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Moiety

noun
(pl. moieties)
1.
One of two (approximately) equal parts.  Synonym: mediety.
2.
One of two basic subdivisions of a tribe.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Moiety" Quotes from Famous Books



... popular lecture thus, as I believe, finds one moiety of its justification in the self-discipline of the lecturer, it surely finds the other half in its effect on the auditory. For though various sadly comical experiences of the results of my own efforts have led me to entertain a very ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... the crank, which demanded young Hopeful by its mouthpiece, Fry. After dinner, to his infinite disgust, he received the other moiety of his flogging; but by a sort of sulky compensation his bed was kicked into his cell again at night by Fry acting under ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... to the colonists, and next to their mother-country, from access being obtained to a second gigantic waterway through the territories of New France; serving, as it virtually might in times to come, as a complement, or completing moiety for the former, enabling the colonists to have the command of two seas. Still, as the Gulf of Mexico had not been reached by the adventurers upon the present occasion, some persons had their doubts about the real course of the lower flood. There was therefore still in store ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson

... least cause of offence, lest he lose his money. I assure you, in these times, no man has his servant more obsequious and pliant, than gentlemen their creditors: to whom, if at any time you pay but a moiety, or a fourth part, it comes more acceptably than if you ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson

... rights that can only be abrogated or ignored by a child's actual parent—its mother—at the cost of insult and contumely from a world that worships its own folly and ignores its own gods. Sally was hers—her own—hard as the terms of her possession had been, and she had assigned a moiety of her rights in her to the man she loved. What was the fatherhood of blood alone to set against the one her motherhood had a right to concede, and had conceded, in response to the spontaneous growth of a father's love? What ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... remelted over clean water, so manipulated as to free it from foreign substances, then molded into cakes. One cake was always set apart for the neighborhood cobbler, who melted it with tallow and rosin to make shoemaker's wax. Another moiety was turned into grafting wax—by help of it one orchard tree bore twelve manners of fruit. And still another, a small, pretty cake from a scalloped patty pan, found place in the family work basket—in sewing by hand with flax thread, unless you waxed it, it lost strength, ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams

... practice there is usually compromise in these matters. The universe, if it does not give an organism short shrift and eat it at once, will commonly abate something of its claim; it gets tricked out of an additional moiety by the organism; the organism really does pay something by way of changed habits; this results in variation, in virtue of which the accounts are cooked, cobbled, and passed by a series of those miracles of inconsistency which was call compromises, ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... had so powerfully urged himself to his present undertaking, might produce a like result on the mind of some other student of nature. Here, then, was the prospect of an alarming rivalry, which bade fair to strip him of at least a moiety of the just rewards of all his labours, privations, and dangers. Under these views of his character, therefore, it is not at all surprising that the native meekness of the naturalist's disposition was a little disturbed, and that he watched the proceedings of the other ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... to these conditions, good and well. If they demur, Constable must be instantly tried; giving half to the Longmans, and we drawing on them for that moiety, or Constable lodging their bill in our hands. You will understand it is a four-volume touch—a work totally different in style and structure from the others; a new cast, in short, of the net which ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... have, not only their relations to one another, but their relations to physical phenomena, connected in natural series of causes and effects, strictly defined. In other words, while at present we know only the nearer moiety of the chain of causes and effects by which the phenomena we call material give rise to those which we call mental, hereafter we shall get to the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various

... him dost lie,— A closet never pierc'd with crystal eyes— But the defendant doth that plea deny, And says in him thy fair appearance lies. To side this title is impannelled A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart; And by their verdict is determined The clear eye's moiety, and the dear heart's part: As thus; mine eye's due is thy outward part, And my heart's right, thy ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare

... but he assured me that the steward of the king's revenue from lands, and the providore, or steward of the monastery, had taken great care all along that the incumbent, that is to say my partner, gave every year a faithful account of the produce, of which they had duly received my moiety. I asked him if he knew to what height of improvement he had brought the plantation, and whether he thought it might be worth looking after; or whether, on my going thither, I should meet with any obstruction to my possessing my just right in the moiety. He told me he could not tell exactly to ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe

