The Collaborative International Dictionary
Possession \Pos*ses"sion\, n. [F. possession, L. possessio.]
The act or state of possessing, or holding as one's own.
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(Law) The having, holding, or detention of property in one's power or command; actual seizin or occupancy; ownership, whether rightful or wrongful.
Note: Possession may be either actual or constructive; actual, when a party has the immediate occupancy; constructive, when he has only the right to such occupancy.
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The thing possessed; that which any one occupies, owns, or controls; in the plural, property in the aggregate; wealth; dominion; as, foreign possessions. When the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. --Matt. xix. 22. Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession. --Acts v.
The house of Jacob shall possess their possessions.
--Ob. 17.
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The state of being possessed or controlled, as by an evil spirit, or violent passions; madness; frenzy; as, demoniacal possession. How long hath this possession held the man? --Shak. To give possession, to put in another's power or occupancy. To put in possession.
To invest with ownership or occupancy; to provide or furnish with; as, to put one in possession of facts or information.
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(Law) To place one in charge of property recovered in ejectment or writ of entry.
To take possession, to enter upon, or to bring within one's power or occupancy.
Writ of possession (Law), a precept directing a sheriff to put a person in peaceable possession of property recovered in ejectment or writ of entry.
Usage examples of "to take possession".
That was when the Eye of the Beholder knew that it had found its ideal mate and merged itself into my body, so as to take possession of the soul as well.
The girl's face softened, and a smile threatened to take possession of her mouth.
Time went spinning backward even further, all the way back to that moment in the drawing room when she and the children had first learned that Sterling Harlow planned to take possession of their home.
Nothing came straight, but horror and wrath began to take possession of him.
Confederate Lieutenant Colonel John Robert Baylor exploited the Union's weakened position to take possession of Arizona Territory for the Confederacy.
When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than yourselves, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them.
His rabid and morbid hate of Jorth had eaten into his heart to take possession there, like the parasite that battened upon the life of its victim.
At this Ismail flew into a passion and vowed revenge against his powerful subject, who, to save himself, wrote to Da Cunha, professing his unalloyed friendship for the Portuguese, and inviting them to take possession of certain tracts on the mainland.
The money was secured by a mortgage on Evelyn's grandmother's house, and the True Blue Bonds Bail Agency wants to take possession of the house.
He saw himself returning, with some plausible story of his wanderings, to take possession of the wealth which was his--saw himself living once more, rich, free, and respected, in the world from which he had been so long an exile.
Settlements were offered to the Goths in Lombardy, and they advanced from the Po towards the Alps to take possession of them.