The Collaborative International Dictionary
disability \dis`a*bil"i*ty\, n.; pl. Disabilities.
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State of being disabled; deprivation or want of ability; absence of competent physical, intellectual, or moral power, means, fitness, and the like.
Grossest faults, or disabilities to perform what was covenanted.
--Milton.Chatham refused to see him, pleading his disability.
--Bancroft. -
Want of legal qualification to do a thing; legal incapacity or incompetency.
The disabilities of idiocy, infancy, and coverture.
--Abbott.Syn: Weakness; inability; incompetence; impotence; incapacity; incompetency; disqualification.
Usage: -- Disability, Inability. Inability is an inherent want of power to perform the thing in question; disability arises from some deprivation or loss of the needed competency. One who becomes deranged is under a disability of holding his estate; and one who is made a judge, of deciding in his own case. A man may decline an office on account of his inability to discharge its duties; he may refuse to accept a trust or employment on account of some disability prevents him from entering into such engagements.
Wiktionary
n. (plural of disability English)
Wikipedia
Disabilities were legal restrictions and limitations placed on Jews in the Middle Ages. They included provisions requiring Jews to wear specific and identifying clothing such as the Jewish hat and the yellow badge, restricting Jews to certain cities and towns or in certain parts of towns ( ghettos), and forbidding Jews to enter certain trades (for example selling new clothes in medieval Sweden). Disabilities also included special taxes levied on Jews, exclusion from public life, restraints on the performance of religious ceremonies, and linguistic censorship. Some countries went even further and completely expelled Jews, for example England in 1290 (Jews were readmitted in 1655) and Spain in 1492 (readmitted in 1868).
The disabilities began to be lifted with Jewish emancipation in the late 18th and the 19th century. In 1791, Revolutionary France was the first country to abolish disabilities altogether, followed by Prussia in 1848. Emancipation of the Jews in the United Kingdom was achieved in 1858 after an almost 30-year struggle championed by Isaac Lyon Goldsmid with the ability of Jews to sit in parliament with the passing of the Jews Relief Act 1858. The newly united German Empire in 1871 abolished Jewish disabilities in Germany.
The first Jewish settlers in North America arrived in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1654; they were forbidden to hold public office, open a retail shop, or establish a synagogue. When the colony was seized by the British in 1664 Jewish rights remained unchanged, but by 1671 Asser Levy was the first Jew to serve on a jury in North America.
Usage examples of "disabilities".
Nor is it only in our own country and in America that women are beginning to protest, more or less collectively, against the disabilities under which they labour.
The disabilities, therefore, to which women are subject from the mere fact of their birth, are the solitary examples of the kind in modern legislation.
I believe that their disabilities elsewhere are only clung to in order to maintain their subordination in domestic life.
In the last two centuries, when (which was seldom the case) any reason beyond the mere existence of the fact was thought to be required to justify the disabilities of women, people seldom assigned as a reason their inferior mental capacity.
An unprejudiced view of it gives additional strength to the arguments against the disabilities of women, and reinforces them by high considerations of practical utility.
In regard, however, to the larger question, the removal of women’s disabilities -- their recognition as the equals of men in all that belongs to citizenship -- the opening to them of all honourable employments, and of the training and education which qualifies for those employments -- there are many persons for whom it is not enough that the inequality has no just or legitimate defence.
And here let me notice the singular way in which the question of women’s disabilities is frequently presented to view, by those who find it easier to draw a ludicrous picture of what they do not like, than to answer the arguments for it.
Indeed, she was fascinated that Harry, with such severe disabilities, could function well enough to play the gracious host to unexpected visitors.
Hell, everyone thinks a cripple is a little strange anyway-strange in the head, I mean-they equate physical disabilities with mental disabilities at least a little, at least subconsciously.
In the end my disabilities have led me to appreciate and love life more.
I had quite a good pension for my disabilities, and the promise of wooden legs as I needed them, and of course my annual $50 that went with the V.
Indeed, if people think of disabilities as literally God-given, then waiting by the pool is the only reasonable response.
Some day, and Heaven send that day soon, we shall be horrified at the thought that a vast number of unfortunates exist among us who, demanding our pity and our care, are going down to the grave without that care to which their physical disabilities entitle them.
Some of the sweetest, cleverest, bravest men I know suffer from great physical disabilities, but they have pleasures and compensations, they live useful lives, their compensations have produced light and sweetness, they are not useless in a busy world, they are not mere cumberers of the ground.
Because real epileptics are so common in the underworld, and their sufferings so palpable and striking, that parasites, even though afflicted themselves, nay, because of their own disabilities, can and do simulate the weird sufferings of epileptics.