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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
abstinence
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
total
▪ I knew of no virtues except truthfulness, obedience, self-sacrifice, total abstinence from alcoholic drinks ....
▪ If not, client and therapist can then together consider a goal of total abstinence.
▪ As a public man and staunch Congregationalist he was active in social reform, notably in promoting total abstinence.
▪ Compliance with any of the three drug treatments was associated with total abstinence during the year.
▪ His campaigns for total abstinence were based on appeals to reason.
▪ At sixteen Malins took the total abstinence pledge.
▪ As for the member of Alcoholics Anonymous, there could be no compromise solution: it was either total abstinence or total relapse.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ I had planned to usher in the new decade with a month of abstinence.
▪ I should know by now that heavy drinkers are awfully fond of high-flown rationalisations for any brief spell of abstinence.
▪ In the early stages of abstinence, people are having a lot of difficulties and craving is most pronounced.
▪ Paul permits temporary abstinence also but only by mutual agreement.
▪ Some creatures indulge but once a year, with long periods of abstinence as they make copies of themselves.
▪ The primary goal of the treatment was abstinence.
▪ The third floor was a no-smoking floor or I think I might have started smoking again after six years' abstinence.
▪ Total abstinence from any sweeteners can cure a sweet tooth permanently - which is much better in the long term.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Abstinence

Abstinence \Ab"sti*nence\, n. [F. abstinence, L. abstinentia, fr. abstinere. See Abstain.]

  1. The act or practice of abstaining; voluntary forbearance of any action, especially the refraining from an indulgence of appetite, or from customary gratifications of animal or sensual propensities. Specifically, the practice of abstaining from intoxicating beverages, -- called also total abstinence.

    The abstinence from a present pleasure that offers itself is a pain, nay, oftentimes, a very great one.
    --Locke.

  2. The practice of self-denial by depriving one's self of certain kinds of food or drink, especially of meat.

    Penance, fasts, and abstinence, To punish bodies for the soul's offense.
    --Dryden.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
abstinence

mid-14c., "forbearance in indulgence of the appetites," from Old French abstinence (earlier astenance), from Latin abstinentia "abstinence, starvation; self-restraint, integrity," noun of quality from abstinentem (nominative abstinens), present participle of abstinere (see abstain). Specifically of sexual appetites from mid-14c., but also in Middle English of food, fighting, luxury.

Wiktionary
abstinence

n. 1 The act or practice of abstaining, refraining from indulge a desire or appetite. (First attested around 1150 to 1350.)(R:SOED5: page=10) 2 # Specifically, the practice of abstaining from intoxicating/alcoholic beverages; total abstinence; teetotalism). (First attested around 1150 to 1350.) 3 # Specifically, the practice of abstaining from sexual intercourse, either permanently or until marriage. (First attested around 1150 to 1350.) 4 # (context ecclesiastical English) Abstention from certain foods on days of penitential observance. (First attested around 1150 to 1350.) 5 The practice of self-denial; self-restraint; forebearance from anything. (First attested around 1350 to 1470.) 6 (context obsolete English) Self-denial; abstaining; or forebearance of anything. (First attested around 1150 to 1350.) 7 (context business English) Delay of spending to accrue capital.

WordNet
abstinence
  1. n. the trait of abstaining (especially from alcohol) [syn: abstention]

  2. act or practice of refraining from indulging an appetite

Wikipedia
Abstinence (conscription)

The Abstinence (, Ashkenazi pronunciation: Histagfus) tactic of draft evasion was a type of hunger strike (or other forms of self-harm, such as sleep deprivation, tending to cause tachycardia, or self-inflicted wound), employed by young men in the Russian Empire's Jewish Pale of Settlement (and in neighboring Austria-Hungary's Galician community), in order to be found unfit for military service by the Imperial authorities.

Abstinence (psychoanalysis)

Abstinence or the rule of abstinence is the principle of analytic reticence and/or frustration within a clinical situation. It is a central feature of psychoanalytic theory - relating especially to the handling of the transference in analysis.

As Freud wrote in 1914,

The cure must be carried through in abstinence. I mean by that not physical self-denial alone, nor the denial of every desire....But I want to state the principle that one must permit neediness and yearning to remain as forces favoring work and change.

Abstinence (band)

Abstinence is an experimental industrial music project founded in 1985 in Belmar, New Jersey, USA, now based in Brooklyn. Its sound ranges from bombastic to noise, ambient soundtrack to industrial music and uses video/audio dialog and sound samples.

Since 1982, Abstinence has created experimental industrial music that follows in the traditions of the Beats, the Dada movement, the Futurism movement, punk rock, the origins of industrial music, the freedom of the experimental art movement and the human rights art movement.