... reason that he was natural brother"; and that he voluntarily offered to "bear and pay half the charges of the said building then bestowed and thereafter to be bestowed" in order "that he might have the moiety[50] of the above named Theatre."[51] As a further inducement, so the Burbages asserted, he promised that "for that he had no children," the moiety at his death should go to the children of James Burbage, "whose advancement he then ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams

... that Hakon had prepared a force to dispute his rights. Hakon agreed, however, to give up his claims to Magnus' half share if Magnus should obtain a grant of it from the Norwegian king.[12] King Eystein about 1106 gave him this moiety and the title of Jarl; and the two cousins lived in amity for "many winters," joining their forces and fighting and killing Dufnjal,[13] who was one degree further off than their first cousin, and killing Thorbjorn at Burrafirth ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray

... soon alongside again for a second moiety of my companions in misfortune, and a third trip sufficed to clear the raft of its living occupants, I, of course, as in duty bound, being the last to leave the clumsy structure which had served us ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood

... farmer, the Mount Vernon estate was but a small part of his property. His father had left him a plantation of two hundred and eighty acres on the Rappahannock, "one Moiety of my Land lying on Deep Run," three lots in Frederick "with all the houses and Appurtenances thereto belonging," and one quarter of the residuary estate. While surveying for Lord Fairfax in 1748, as part of his compensation ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford

... were all (except the old subsidy of tonnage and poundage, of which one moiety only was made a part of this fund, and a duty upon the importation of Scotch linen, which had been taken off by the articles of union) still further continued, as a fund for new loans, to the first of August ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... on which a line of ideographs were inscribed. The card was then cut along the line, and a moiety was given to the trader, the corresponding moiety being ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... veiling of the fact that Mrs. Pott, acting upon her often-repeated threat of separation, had, in virtue of an arrangement negotiated by her brother, the lieutenant, and concluded by Mr. Pott, permanently retired with the faithful bodyguard upon one moiety or half part of the annual income and profits arising from the editorship and sale of ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... one half of man, his mind, Is, sui juris, unconfin'd, And cannot be laid by the heels, 1015 Whate'er the other moiety feels. 'Tis not restraint or liberty That makes men prisoners or free; But perturbations that possess The mind, or aequanimities. 1020 The whole world was not half so wide To ALEXANDER, when he cry'd, Because he had but one to subdue, As was a paltry ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... conflict, and of the patriotic spirit which inspired and underlaid them, has come, or will come, to at least one-half the population of this vast nation of sixty-five millions from the printed page or through the listening ear. The other moiety, more or less, either as children or adults, lived in the period of action, saw the gathering battalions, and heard or read the daily ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic

... prophecy, That at the sounding from thy station Of thy flagrant trumpet, see The seals that melt, the open revelation? Or who a God-persuading angel needs, That only heeds The rhetoric of thy burning deeds? Which but to sing, if it may be, In worship-warranting moiety, So I would win In such a song as hath within A smouldering core of mystery, Brimm-ed with nimbler meanings up Than hasty Gideons in their hands may sup;— Lo, my suit pleads That thou, Isaian coal of fire, Touch from yon altar my poor ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson

... Bishop mutter'd a curse, and a prayer, Which his double capacity hit to a nicety; His Princely, or Lay, half induced him to swear, His Episcopal moiety said "Benedicite!" ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... see if the indulto of his majesty were fairly accounted for. They therefore saved every shilling of that indulto, as the Ruby touched first in France, where no cognizance whatever was taken of this affair. They also got clear of the other moiety payable in Spain, as they landed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr

... The moiety of Horus, added to that of Sit, formed the kingdom which Sibu had inherited; but his children failed to keep it together, though it was afterwards reunited under ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... sooner. Now it is late in the day,—though God knows I am glad for the least of my poor fellows if he be raised from his sickness through this or any other cure.... Captain Carlisle, you will see to it that before night I have the opinion of all the land captains touching our contentment with a moiety of the ransom and our leave-taking of this place. Captain Cecil, you will speak for the officers of the ships. Three nights from now the Governor feasts us yet again, and on that night this matter shall be determined. ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston

