Pretend to have, as an illness

Usage examples of feign.

Then the old woman rendring out like sighes, began to speake in this sort : My daughter take a good heart unto you, and bee not afeared at feigned and strange visions and dreams, for as the visions of the day are accounted false and untrue, so the visions of the night doe often change contrary.

Dyne, his scrawny arms strapped to a pair of Y-shaped branches, eyes girlishly aflutter, feigned to yield his hairless body into the ecstatic admixture of bliss and pain of which he fancied heaven was justly composed.

As for Lady Afy, he execrated the greenhornism which had made him feign a passion, and then get caught where he meant to capture.

He had tried several times to speak to her while in Hes, but always she had feigned tiredness or some pressing business, and she never seemed to require his bodyguard services anymore, the way she had during their first weeks together.

The same may be said of feigned insanity, aphonia, deaf-mutism, and loss of memory.

A few moments later Sigurd Ring awoke from his feigned sleep, and after telling Frithiof that he had recognized him from the first, had tested him in many ways, and had always found his honor fully equal to his vaunted courage, he bade him be patient a little longer, for his end was very near, and said that he would die happy if he could leave Ingeborg, his infant heir, and his kingdom in such good hands.

They feign a lack of interest in magic, and indeed some of them declare that they know my secrets, but I have had one or two moments when, gratifyingly, I have seen genuine bafflement in their expressions.

On the other hand, if one or both were skillful enough to feign the biomarkers of veracity while lying, that is exactly what I would expect to detect.

When he came back, the bondswoman looked at him with feigned disinterest.

We teach them to express affection, or at least to feign affection, by buying appropriate gifts for the special people in their lives.

He was rather addicted to gallantry, and the empress, who always called him master feigned not to notice it, because she did not want the world to know that her charms could no longer captivate her royal spouse, and the more so that the beauty of her numerous family was generally admired.

I feigned a passionate desire, and I could see that I should not have much trouble in gaining my suit.

Donna Ignazia feigned to be persuaded and asked her lover to sit down, but she did not speak another word to him, confining her remarks to me, saying how much she had enjoyed the ball, and how kind I had been to take her cousins.

As I did not see Leah at supper-time I imagined that she was feigning illness to avoid meeting me, and I felt very much obliged to her on this account.

It was some years since Stephen had heard Jack reprove one of his officers, and he was much struck by the remarkable advance in efficacity, by the impersonal, God-like, severe authority that could not possibly be feigned or assumed by any man who did not naturally possess it.