law

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

• noun A rule of conduct or procedure established by custom, agreement, or authority.
• noun The body of rules and principles governing the affairs of a community and enforced by a political authority; a legal system.
• noun The condition of social order and justice created by adherence to such a system.
• noun A set of rules or principles dealing with a specific area of a legal system.
• noun A statute, ordinance, or other rule enacted by a legislature.
• noun A judicially established legal requirement; a precedent.
• noun The system of judicial administration giving effect to the laws of a community.
• noun Legal action or proceedings; litigation.
• noun An impromptu or extralegal system of justice substituted for established judicial procedure.
• noun An agency or agent responsible for enforcing the law. Often used with the.
• noun Informal A police officer. Often used with the.
• noun The science and study of law; jurisprudence.
• noun Knowledge of law.
• noun The profession of an attorney.
• noun Something, such as an order or a dictum, having absolute or unquestioned authority.
• noun A body of principles or precepts held to express the divine will, especially as revealed in the Bible.
• noun The first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures.
• noun A code of principles based on morality, conscience, or nature.
• noun A rule or custom generally established in a particular domain.
• noun A way of life.
• noun A statement describing a relationship observed to be invariable between or among phenomena for all cases in which the specified conditions are met.
• noun A generalization based on consistent experience or results.
• noun Mathematics A general principle or rule that is assumed or that has been proven to hold between expressions.
• noun A principle of organization, procedure, or technique.
• idiom (a law unto (oneself)) A totally independent operator.
• idiom (take the law into (one's) own hands) To mete out justice as one sees fit without due recourse to law enforcement agencies or the courts.

from The Century Dictionary.

• An obsolete or dialectal (Scotch) form of low.
• noun A rule of action prescribed by authority, especially by a sovereign or by the state: as, the laws of Manu; a law of God.
• noun Specifically— Any written or positive rule, or collection of rules, prescribed under the authority of the state or nation, whether by the people in its constitution, as the organic law, or by the legislature in its statute law, or by the treaty-making power, or by municipalities in their ordinances or by-laws.
• noun An act of the supreme legislative body of a state or nation, as distinguished from the constitution: as, the constitution, and the laws made in pursuance thereof.
• noun In a more general sense, the profession or vocation of attorneys, counsellors, solicitors, conveyancers, etc.: as, to practise law.
• noun Litigation: as, to go to law.
• noun Collectively, a system or collection of such rules.
• noun The Mosaic system of rules and ordinances.
• noun Hence— The books of the Bible containing this system; the books of the law.
• noun The preceptive part of the Bible, especially of the New-Testament, in contradistinction to its promises.
• noun A proposition which expresses the constant or regular order of certain phenomena, or the constant mode of action of a force; a general formula or rule to which all things, or all things or phenomena within the limits of a certain class or group, conform, precisely and without exception; a rule to which events really tend to conform.
• noun One of the rules or principles by which anything is regulated: as, the laws of the turf; the laws of versification.
• noun A rule according to which anything is produced: as, the mathematical law of a curve.
• noun An allowance in distance or time granted to an animal in a chase, or to a weaker competitor in a race or other contest; permission given to one competitor to start a certain distance ahead of, or a certain time before, another, in order to equalize the chances of winning.
• noun Custom; manner.
• noun that the quantity of an electrolyte decomposed in a given time is proportional to the strength of the current;