Crossword clues for impotence
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Impotence \Im"po*tence\, Impotency \Im"po*ten*cy\, n. [L. impotenia inability, poverty, lack of moderation. See Impotent.]
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The quality or condition of being impotent; lack of strength or power, animal, intellectual, or moral; weakness; feebleness; inability; imbecility.
Some were poor by impotency of nature; as young fatherless children, old decrepit persons, idiots, and cripples.
--Hayward.O, impotence of mind in body strong!
--Milton. Lack of self-restraint or self-control. [R.]
--Milton.(Law & Med.) Lack of procreative power; inability to copulate, or beget children; also, sometimes, sterility; barrenness; specifically, in males: the inability to achieve or sustain a penile erection; erectile dysfunction.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
early 15c., "physical weakness," also "poverty," from Middle French impotence "weakness," from Latin impotentia "lack of control or power," from impotentem (nominative impotens); see impotent. In reference to a want of (male) sexual potency, from c.1500. The figurative senses of the word in Latin were "violence, fury, unbridled passion." Related: Impotency.
Wiktionary
n. 1 powerlessness. 2 Inability to copulate or beget children; sterility, erectile dysfunction, etc.
WordNet
n. the quality of lacking strength or power; being weak and feeble [syn: powerlessness, impotency] [ant: power, power]
an inability (usually of a male) to copulate [syn: impotency]
Usage examples of "impotence".
They clung to their quaint customs and to their own little god, Adonai, despite his impotence before Marduk.
Sometimes Fila used to tint it for her with extract of camomile, but now she has become fond of this brush of whitewash on her mass of fair hair, a touch of frivolity above a face slackened by impotence.
GENERAL NEURASTHENIA, or nervous exhaustion, may also produce a local weakness of the sexual centres of the brain and spinal cord, with symptoms at least resembling those of partial impotency and great irritability of the sexual organs, or a complete impotence, with premature seminal discharge whenever coition is attempted.
Some, zestfully proclaiming the futility of the cosmos and the impotence of man, cherished their own calm or heroic emotions, and deployed their cloak of fortitude and flowing rhetoric, mannequins even on the steps of the scaffold.
The main side effect, for men, is that prolonged or heavy work in the matrixes temporarily closes off the channels to sex, and the man undergoes a prolonged period of impotence.
I had not been able to close an eye, and on finding me in the same state of impotence as before.
Posterity will class me amongst the Zoiluses whose own impotence made them attack this great man to whom civilization and human happiness owe so much.
Leonilda gave him a vivid description of our nocturnal labours, but in his unhappy state of impotence he must have been thankful for his absence.
She began to get angry when I tried to convince her rather too forcibly that my misfortune was not due to my want of will, and then she blamed herself as the cause of my impotence.
To demonstrate the government's impotence, to blind its eyes among the populace, and to leave a vacuum the insurgents' political apparatus could fill.
I did not see my life pass before my eyes, but rather saw the sum of my life imprinted upon that unimportant landscape, and understood that in this cunning design with its drear prospect and trivial monster, all the wastage and impotence of my days, all my misused intellect and defrauded ambitions, all my torpid compulsions and arousals, all my puerile dreams and dissipated hopes and contemptible passions had found their proper resolution.
Gillings exploded from his chair with all the frustrated astonished exasperated impotence of the strong man suddenly discovering himself in an untenable position.
I would bind myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric--brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.
A long time ago, memories of the way he had been manipulated by Breel, of his own impotence in that ancient situation, had brought Rom great pain.
Sometimes she would wait a week, or even two, until, blind with rage at his own impotence and the caducity of his passion, he would repeat the old cry, "She isn't minel Tell me, or I'll throttle it out of you.