Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A deterioration of mental faculties associated with aging.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The state of one who dotes; feebleness or imbecility of mind in old age; second childhood; senility.
- noun Weak and foolish affection; excessive fondness.
- noun The folly imagined by one who is foolish and doting.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun Feebleness or imbecility of understanding or mind, particularly in old age; the childishness of old age; senility.
- noun Foolish utterance; drivel.
- noun Excessive fondness; weak and foolish affection.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun
Decline injudgment and othercognitive functions, associated with aging;senility . - noun
Fondness orattentiveness , especially to anexcessive degree. - noun
foolish utterance ;drivel
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun mental infirmity as a consequence of old age; sometimes shown by foolish infatuations
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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And fo what we call dotage, feldom breeds In bodies, but where nature fows the feeds.
The Works of the English Poets.: With Prefaces, Biographical and Critical 1781
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He "doesn't give a bollocks" about hitting 60 his age at the time of recording the album, 58 ½, features prominently on the album cover artwork and feels more content in what he calls his "dotage" than in pretty much any period of his life.
Evening Standard - Home Simon Mills 2011
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If you forget all the delightful things she comes out with – and sadly Mums do – all you have to do, when you are in your dotage, is browse through your blog.
special k 2008
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Because of wrecked pensions and the fact that people are dedicating all their financial resources into buying their home actually it WILL matter what its worth when you are forced in dotage to draw on it to put food on the table.
Leaseholders Stabbed in The Back Newmania 2007
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As petulance and lust belong to the young more than to the old, yet not to all young men, but to those who are not virtuous; so that senile folly, which is commonly called dotage, belongs to weak old men, and not to all.
The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome Various 1887
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a stranger, who I could urge no claim of consanguinity upon him, absolutely astonished them; and their resentment at his caprice -- or rather what they termed his dotage -- was not only deep, but loud.
The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector The Works of William Carleton, Volume One William Carleton 1831
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What exactly am I paying taxes and National Insurance AND a private pension for if I then have to pay extra tax to be cared for in my dotage, which is also on top of all the extra "stealth" taxes I am paying now (petrol, VAT taxes on savigs etc) plus the extra ones dreamed up to plug the hole in the national budget.
Telegraph.co.uk: news, business, sport, the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Sunday Telegraph 2010
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The common sort define it to be a kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions, fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion.
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Towards the end he fell into a kind of dotage; his family must entertain him with games of tin soldiers, which he took
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Two days he continued quiet in the old nook by the hearth, apparently in a kind of dotage doze; but on the third, he began to poke about, hobbled into the dairy, peered into the churn, touched the skimmer.
The Lord of the Sea 1906
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