Draw out, prolong

Usage examples of protract.

For these reasons he proposed, that although the term of subscribing should be protracted till the thirtieth day of May, the encouragement of three pounds ten shillings per centum per annum should not be continued to the second subscribers longer than till the fifth day of December, in the year one thousand seven hundred and fifty-five.

Stooped, he strode stiffly to the machine shop and inquired of the machinist when the buzz saw and lathe were planning to take a fairly protracted intermission, because he, the ballet pianist and former concert pianist, wished to practice, very softly, some thing complicated, a so-called adagio.

Knapp has shown that they were protracted to include matters relating to Bowring and long posterior to the period covered by the autobiography, and that the magnitude of these additions compelled him to divide the book in two.

Cornelius Merula, the censor Publius Licinius Crassus, the banker and merchant Titus Pomponius, the banker Gaius Oppius, Quintus Mucius Scaevola Pontifex Maximus, and Marcus Antonius Orator, just returned to the Senate after a protracted illness.

Affirming that the Supreme Court is not concluded by the finding of a jury in a State court that a confession in a murder trial was voluntary, but determines that question for itself from the evidence, the Justices unanimously declared that the Constitution proscribes lawless means irrespective of the end, and rejected the argument that the thumbscrew, the wheel, solitary confinement, protracted questioning, and other ingenious means of entrapment are necessary to uphold our laws.

Landowners felt deprived because the state had abolished serfdom without helping them to overcome the protracted crisis of change from feudal to capitalist production.

And finally, after an interval so apparently protracted that within it mountain ranges rose and continents were subducted, the weeks also passed and I rose one autumnal morning to discover that today was the day.

Acceptance of this idea was fostered by the mounting accumulation of evidence of the practical disadvantages and malpractices attendant upon legislative selection, such as deadlocks within legislatures resulting in vacancies remaining unfilled for substantial intervals, the influencing of legislative selection by corrupt political organizations and special interest groups through purchase of legislative seats, and the neglect of duties by legislators as a consequence of protracted electoral contests.

The tribal mode probably originated in the unstable social conditions that resulted from the protracted decline of the Abbasid Caliphate and the subsequent cycles of invasion and devastation.

Better that I or my friend should die than protract existence through accumulated years of torture upon animals whose exquisite suffering we cannot fail to infer, even though they may have neither voice nor feature to express it.

When the reader came to the allusions to secret arrests, protracted imprisonments, and the tedious formalities of the law and lawyers, he declared that it would be necessary to pull down the Bastile before it could be acted with safety, as Beaumarchais was ridiculing every thing which ought to be respected.

Had they been admitted two hundred years earlier, he knew, far more research might have been redirected into pure bioscience, and members of die new generation of Naturals might now be welcoming dieir second century of hopefully eternal youdi instead of climbing out of slighdy protracted adolescence.

Had they been admitted two hundred years earlier, he knew, far more research might have been redirected into pure bioscience, and members of the new generation of Naturals might now be welcoming their second century of hopefully eternal youth instead of climbing out of slightly protracted adolescence.

Saladin having thrown a strong garrison into the place under the command of Caracos, his own master in the art of war, and molesting the besiegers with continual attacks and sallies, had protracted the success of the enterprise, and wasted the force of his enemies.

He pounded Pitts for his continuing failure to deliver his dissertation, and for shirking his responsibilities to MIT and the Guggenheim Foundation to complete his protracted doctoral program.