apposition

Definitions

  • WordNet 3.6
    • n apposition the act of positioning close together (or side by side) "it is the result of the juxtaposition of contrasting colors"
    • n apposition (biology) growth in the thickness of a cell wall by the deposit of successive layers of material
    • n apposition a grammatical relation between a word and a noun phrase that follows "`Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer' is an example of apposition"
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Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
    • Apposition The act of adding; application; accretion. "It grows . . . by the apposition of new matter."
    • Apposition The putting of things in juxtaposition, or side by side; also, the condition of being so placed.
    • Apposition (Gram) The state of two nouns or pronouns, put in the same case, without a connecting word between them; as, I admire Cicero, the orator. Here, the second noun explains or characterizes the first.
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Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
    • n apposition The act of adding to or together; a setting to; application; a placing together; juxtaposition.
    • n apposition In grammar: The relation to a noun (or pronoun) of another noun, or in some cases of an adjective or a clause, that is added to it by way of explanation or characterization. Thus, “Cicero, the famous orator, lived in the first century before Christ”; “On him, their second Providence, they hung.” In languages that distinguish cases, the noun in apposition is in the same case as the word to which it is apposed. The same term is also used of an adjective that stands to the noun (or pronoun) to which it refers in a less close relation than the proper attributive, being added rather parenthetically, or by way of substitute for a qualifying clause. Thus, “They sang Darius, great and good”; “Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again.” Rarely, it is applied to a clause, whether substantive or adjective, that qualifies a noun (or pronoun) in an equivalent manner. Compare attributive and predicative.
    • n apposition The relation of two or more nouns (or a noun and pronoun) in the same construction, under the above conditions. Knights Templars, lords justices, Paul the apostle, my son John's book (where son is also possessive, the sign of the possessive case being required only with the final term), are examples of nouns in apposition; “I Jesus have sent mine angel” (Rev. xxii. 16) is an example of a pronoun and noun in apposition.
    • n apposition In rhetoric, the addition of a parallel word or phrase by way of explanation or illustration of another.
    • apposition A public disputation or examination: now used only as a name of Speech Hay in St. Paul's School, London.
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Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary
    • n Apposition ap-poz-ish′un the act of adding: state of being placed together or against: juxtaposition:
    • n Apposition ap-poz-ish′un (gram.) the annexing of one noun to another, in the same case or relation, in order to explain or limit the first: also used of a public disputation by scholars, and still the word in use for the 'Speech Day' at St Paul's School, London
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Etymology

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
L. appositio, fr. apponere,: cf. F. apposition,. See Apposite
Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary
See Apposite.

Usage

In literature:

Mrs. Trapes is a woman of singularly apposite ideas.
"The Definite Object" by Jeffery Farnol
And Aunt Charlotte was a very apposite specimen of the class.
"Austin and His Friends" by Frederic H. Balfour
Dr. Lieber's remarks on this point are peculiarly just and apposite.
"Elements of Military Art and Science" by Henry Wager Halleck
On the other hand, an apposite anecdote has saved many a speech from failure.
"The Art of Public Speaking" by Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
The only other rule in the game is that the occasion for making each remark must be reasonably apposite.
"Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920" by Various
I wish, therefore, but for an apposite occasion to express to Mr. Adams my unchanged affections for him.
"Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson" by Thomas Jefferson
The author answers appositely that the abundance of the goodness of God is the cause.
"Theodicy" by G. W. Leibniz
Is not sympathy with what is modern, instant, actual, and apposite a fair parallel of patriotism?
"French Art" by W. C. Brownell
Between words or phrases in apposition to each other.
"Punctuation" by Frederick W. Hamilton
The "Prince of the power of the air," he very appositely called the "Little Bad Man.
"Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3)" by James Athearn Jones
Words in apposition are generally marked off by commas.
""Stops"" by Paul Allardyce
It was the most astonishing and apposite piece of luck that had ever happened to him.
"Clayhanger" by Arnold Bennett
I cannot tell you how very apposite to my work these two feathers are.
"Hortus Inclusus" by John Ruskin
It consisted in outlining leaves or branches by means of two lines of ink placed in apposition.
"Chinese Painters" by Raphael Petrucci
She gave a light laugh that had in it so little mirth, was so little apposite to ridicule, that he did not feel it a fleer.
"The Storm Centre" by Charles Egbert Craddock
The example most apposite to our present subject is the structure of the bones of animals.
"The Seven Lamps of Architecture" by John Ruskin
The element of the opportune, the apposite, the fit, is always great part of the secret of eloquence.
"French Classics" by William Cleaver Wilkinson
The Skipper's apposite remarks aided me in keeping my senses.
"Latitude 19 degree" by Mrs. Schuyler Crowninshield
James Nimmo could quote whole stanzas of him, and kept a store of apposite tags and passages from his works upon the tip of his tongue.
"A Knight on Wheels" by Ian Hay
For they wrest the Holy Scripture, and never quote it appositely.
"History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century (Volume 1)" by J. H. Merle D'Aubigné
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In news:

Integrin-Dependent Apposition of Drosophila Extraembryonic M.
cell.com
Integrin-Dependent Apposition of Drosophila Extraembryonic Membranes Promotes Morphogenesis and Prev.
cell.com
Those words were to prove the most memorable of his brief administration and also the most apposite.
washingtonpost.com
The character of American humor, and its want of resemblance to the humor of Kamtschatka and Patagonia,—will the reader forgive us if we fail to set down here the thoughts suggested by these fresh and apposite topics.
theatlantic.com
The most familiar instance of the anatomy for English readers, and one particularly apposite to Doris Lessing 's project, is "Gulliver's Travels".
nytimes.com
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In science:

After the apposition of all essential graphs at the examined frequency ranges, an evaluation of the antenna’s behaviour in connection with frequency has to be made.
"D-Dimond1", Prototype Antenna RGA-05
The word coagulation, introduced in German in , sounds strange to the native English speaker to whom it suggests blood clotting; coalescence seems a more apposite English word.
More Uses of Exchangeability: Representations of Complex Random Structures
The BLC is therefore an apposite candidate for any high-contrast instruments on ELTs.
Band-Limited Coronagraphs using a halftone-dot process: II. Advances and laboratory results for arbitrary telescope apertures
In Section 2, we construct the operator restrictions of interest together with a set of formal completeness relations that will pave the way for introducing in Section 3 the spaces of state vectors for particle-antiparticle pairs, the apposite dynamical operators and their local matrix representation.
Pseudo-Unitary Dynamics of Free Relativistic Quantum Mechanical Twofold Systems
The fusion process can be roughly divided into two steps [ 30]: first the two membranes to be fused are brought into close apposition.
Biological and synthetic membranes: What can be learned from a coarse-grained description?
In the proof outlined above, an apposite indexing of the closed terms in the sets T and T ′ facilitates the definition of the bijection β .
Thread extraction for polyadic instruction sequences
Blind analysis has won a secure place in our practice of particle physics, as a talisman against experimenter’s bias, but it is not apposite when we are seeking to get the lay of the land.
Looking into Particle Production at the Large Hadron Collider
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Related words