Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Recreancy.

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

  • noun Recreancy.

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

  • noun Dated form of recreancy.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word recreance.

Examples

  • He was, in fact, not the least curious for the sight, and the only thing that really troubled him was the question of how he should justify his recreance to his wife.

    Complete March Family Trilogy William Dean Howells 1878

  • He was, in fact, not the least curious for the sight, and the only thing that really troubled him was the question of how he should justify his recreance to his wife.

    Their Silver Wedding Journey — Volume 3 William Dean Howells 1878

  • He smiled to see her grieving at this recreance of her memory to her conscience.

    The Lady of the Aroostook William Dean Howells 1878

  • He was, in fact, not the least curious for the sight, and the only thing that really troubled him was the question of how he should justify his recreance to his wife.

    Their Silver Wedding Journey — Complete William Dean Howells 1878

  • Bethought himself, to ease his heart, some recreance to find,

    A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 6 William Carew Hazlitt 1873

  • They remembered their Ruskinian youth, and the confidence with which they would once have condemned it; and they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but they certainly admired it, and it remained for them the supreme expression of that time-soul, mundane, courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which once influenced the art of the whole world, and which had here so curiously found its apotheosis in a city remote from its native place and under

    Complete March Family Trilogy William Dean Howells 1878

  • They remembered their Ruskinian youth, and the confidence with which they would once have condemned it; and they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but they certainly admired it, and it remained for them the supreme expression of that time-soul, mundane, courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which once influenced the art of the whole world, and which had here so curiously found its apotheosis in a city remote from its native place and under a rule sacerdotally vowed to austerity.

    Their Silver Wedding Journey — Volume 3 William Dean Howells 1878

  • They remembered their Ruskinian youth, and the confidence with which they would once have condemned it; and they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but they certainly admired it, and it remained for them the supreme expression of that time-soul, mundane, courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which once influenced the art of the whole world, and which had here so curiously found its apotheosis in a city remote from its native place and under a rule sacerdotally vowed to austerity.

    Their Silver Wedding Journey — Complete William Dean Howells 1878

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • ERASMUS

    When he protested, not too solemnly,

    That for a world's achieving maintenance

    The crust of overdone divinity

    Lacked ailment, they called it recreance;

    And when he chose through his own glass to scan

    Sick Europe, and reduced, unyieldingly,

    The monk within the cassock to the man

    Within the monk, they called it heresy.

    And when he made so perilously bold

    As to be scattered forth in black and white,

    Good fathers looked askance at him and rolled

    Their inward eyes in anguish and affright;

    There were some of them did shake at what was told,

    And they shook best who knew that he was right.

    – Edwin Arlington Robinson

    February 26, 2009

  • Erasmus is my homey.

    February 26, 2009