noun a member of an ancient Jewish sect distinguished by strict observance of the traditional and written law and commonly held to have pretensions to superior sanctity a self righteous person a hypocrite The Pharisees are mentioned only by Josephus and in the New Testament Unlike the Sadducees who tried to apply Mosaic law strictly the Pharisees allowed some freedom of interpretation Although in the Gospels they are represented as the chief opponents of Jesus they seem to have been less hostile than the Sadducees to the nascent Church with which they shared belief in the Resurrection moat m t noun a deep wide ditch surrounding a castle fort or town typically filled with water and intended as a defense against attack verb trans often as adj moated surround a place with a moat a moated castle ORIGIN late Middle English from Old French mote mound PHRASES a beam in one s eye a fault that is greater in oneself than in the person one is finding fault with ORIGIN with biblical allusion to Matt 7 3 off or way off beam informal on the wrong track mistaken you re way off beam on this one on the beam informal on the right track on her or its beam ends of a ship heeled over on its side almost capsized ORIGIN Old English b am tree beam related to Dutch boom and German Baum With four tildes tilde tild noun an accent placed over Spanish n when pronounced ny as in se or or Portuguese a or o when nasalized as in S o Paulo or over a vowel in phonetic transcription indicating nasalization the same symbol as a part of a URL a similar symbol used in mathematics to indicate similarity and in logic to indicate negation ORIGIN mid 19th cent from Spanish based on Latin titulus see title