Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- intransitive verb To act or speak in order to gain time, avoid an argument, or postpone a decision.
- intransitive verb To act to suit current circumstances or necessities.
- intransitive verb To say or utter in temporizing.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To comply with the time or occasion, or with the desires of another; yield temporarily or ostensibly to the current of opinion or circumstances.
- To parley.
- To dilly-dally; delay; procrastinate.
- Also spelled
temporise .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- transitive verb To comply with the time or occasion; to humor, or yield to, the current of opinion or circumstances; also, to trim, as between two parties.
- transitive verb rare To delay; to procrastinate.
- transitive verb obsolete To comply; to agree.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb To deliberately act
evasively orprolong adiscussion in order to gain time orpostpone adecision , sometimes in order to reach acompromise or simply to make a conversation moretemperate . - verb obsolete To comply with the time or occasion; to humor, or yield to, the current of opinion or circumstances; also, to trim, as between two parties.
- verb obsolete To
delay ; toprocrastinate . - verb obsolete To
comply ; toagree .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb draw out a discussion or process in order to gain time
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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Cowardice is called meekness; to temporize is to be charitable and reverent; to speak truth, and shame the devil, is to offend weak brethren, who, somehow or other, never complain of their weak consciences till you hit them hard.
Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet An Autobiography Charles Kingsley 1847
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Gorbachev was more of a juggler, somebody who would kind of temporize, try to find compromises eternally, and that was very important.
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Against his will and against his nature he began to temporize, meaning later to revenge his present humiliation upon his son.
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For a while, the Treasury can temporize with creative accounting, shifting money from one pile to another, and the like.
The Debt Ceiling Fiasco Alan S. Blinder 2011
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Your partner opens one diamond, you respond one spade, he bids two clubs and you temporize with two hearts.
Bridge Frank Stewart 2010
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It's about the brutal perfidy of the Conservative government, its gall, its utter lack of class, its willingness to cover up, to prevaricate, to temporize: hell, to lie its way out of a tight spot.
Archive 2009-11-01 2009
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It's about the brutal perfidy of the Conservative government, its gall, its utter lack of class, its willingness to cover up, to prevaricate, to temporize: hell, to lie its way out of a tight spot.
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Before you temporize and go too far with the fish grab agenda, you need to first determine where we are actually losing the fish.
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The other candidates in that election, had one of them won, would have continued to temporize, while Lincoln, in his own seemingly tentative style, refused to budge on the Republican Party's raison d'etre of no expansion of slavery into the territories.
John Marszalek: What if Lincoln lost the election? Nancy Kerr 2010
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The slow and ugly approach is to mitigate, temporize and forestall to give us time to work ourselves out of difficulties.
Notable & Quotable 2011
Logophile77 commented on the word temporize
hypernym: timeserve,timeplease
January 10, 2018