... Christianity into Scotland. The soil of the fields to the west of the monastery is, when turned over, found still full of fragments of human bones. Allan de Mortimer, Lord of Aberdour, gave to the Abbey of Inchcolm a moiety of the lands of his town of Aberdour for leave of burial in the church of the monastery.[100] In Scottish history various allusions occur with regard to persons of note, and especially the ecclesiastics of Dunkeld, being carried for sepulture ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... age of 17 he went to London, and was apprenticed to a printer. Careful and diligent, he prospered in business, became printer of the Journals of the House of Commons, and in the year before his death purchased the moiety of the patent of King's Printer. He was twice m., and each of his wives brought him six children, of whom, however, only four daughters were living at his death. R., who was the originator of the modern novel, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin

... "W.C." of Milton (who is anxious for our accuracy on all points), wishes us to correct an error or two in the account of Eclipse, at p. 362, vol. xix. of The Mirror. It is there stated that Mr. Wildman sold the moiety of Eclipse to Colonel O'Kelly, for 650 guineas; and that O'Kelly subsequently bought the other moiety for 1,100 guineas. But, our Correspondent, who was for many years intimate with both the above gentlemen, assures us that "the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various

... reached Smolensk on the ninth, and on the thirteenth the remnants of the rear, with many stragglers, came up and encamped. The heroes of the hour were Eugene and Ney. Ney's division had well-nigh vanished in their glory. Fighting without fear, and dying undaunted, they had saved the moiety of the grand army which reached Smolensk; the other half had perished by the way. Eugene had taken a long circuit, but his division had lost fewer and was less demoralized than those of his colleagues. Murat's recklessness in fighting the Cossacks had resulted ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury and when so recovered to be to his Majesty for the use of this Government or by action of debt in any of his Majesty's Courts of Record and in case of such recovery the one moiety thereof to be to his majesty for the use of this Government the other moiety to the Person or Persons who ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... a general way for us to be certain that there are hundreds of these crimes committed of which the public is not told. The rule is to keep secret all such affairs when an arrest does not follow the offence, and hardly any police official will venture to claim that the arrest occurs in more than a moiety of the cases. There are hundreds of such crimes every year where the criminal is not detected, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property stolen of which the police ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... least did not choose to add what they killed to the common stock. We subsequently learned that the hunters often secreted the partridges they shot and ate them unknown to the officers. Some tripe de roche was collected which we boiled for supper with the moiety of the remainder of our deer's meat. The men commenced cutting the willows for the construction of the raft. As an incitement to exertion I promised a reward of three hundred livres to the first person who should convey ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin

... had conferred on Alesius the prebend of Aldenburgh. Being in greats straits for money, and having been disappointed of help otherwise, he was constrained to write from Wittenberg, on the 12th of December 1533, to Spalatinus, requesting him to obtain payment of the moiety of the prebend ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell

... singer had been admired by another, an elderly suitor of much fortune, whom her father had approved, but to whom she was averse. This gentleman now became the benefactor of the pair. He settled a moiety of three thousand pounds on the bride. Her father retained half of this as compensation for the loss of the services of his daughter. On the balance, the youthful couple lived. Sheridan had entered himself a student of the Middle Temple shortly before his marriage. Though their income was small, ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing

... to bring them before the higher courts in this country, is through this native court, as we have already seen, almost an impossibility. Is it not plain that the Church at home will not thus have a moiety of the control over her Missionaries she now has? Is this the way to keep the Church at Amoy sound and pure? It seems to be supposed by some that the Missionaries desire to be separated from the control of the Church at home. This is altogether a mistake, ...
— History and Ecclesiastical Relations of the Churches of the Presbyterial Order at Amoy, China • J. V. N. Talmage

