Crossword clues for avocation
avocation
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Avocation \Av`o*ca"tion\, n. [L. avocatio.]
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A calling away; a diversion. [Obs. or Archaic]
Impulses to duty, and powerful avocations from sin.
--South. -
That which calls one away from one's regular employment or vocation.
Heaven is his vocation, and therefore he counts earthly employments avocations.
--Fuller.By the secular cares and avocations which accompany marriage the clergy have been furnished with skill in common life.
--Atterbury.Note: In this sense the word is applied to the smaller affairs of life, or occasional calls which summon a person to leave his ordinary or principal business. Avocation (in the singular) for vocation is usually avoided by good writers.
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pl. Pursuits; duties; affairs which occupy one's time; usual employment; vocation.
There are professions, among the men, no more favorable to these studies than the common avocations of women.
--Richardson.In a few hours, above thirty thousand men left his standard, and returned to their ordinary avocations.
--Macaulay.An irregularity and instability of purpose, which makes them choose the wandering avocations of a shepherd, rather than the more fixed pursuits of agriculture.
--Buckle.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context obsolete English) A calling away; a diversion. 2 A hobby or recreational or leisure pursuit. 3 That which calls one away from one's regular employment or vocation. 4 Pursuits; duties; affairs which occupy one's time; usual employment; vocation.
WordNet
n. an auxiliary activity [syn: by-line, hobby, sideline, spare-time activity]
Wikipedia
An avocation is an activity that one engages in as a hobby outside one's main occupation. There are many examples of people whose professions were the ways that they made their livings, but for whom their activities outside of their workplaces were their true passions in life. Occasionally, as with Lord Baden-Powell and others, a person who pursues an avocation is more remembered by history for their avocation than for their professional career.
Many times a person's regular vocation may lead to their avocation. Many forms of humanitarian campaigning, such as work for organizations such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace may be done by people involved in the law or human rights issues as part of their work.
Many people involved with youth work pursue this as an avocation.
Usage examples of "avocation".
After dinner she left me, and went with her two men on her farming avocations, and I was for a long while cogitating on what had passed.
In his ordinary avocation he places upon the cast his health, his fortune, his life, and, possibly, the food and shelter of his wife and children, whom let no man say that he loves less passionately and enduringly than his more stationary fellow labourer.
Our Apostleship requires, that the Catholic faith should especially in this Our day increase and flourish everywhere, and that all heretical depravity should be driven far from the frontiers and bournes of the Faithful, We very gladly proclaim and even restate those particular means and methods whereby Our pious desire may obtain its wished effect, since when all errors are uprooted by Our diligent avocation as by the hoe of a provident husbandman, a zeal for, and the regular observance of, Our holy Faith will be all the more strongly impressed upon the hearts of the faithful.
They my-loved and my-deared each other assiduously, but kept apart generally, whereas Sir Pitt, in the midst of his multiplied avocations, found daily time to see his sister-in-law.
Tom, like his father before him, has a family practice in Orangetown, a quick ten minutes away, but he spends at least a third of his time working on trilobite research, his hobby, his avocation, he would tell you in a kind of winking way so that you understand trilobites are his real work.
Nor was there any loss of interest in his various avocations, among which, in 1840, he found time to plan and supervise extensive alterations in Christ Church, of which he had become a vestryman in 1835.
John was left behind, under the pretence of keeping Denbigh company in his morning avocations, but really because Mrs.
Among the young, the gambols, races, and other sports were chiefly or wholly diversional, and commonly mimicked the avocations of the adults.
She had doubtless resumed her usual avocations too soon after the birth of her last child, as often happens in working-class families where the mother is unable to remain idle.
And even these resembled those pleasant avocations which fill up the elegant morning leisure of our fashionable ladies at home.
Tom, like his father before him, has a family practice in Orangetown, a quick ten minutes away, but he spends at least a third of his time working on trilobite research, his hobby, his avocation, he would tell you in a kind of winking way so that you understand trilobites are his real work.
Recorded a joychoice at the proper time—bird watching—but one can suspect he did so primarily to comply with tradition since he did nothing with this purported avocation for a number of years, to be precise, nothing until a little over two years ago, when he began showing a strong interest in tracking avian migrations and applied for leave to follow the greater blueback on its biennial flights.
The avocations of a military life had diverted his youth from the elegant pursuits of literature.
The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came into being.
It is not an avocation of a remunerative description - in other words, it does not pay - and some temporary embarrassments of a pecuniary nature have been the consequence.