Abstinence utilizes tunnels, decommissioned military bases, warehouses, bathrooms, abandoned buildings, basements, freeway underpasses and various indoor/outdoor environments as sound laboratories to create unique soundscapes that coalesce with power tools, a variety of traditional analog / digital instrumentation and percussion.

Abstinence

Abstinence is a self-enforced restraint from indulging in bodily activities that are widely experienced as giving pleasure. Most frequently, the term refers to sexual abstinence, or abstinence from alcohol or food. The practice can arise from religious prohibitions and practical considerations. Abstinence may also refer to drugs. For example, one can abstain from smoking. Abstinence has diverse forms. Commonly it refers to a temporary or partial abstinence from food, as in fasting. In the twelve-step program of Overeaters Anonymous abstinence is the term for refraining from compulsive eating, akin in meaning to sobriety for alcoholics. Because the regimen is intended to be a conscious act, freely chosen to enhance life, abstinence is sometimes distinguished from the psychological mechanism of repression. The latter is an unconscious state, having unhealthy consequences. Freud termed the channeling of sexual energies into other more culturally or socially acceptable activities, " sublimation".

Abstinence (disambiguation)

Abstinence is a voluntary restraint from indulging a desire or appetite for certain bodily activities that are widely experienced as giving pleasure.

Forms of abstinence include

  • Coerced abstinence, a drug rehabilitation technique
  • Fasting and abstinence in the Roman Catholic Church
  • Fasting and abstinence of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria
  • Sexual abstinence

Abstinence may also refer to:

  • Abstinence (band), an experimental industrial music project
  • " The Abstinence", a Seinfeld episode
  • Abstinence theory of interest in classical economics

Usage examples of "abstinence".

In such seasons this chaste husband brought down his fleshly desires by the fatigue of hunting and by abstinence.

According to Cornell law professor Gary Simson, sex education courses that teach abstinence until marriage are unconstitutional because they violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

There is an exaggeration in your sorrow These liars in surplice, in black cassock, or in purple Time, the irresistible healer Trust not in kings Violent passion had changed to mere friendship Weeping just as if princes had not got to die like anybody else Went so far as to shed tears, his most difficult feat of all What they need is abstinence, prohibitions, thwartings When women rule their reign is always stormy and troublous When one has seen him, everything is excusable When one has been pretty, one imagines that one is still so Wife: property or of furniture, useful to his house Wish you had the generosity to show, now and again, less wit Women who misconduct themselves are pitiless and severe Won for himself a great name and great wealth by words Would you like to be a cardinal?

The Americans had already put their threats into execution concerning their abstinence from the use of British goods, and this created great alarm among shipowners, merchants, manufacturers, artizans, and labourers.

While in Brahminism man was deprived of his individuality, and regarded only as an effluence from Brahma, and tormented by the fear of hell, and by the thought of a ceaseless process of countless new births awaiting him after death, whence the necessity of the most painful penances and chastisements, Sakya-muni began with man as an individual, and in morals put purity, abstinence, patience, brotherly love, and repentance for sins committed above sacrifice and bodily mortification, and opened to his followers the prospect, after this weary life, no more to be exposed to the ever-recurring pains of new birth, but released from all suffering to return to Nirvana, or nothingness.

As soon as Carandas had verified the arrangement and constant practice of these gallant diversions, he determined to wait for a day when the lovers would meet, hungry one for the other, after some accidental abstinence.

Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost.

Of course it was a day of Lenten abstinence, but it was also an emergency, especially for the cardinal, who had never fully recovered from his ordeal in the breeding pit.

Our Lord Jesus Christ who fasted forty days in the desert, the faithful observed the fast from Quadragesima Sunday until Easter Sunday, making forty days after abstracting the Sundays when the fast was broken but not the abstinence.

There are certain idiosyncratic structures of face and body found only in the members of the Celtic subrace, and the stubble of beard on his face, though darkened by prolonged abstinence from the means of ablution, had a reddish tinge.

Substance-focus tends to narrow the aperture of recovery and focus too much on abstinence from just one Substance instead of complete sobriety and a new spiritual way of life in toto.

Almighty can enjoy the sufferings, the pains, the fasts and abstinences which they offer to Him as a sacrifice, and that His love is granted only to those who tax themselves so foolishly.

It was at this time I learnt the truth of the maxim that if abstinence is sometimes the spur of love, it has also the contrary effect.

Towards midnight I returned to the two amiable sisters who were expecting me with their usual loving impatience, but, I am bound to confess it with all humility, my sorrows were prejudicial to love in spite of the fortnight of absence and of abstinence.

I spent all my time with Esther, and every day we grew more and more in love, and more unhappy, for we were tormented by abstinence, which irritated while it increased our desires.