The way in which a word or expression or situation can be interpreted

Usage examples of signified.

It signified a colossal ego, a man who might easily have given himself an anther and pollinated amaryllises and neighbor ladies, a man who judged the rightness of his behavior only by his own standards, if he bothered to so judge at all.

He was bewildered, for instance, by her new and to him quite inexplicable reluctance to respond to their familiar urinary tune by singing the antistrophe that signified assent, and crouching to relieve herself.

To The Shadow, the death of so prominent an individual as Josiah Bartram signified a possible reawakening of crime in Holmsford.

It is therefore manifest that the sacraments of the Old Law were not endowed with any power by which they conduced to the bestowal of justifying grace: and they merely signified faith by which men were justified.

Lo Croesus, which that was of Lydia king, Mette he not that he sat upon a tree, Which signified he shoulde hanged be?

I replied that I would call on her in the afternoon, and that my answer would depend on my welcome, I went in due course, and after a lively discussion, she gave way, and I signified my willingness to sell the carriage for the sum offered by the vice-legate.

She rode a horse, a fact that signified that she was no ordinary religieuse but a woman of rank.

The curtain at length fell on the performances, to the infinite satisfaction of the Viscount of Morcerf, who seized his hat, rapidly passed his fingers through his hair, arranged his cravat and wristbands, and signified to Franz that he was waiting for him to lead the way.

This cannot fail to recall the signified in another semiological system, Freudianism.

Let me therefore restate that any semiology postulates a relation between two terms, a signifier and a signified.

I was entertaining Anna by playing spillikins with her in the upstairs yellow drawing room, Lord Winterdale came into the room wearing the drab coat with three tiers of pockets, huge pearl buttons, and blue waistcoat with yellow stripes that signified a member of the Four House Club.

These things were signified by the strange and dreadfull wondres which fortuned in the house of the good man, who after he had heard these sorrowfull tydings could in no wise weepe, so farre was he stroken with dolour, but presently taking his knife wherewith he cut his cheese and other meate before, he cut his owne throat likewise, in such sort that he fell upon the bord and imbraced the table with the streames of his blond, in most miserable manner.

These military preparations of the Government of the United States signified nothing less than the subjugation of the Southern States, so that, by one devastating blow, the North might grasp for ever that supremacy it had so long coveted.

The imperative or the subjunctive mode, for instance, are the form of a particular signified, different from the meaning: the signified is here my will or my request.

I have previously transformed to the level of depth that discloses and supports the interior signified.