... Warren, there are probably fifty Harvard men in this one regiment—or were at least," says the colonel, sadly, "up to a month ago. Cedar Mountain, Bull Run, South Mountain, and Antietam have left but a moiety. Most of our officers are graduates of the old college, and many a man was there. I dare say I could have found a dozen who well knew your son. In the few words I had with Abbot, he told me he remembered that ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King

... could write their own histories! The autobiography of a single boulder, with notes on the various floras which had sprung up around it, and the various classes of birds, beasts, and insects by which it had been visited, would be worth nine-tenths of all the autobiographies ever published, and a moiety ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... printing-press. All would rather be inclined to excuse her little achievement in spreading the Bible during the Middle Ages on the ground of the poor facilities at her command. Every intelligent and fair person will accord the Roman Church every moiety of credit for the amount of Bible-knowledge which she did convey to the people. We heartily join Luther in his belief that even in the darkest days of the papacy men were still saved in the Roman Church, because they clung ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... the sum of L50 for every person received on board, and the sum of L200 for every vessel fitted out for the trade, "to be recovered by action of debt, in any Court within this Commonwealth, proper to try the same; the one moiety thereof to the use of this Commonwealth, and the other moiety to the person who shall prosecute ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois

... leaning on the butler's arm, the poor old man (whom a moiety of ten minutes, with its crowding fears, had made to look some ten years older,) proceeded to the square, and knocked up Sir Abraham at midnight, and the admiral came down, half asleep, in dressing-gown and slippers, vexed at having been knocked up from his warm berth ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... William Claiborne, among whose dominant traits was an inability to recognize defeat, was making attempts upon Kent Island. Calvert was not long at St. Mary's ere Ingle sailed in again with letters-of-marque from the Long Parliament. Ingle and his men landed and quickly found out the Protestant moiety of the colonists. There followed an actual insurrection, the Marylanders joining with Ingle and much aided by Claiborne, who now retook Kent Island. The insurgents then captured St. Mary's and forced the Governor ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston

... horse, carrying the mails for all the places enumerated in the Notice, to the splendidly appointed four-horse mail coaches of a period thirty years later on, or to the present time, when on the Great Western Railway one whole train is used to carry only a moiety of the King's mail to Bristol and the West! No wonder that the postboy fell an easy victim to the highwaymen, who bound him and threw him into an out-of-the-way field. The desperadoes proved to be two brothers, young men of the ...
— The King's Post • R. C. Tombs

... aside thy garments, for it will burn them, though thee it will not hurt. Thou must stand in the flame while thy senses will endure, and when it embraces thee suck the fire down into thy very heart, and let it leap and play around thy every part, so that thou lose no moiety of its ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... 20,000 pound prize. I made a visit to one of them the other day, whose farm is not far off, and he had made it the prettiest in the world; and he has three children to share his 10,000, for one moiety of ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue

... having purchased certain Lands from your Nations about Six Years ago, a Moiety of what was agreed to be given in Consideration of that Purchase was at that Time delivered to them, and the other being at their own Desire left in the Proprietor's Hands, He pressed you by Shikalamy, to ...
— The Treaty Held with the Indians of the Six Nations at Philadelphia, in July 1742 • Various

... the shabbiness of her apparel and uncomeliness of her tangled hair and dirty face she had added the humility of tears, the master would have extended to her the usual moiety of pity, and nothing more. But with the natural, tho illogical instincts of his species, her boldness awakened in him something of that respect which all original natures pay unconsciously to one another in any grade. And he gazed at her the more fixedly ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... behalf, as alleged by Mr Gazebee,—like running water; money for furniture, money for the lease of a house, money when he had been separated from his wife, money while she was living abroad. It had seemed to him that he had been made to pay for the entire support of the female moiety of the De Courcy family which had settled itself at Baden-Baden, from the day, and in some respects from before the day, on which his wife had joined that moiety. He had done all in his power to struggle ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope

... his lordship, as he watched her depart. "With this ring, I'll keep thee wedded to jealous interest, and so enrich my purse and power. Thou art a great woman, fair France; I half love thee myself. But thou knowest only a moiety of my purpose. ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.

