Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The quality or condition of being insistent; urgency.
  • noun Immediacy of occurrence; instantaneousness.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Instance; insistency.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun obsolete Instance; urgency.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun insistence, insistency
  • noun immediacy, instantaneousness

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the quality of being insistent
  • noun the quickness of action or occurrence

Etymologies

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Examples

  • The painting has an instancy that he finds striking.

    Underworld Don Delillo 2008

  • The painting has an instancy that he finds striking.

    Underworld Don Delillo 2008

  • How Thompson's line, "Deliberate speed, majestic instancy," came to dominate one of the defining moments in American constitutional law represents a unique instance of not law-in-literature or law-as-literature, but literature-as-law.

    In the beauty of the poppies 2008

  • How Thompson's line, "Deliberate speed, majestic instancy," came to dominate one of the defining moments in American constitutional law represents a unique instance of not law-in-literature or law-as-literature, but literature-as-law.

    Archive 2008-02-01 2008

  • The painting has an instancy that he finds striking.

    Underworld Don Delillo 2008

  • Even in our time, in the sightlines of living history, in the retrieved instancy of film and videotape, there are stories waiting to be finished, open to the thrust of reasoned analysis and haunted speculation.

    Racing Against Reality O'Hagan, Andrew 2007

  • Water as it is in nature, and the child (that once was me) wading there in butterburrs; and wonder at the instancy and virgin freshness of that memory; and be pricked again, in season and out of season, by the desire to weave it into art.

    Memories and Portraits 2005

  • Cappadociaes request; soliciting him with all instancy, to be the more speedy in assayling Osbech.

    The Decameron 2004

  • The devotee's irrationality springs from a thousand inexplicable demonstrations of God's instancy in trouble.

    Autobiography of a Yogi Yogananda, Paramhansa, 1893-1952 1935

  • The devotee's irrationality springs from a thousand inexplicable demonstrations of God's instancy in trouble.

    Autobiography of a Yogi Paramahansa Yogananda 1922

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