relic
Part of speech: noun
adj
Morphological type: simple
Topics: astronomy
cosmology
lifestyle
natural-sciences
religion
Etymology: From Middle English relik et al., from Old French relique, from Latin reliquiae (“remains, relics”), from relinquō (“to leave behind, abandon, relinquish”), from re- + linquō (“to leave, quit, forsake, depart from”). Doublet of relict, derelict, and relinquish.
Inflected forms:
form: relics
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: relick
pos: noun
tags: alternative
archaic
form: relique
pos: noun
tags: alternative
archaic
form: relick
pos: adj
tags: alternative
archaic
form: relique
pos: adj
tags: alternative
archaic
Senses:
gloss: That which remains; that which is left after loss or decay; a remaining portion.
pos: noun
examples: […] let him not ask our pardon;
The nature of his great offence is dead,
And deeper than oblivion we do bury
The incensing relics of it […]
Though a Cup of cold water from ſome hand may not be without it's reward, yet ſtick not thou for Wine and Oyl for the Wounds of the Distreſſed, and treat the poor, as our Saviour did the Multitude, to the reliques of ſome baskets.
1797, Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, London: T. Cadell Jun. & W. Davies, Volume 2, Chapter 6, p. 184,
It appeared, from […] the ruins scattered distantly along its skirts, to be a part of the city entirely abandoned by the modern inhabitants to the reliques of its former grandeur.
She exerted the last relics of her wasted strength to gain a prominent position upon a ledge of the rocks behind her […]
[T]hey know that the low social level of the mass of the race is responsible for much discrimination against it, but they also know, and the nation knows, that relentless color-prejudice is more often a cause than a result of the Negro’s degradation; they seek the abatement of this relic of barbarism, and not its systematic encouragement and pampering by all agencies of social power from the Associated Press to the Church of Christ.
gloss: Something old and outdated, possibly kept for sentimental reasons.
pos: noun
examples: […] the imperfect light entering by their narrow casements showed bedsteads of a hundred years old; chests in oak or walnut, looking, with their strange carvings of palm branches and cherubs’ heads, like types of the Hebrew ark; rows of venerable chairs, high-backed and narrow; stools still more antiquated, on whose cushioned tops were yet apparent traces of half-effaced embroideries, wrought by fingers that for two generations had been coffin-dust. All these relics gave to the third storey of Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine of memory.
Published in 1982, the now out-of-print computer guide is a real relic, full of dozens of black-and-white pictures of large, bulky computers that you would sooner find in the Smithsonian than on anybody's desk today.
gloss: A part of the body of a saint, or an ancient religious object, kept for veneration.
pos: noun
examples: Why ſhould onely I,
Of all the other Princes of the World,
Be caſ’d-vp, like a holy Relique?
No Anchorite in the exstasy of devotion, ever adored a relique with more fervour than that with which I kissed this inimitable proof of my charmer’s candour, generosity and affection!
[…] the duke, in order to support their drooping hopes, ordered a procession to be made with the reliques of St. Valori, and prayers to be said for more favourable weather.
During that time he had been living with his youthful memory of her; but she had doubtless had other and more tangible companionship. Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something apart; but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim chapel, where there was not time to pray every day....
gloss: A particle or entity that has existed since the Big Bang.
pos: noun
examples: One of the primary targets of current and especially future cosmological observations are light thermal relics of the hot big bang.
gloss: Pertaining to the Big Bang.
pos: adj
tags: not-comparable
examples: A more realistic model must include the presence of perturbations whose extra energy can produce distortions of the relic radiation spectrum.
While Lasserre acknowledges that physicists are still decades away from observing a direct relic neutrino signal, he says that this work represents an important step forward in the search for the holy grail of neutrino physics.
We carry out model-independent analysis to obtain the temperature at the end of inflation and the estimate for the upper bound on the Hubble parameter to circumvent the problem due to relic gravitational waves
This has been very successfully employed by measuring the relic abundances of the light elements, which were synthesized about three minutes after the beginning of the universe during big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN).
Related words: delict
delinquent
derelict
relict
relinquish
reliquary
Derived words: Planck relic
relical
reliclike
relicmonger
Relic Sunday
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