... speeches against the asserted tyranny of the administration, it was unanimously resolved to prevent the removal of the archives, by open and armed resistance. To that end, they organized a company of four hundred men; one moiety of whom, relieving the other at regular periods of duty, should keep constant guard around the state-house until the peril passed by. The commander of this force was one Colonel Morton, who had achieved considerable ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman

... in England a woman demands her dower by the writ "Unde nihil habet," which is a writ at common law, and yet, according to the custom of the country, she will recover for her dower a moiety of the tenements which belonged to her husband, where by common law she would have only the third part, and also in the case of tenements in some countries which are holden by knight-service the lord can avow the taking as good for cornage according to the law of the country; and yet ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... winter! Both the Park and the Hall were shut up; nor did General Stanley ever again resume his tenancy of the old manor. When the result of the Chancery suit left Mr Altham in possession of the former estate, the General literally preferred forfeiting the moiety of the purchase-money he had paid, and giving up the place to be re-united with the property, which the rigour of the law thus singularly restored to the last heirs of the Althams; and such was the cause of my neighbour, the present Sir Julius Altham, regaining possession ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... to be by so very much his better half, that his own moiety of himself was utterly cast away ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens

... the gallant scribe's feelings, but the fact is that he, as a reader, has a very soothing-syrupy tone and, I fancy, that in less than a quarter of an hour, judging by the moiety of my cigar. I must ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 11, 1891 • Various

... upon his learned counsel, to contribute his moiety to the riddle—"Having at the door the sign of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... any efficacy to prayer and sacrifice: which bids men look to nothing but their own efforts for salvation: which in its original purity knew nothing of vows of obedience and never sought the aid of the secular arm: yet spread over a considerable moiety of the old world with marvellous rapidity and is still with whatever base admixture of foreign superstitions the dominant creed of a large fraction of mankind." But some of this is too strongly phrased. Early Buddhism counted the desire for heaven as a hindrance to the highest spiritual ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... one banshee story than fifteen pages of proof that "life, which began as a cell, with a c, is to end as a sell, with an s." It should be added that the boatman has given his consent to the printing of his yarns. On being offered a moiety of the profits, he observed that he had no objection to these, but that he entirely declined to be responsible for any share of the expenses. Would that all authors were as sagacious, for then the amateur novelist and the minor poet would vex us ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang

... able, and you can tell me what you think." The will provided that Gismondo and Lionardo Buonarroti should be his joint-heirs, without the power of dividing the property. This practically left Lionardo his sole heir after Gismondo's life-tenancy of a moiety. It does not, however, seem to have been executed, for Michelangelo died intestate. Probably, he judged it simplest to allow Lionardo to become his heir-general by the mere course of events. At the same time, he now displayed more than his usual ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... entertained at the count's lodgings, where quadrille was proposed by the abbe, as the most innocent pastime, and the proposal was immediately embraced by all present, and by none with more alacrity than by our adventurer, who, without putting forth a moiety of his skill, went home with twenty louis clear gain. Though, far from believing himself greatly superior to the rest of the party, in the artifices of play, he justly suspected that they had concealed their skill, with a view of stripping ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... stop here, but we have a painful duty imposed upon us, which we must discharge. Mr. and Mrs. Tibbs have separated by mutual consent, Mrs. Tibbs receiving one moiety of 43l. 15s. 10d., which we before stated to be the amount of her husband's annual income, and Mr. Tibbs the other. He is spending the evening of his days in retirement; and he is spending also, annually, that small but honourable ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... the year of Christ . . . in his thirty-eighth year, on the eve of the Calends of March, his birthday, Michel Montaigne, already weary of court employments and public honours, withdrew himself entirely into the converse of the learned virgins where he intends to spend the remaining moiety of the to allotted to him ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne



Words linked to "Moiety" :   one-half, folk, tribe, mediety, half, social group



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