The Collaborative International Dictionary
Countenance \Coun"te*nance\ (koun"t?-nans), v. t. [imp. & p. p. Countenanced (-nanst); p. pr. & vb. n. Countenancing.]
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To encourage; to favor; to approve; to aid; to abet.
This conceit, though countenanced by learned men, is not made out either by experience or reason.
--Sir T. Browne.Error supports custom, custom countenances error.
--Milton. -
To make a show of; to pretend. [Obs.]
Which to these ladies love did countenance.
--Spenser.
Wiktionary
vb. (present participle of countenance English)
Usage examples of "countenancing".
Thou art also here indicted for countenancing the King’s enemies, after wholesome laws made to the contrary: for, 1.
Rohan got to his feet and began to pace restlessly, helpless to find his way out of countenancing the slaughter for another year.
The Merida thought him trapped into countenancing the invasion and acknowledging Birioc as his heir.
Or, secondly, that each breed, even the purest, has within a dozen or, at most, within a score of generations, been crossed by the rock-pigeon: I say within a dozen or twenty generations, for we know of no fact countenancing the belief that the child ever reverts to some one ancestor, removed by a greater number of generations.
My skirts are clear (so far as other people are concerned) of countenancing that form of intellectual opium-eating in which rhyme takes the place of the narcotic.
He is right, for assuredly the poor intellectual abuses of the time want countenancing now as much as ever, but so far as he countenances them, he should bear in mind that he is returning to the ground of common sense, and should not therefore hold himself too stiffly in the matter of logic.
I tried, without any success, to imagine my cousin Anne at Castle McDaniels going to all this trouble for me, or the stern Lewises even countenancing such a fuss.
He asked, as we are still asking, what Christianity and civilisation mean by countenancing the horrors of war.