The Collaborative International Dictionary
Signify \Sig"ni*fy\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Signified; p. pr. & vb. n. Signifying.] [F. signifier, L. significare; signum a sign + -ficare (in comp.) to make. See Sign, n., and -fy.]
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To show by a sign; to communicate by any conventional token, as words, gestures, signals, or the like; to announce; to make known; to declare; to express; as, a signified his desire to be present.
I 'll to the king; and signify to him That thus I have resign'd my charge to you.
--Shak.The government should signify to the Protestants of Ireland that want of silver is not to be remedied.
--Swift. -
To mean; to import; to denote; to betoken.
He bade her tell him what it signified.
--Chaucer.A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
--Shak.Note: Signify is often used impersonally; as, it signifies nothing, it does not signify, that is, it is of no importance.
Syn: To express; manifest; declare; utter; intimate; betoken; denote; imply; mean.
Wiktionary
vb. (present participle of signify English)
Usage examples of "signifying".
Saxifrage tribe, this generic term Ribes being applied to all fresh currants, as of Arabian origin, and signifying acidity.
Therefore whatever belongs to the Divine and to the human nature can be attributed to that Person: both when a word is employed to stand for it, signifying the Divine Nature, and when a word is used signifying the human nature.
To keep a spatial metaphor, the approximative character of which I have already stressed, I shall say that the signification of the myth is constituted by a sort of constantly moving turnstile which presents alternately the meaning of the signifier and its form, a language-object and a metalanguage, a purely signifying and a purely imagining consciousness.
When different forms cannot come together in one suppositum, the proposition is necessarily in remote matter, the subject signifying one form and the predicate another.
Nevertheless, if on the part of the subject there is added some word signifying human nature in the abstract, it might be taken in this way for the subject of the making, e.
Hebrew tongue: which applies the term signifying woman to those of the female sex who are virgins.
From their very nature sensible things have a certain aptitude for the signifying of spiritual effects: but this aptitude is fixed by the Divine institution to some special signification.
Nebros, which was substituted by the Greeks for Nimrod, signifying a fawn, gave occasion to many allusions about a fawn, and fawn-skin, in the Dionusiaca, and other mysteries.
Le Clerc, who takes this idol for the Sun, from Comosha, a root, in the same tongue, signifying to be swift.
From a notion however of Adama signifying Adam, a story prevailed that he was buried at Damascus.
The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which, far from disguising, he emphasizes and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle.
It is a brief history of cosmos, bios, psyche, theosa tale told by an idiot, it goes without saying, but a tale that, precisely in signifying Nothing, signifies the All, and there is the sound and the fury.
They have perceptible existence in themselves apart from signifying, but they are also instruments for functioning in that way.
The term Dock is botanically a noun of multitude, meaning originally a bundle of hemp, and corresponding to a similar word signifying a flock.
The term Sloe, or Sla, means not the fruit but the hard trunk, being connected with a verb signifying to slay, or strike, probably because the wood of this tree was used as a flail, and nowadays makes a bludgeon.