Crossword clues for privy
privy
- Once secret little room
- Public relations girl for the ladies?
- Aware of
- Where you might go
- Secret — loo
- Old outhouse
- Involved in, with "to"
- In on, with ''to''
- Certain kind of council
- -- to (in on)
- Cabinet member
- Solver rapidly worked out “senior cabinet minister”
- Peer over lavatory, close, to see senior minister
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Privy \Priv"y\, n.; pl. Privies.
(Law) A partaker; a person having an interest in any action or thing; one who has an interest in an estate created by another; a person having an interest derived from a contract or conveyance to which he is not himself a party. The term, in its proper sense, is distinguished from party.
--Burrill.
--Wharton.A necessary house or place for performing excretory functions in private; an outhouse; a backhouse.
Privy \Priv"y\, a. [F. priv['e], fr. L. privatus. See Private.]
Of or pertaining to some person exclusively; assigned to private uses; not public; private; as, the privy purse. `` Privee knights and squires.''
--Chaucer.Secret; clandestine. `` A privee thief.''
--Chaucer.Appropriated to retirement; private; not open to the public. `` Privy chambers.''
--Ezek. xxi. 1-
4. Admitted to knowledge of a secret transaction; secretly cognizant; privately knowing.
His wife also being privy to it.
--Acts v. 2.Myself am one made privy to the plot.
--Shak.Privy chamber, a private apartment in a royal residence.
Privy council (Eng. Law), the principal council of the sovereign, composed of the cabinet ministers and other persons chosen by the king or queen.
--Burrill.Privy councilor, a member of the privy council.
Privy purse, moneys set apart for the personal use of the monarch; also, the title of the person having charge of these moneys. [Eng.]
--Macaulay.Privy seal or Privy signet, the seal which the king uses in grants, etc., which are to pass the great seal, or which he uses in matters of subordinate consequence which do not require the great seal; also, elliptically, the principal secretary of state, or person intrusted with the privy seal. [Eng.]
Privy verdict, a verdict given privily to the judge out of court; -- now disused.
--Burrill.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"private," early 13c., from Old French privé "friendly, intimate; a private place," from Latin privatus "private, personal" (see private (adj.)). Meaning "participating in (a secret)" (usually with to) is attested from late 14c. Related: Privily. Privy Council is from c.1300 in a general sense; specifically of the British government, first attested late 14c., as consaile priue. Privy member "organ of sex" is from late 13c.
"toilet," c.1200, from Old French privé, privee "latrine," literally "private place," from noun use of adjective privé (see privy (adj.)).
Wiktionary
a. 1 (context now chiefly historical English) private, exclusive; not public; one's own. 2 (context now rare archaic English) secret, hidden, concealed. 3 With knowledge of; party to; let in on. n. 1 An outdoor toilet; latrine; earth closet; john; johnny house. 2 (context legal English) A partaker; one having an interest in an action, contract, etc. to which he is not himself a party.
WordNet
Wikipedia
A privy is an old-fashioned term for an outdoor toilet, often known as an outhouse and by many other names. Privy may also refer to:
- Privy council, a body that advises the head of state
- Privy mark, a small mark in the design of a coin
- Privy Purse, the British sovereign's private income
Usage examples of "privy".
What becomes, think you, of the braw commission of the Privy Council that Chasehope had the procuring of?
Thomas Cromwell, then lord privy seal, a design for a similar Burse to be erected in London.
Not being privy to the inner workings of the Mandarinate, he could not guess its nature.
I quite forgot the snake in the privy, the pig in the pantry, and the Indian in the corncrib, absorbed in the rush of water past my legs, the wet, cold touch of stems and the breath of aromatic leaves.
Too few are privy to the fact that the greatest danger any good preservationist may face lies within the borders of Britain herself.
Gaunt had made him privy to the unlocked data back on the Absalom, and Mkoll had studied and restudied the schematics carefully.
Lyonette de Trevalion proposed that Solaine draft orders to the Akkadian ambassador, stamped with the Privy Seal, to string along the Khalif with false promises until he ceded rights to the island of Cythera.
His King paid for it from the Privy Purse, but he supplemented his income by giving undergrad lectures.
An unenclosed two-hole privy sat in regal isolation marked by a trail through the high grass and weeds.
The larch trees with their broken backs, the enormous black sky streaked with fistfuls of congealed fat, the abandoned Poor House that looked like a barn, the great brown dripping box of the Lutheran church bereft of sour souls, bereft of the hymn singers with poke bonnets and sunken and accusing horse faces and dreary choruses, a few weather-beaten cottages unlighted and tight to the dawn and filled, I could see at a glance, with the marvelous dry morality of calico and beans and lard, and then a privy, a blackened pile of tin cans, and even a rooster, a single live rooster strutting in a patch of weeds and losing his broken feathers, clutching his wattles, every moment or two trying to crow into the wind, trying to grub up the head of a worm with one of his snubbed-off claws, cankerous little bloodshot rooster pecking away at the dawn in the empty yard of some dead fisherman .
No longer did barnyards offer sites as rich as the ancient gift of the Nile, no longer was the countryside studded with beneficently unscreened privies, no longer did innumerable slums offer their choice piles of garbage and filth.
It was on the 29th of January that the subject of the Bostonian petition was brought before the privy council.
Then we wait, and when Bragg comes down to use the privy, we move in close and take him.
He glanced at Euler, and the latter nodded back, as if the two shared a secret to which I was not yet privy.
The very fact that the Renunciates had arrived, and that Domenic had not been told to return to Comyn Castle after his night away suggested that there was something going on to which Herm was not privy.