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Climacteric   Listen
noun
Climacteric  n.  
1.
A period in human life in which some great change is supposed to take place in the constitution. The critical periods are thought by some to be the years produced by multiplying 7 into the odd numbers 3, 5, 7, and 9; to which others add the 81st year.
2.
Any critical period. "It is your lot, as it was mine, to live during one of the grand climacterics of the world."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Climacteric" Quotes from Famous Books



... resemble reality while nothing must be demonstrably matter of fact. The appearance of famous personages must be occasional, after the manner of gods in an epic poem; they must not be, as formerly, the leading characters and chief actors in the drama. And great battles, instead of marking the grand climacteric of a story's development, were now merely traversed, so to speak, on their outskirts, or were only approached near enough to throw a glowing sidelight on certain groups and situations. The gradual adoption of these limitations may be ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... stands plum' still, an' ag'in hit gits to pitchin'." The hired man must have been touching up mean whiskey himself. Meanwhile, Mart seemed to be having spells of troubled slumber. He would snore gently, accentuate said snore with a sudden quiver of his body and then wake up with a climacteric snort and start that would shake the bed. This was repeated several times, and I began to think of the unfortunate Tom who was "fitified." Mart seemed on the verge of a fit himself, and I waited ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.

... a period subsequent to the analysis presented here, some work on fifth-decade insanities had been completed, and the delusional features constantly found in the functional cases of insanity developing at the climacteric, entered to modify our general ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... statement that no literary training is required by the student of photoplay writing is true. Provided he is gifted with an imaginative mind and the native ability to see how an idea or a plot-germ would evolve itself into a climacteric and coherent story, and provided he has the dramatic sense, he can actually learn the rules of construction and produce salable photoplays even if he has by no means the literary ability to write a salable short-story. But he must be a person of ideas—no ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... proofs were open to all, and no response was needed from him. He may have been sorely tempted to reply, but I am apt to believe that the rumors that reached him from abroad and at home did not then affect him as they might have done earlier. He was at his grand climacteric, he had passed his sixty-third year, his temper was less hasty than it had been in his youth, and his nerves had not yet received the severe strain from whose effects he suffered during the last years ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden

... Ditmar's life certain events which, in his anecdotal moods, were magnified into matters of climacteric importance; high, festal occasions on which it was sweet to reminisce, such as his visit as Delegate at Large to that Chicago Convention. He had travelled on a special train stocked with cigars and White Seal champagne, in the company of senators and congressmen and ex-governors, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... carriage he continued to me: "O yes, a nurse or patient may break that rule, or almost any rule, and the patient may live. I had a patient, left alone for a moment on the climacteric day, who was found standing at her mirror combing her hair, and to-day she's as well as you or I. I had another who got out of bed, walked down a corridor, fell face downward and lay insensible at the crack of a doorsill with the rain blowing in on him ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable

... taken place in England since I began to breathe the breath of life, a period amounting to over eighty years. Gas was unknown; I groped about the streets of London in the all but utter darkness of a twinkling oil lamp, under the protection of watchmen in their grand climacteric, and exposed to every species of degradation and insult. I have been nine hours in sailing from Dover to Calais, before the invention of steam. It took me nine hours to go from Taunton to Bath, before the invention of railroads; and I now go in six hours from Taunton to ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... was a tough old monk of Exeter; since such a present to a nobleman, now in his grand climacteric, would hardly have been worth the carriage. With the reduction of this stronghold of the Maxwellsse, em to have concluded the Baron's military services; as on the very first day of the fourteenth century we find him once ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various

... senator from Fraser had changed in the years that had passed since the beginning of their acquaintance. Bassett had outwardly altered little as he crossed the watershed of middle life; but it seemed to Dan that the ill-temper he had manifested in the Thatcher affair had marked a climacteric. The self-control and restraint that had so impressed him at first had visibly diminished. What Harwood had taken for steel seemed to him now only ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... in the sixty-third, or what is called the grand climacteric year of life;—had the blessing to retain the use of all his senses to the last; and as death had long before assailed, though not totally vanquished him, he was too much decayed by continual wastings, to feel any of those pangs, which persons who die in their full ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood

... stoop prematurely. If indeed we could put young hearts into old bodies occasionally, we might do some good; or if there could ever be combined in some fortunate individual, throughout his life, the good qualities peculiar to each successive climacteric; if we could mix just enough of the acid and the bitter, which are apt to predominate so unhappily after a long rubbing through the world, to qualify the fiery spirit of youth, and prevent its sweetness from cloying, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various

... have cause to rejoice in the fullness of the year. Above the ground she stores it in drupe and pome and berry, nut and nutlet and achene, and below the ground in rootstock and rhizome, corm and tuber, pumping them full with strokes quick and strong in these grand climacteric days of the summer. All the water which seemed so useless in April, all the rain which seemed so superfluous and so dreary in May and June, has been used. Not a drop of it was wasted. Its office was to feed life, to dissolve the substances ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... either over-arduous or a bit sleepy during the first stages of rehearsing a new composition, and makes a wrong entrance, perhaps during a pause just before the climacteric point. The occurrence is really funny and the other performers are inclined to smile or snicker, but our serious conductor quells the outbreak with a scowl. The humorous leader, on the other hand, sees the ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens

... seniority; epoch, period, time; century; eon; climacteric; old age, dotage, senescence, senility, decrepitude, superannuation; longevity. Associated Words: nostology, geratology, geromorphism, coetaneous, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... painless achievement of fresh knowledge is a pleasant thing. Madame Zattiany went on patiently: "These glands in my case had undergone a natural process of exhaustion. In women the slower functioning of the endocrines is coincident with the climacteric, as they have been dependent for stimulation upon certain ovarian cells. The idea involved is that the stimulation of these exhausted cells would cause the other glands to function once more at full strength and a certain rejuvenation ensue as ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... other. I have seen a youthful beau kiss, with perfect devotion, a ball of cotton dropped from the hand of a lady who was knitting stockings for her grand-children. Another pays his court to a belle in her climacteric, by bringing gimblettes [A sort of gingerbread.] to the favourite lap-dog, or attending, with great assiduity, the egresses and regresses of her angola, who paces slowly out of the room ten times in an hour, while the door is held open ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady

... has not destined the peoples of the earth to the melancholy fate of China. The climacteric of the present stage of progress is rapidly approaching, is even now touching with its finger the startled nations. When it shall have passed, the world will enter upon the third and final stage of civil progress, in which the organized power, social order, moral grandeur, religious unity, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... dangerously powerful narcotic. Something like this is that potent drug in Nature's pharmacopoeia which she reserves for the time of need,—the later stages of life. She commonly begins administering it at about the time of the "grand climacteric," the ninth septennial period, the sixty-third year. More and more freely she gives it, as the years go on, to her grey-haired children, until, if they last long enough, every faculty is benumbed, and they drop off quietly into sleep under its ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... it, that "it made one long to grow old";[1] but Montaigne was a Frenchman, and such sentiment was quite in his way. The dialogue, whether it produce this effect on many readers or not, is very pleasant reading: and when we remember that the author wrote it when he was exactly in his grand climacteric, and addressed it to his friend Atticus, who was within a year of the same age, we get that element of personal interest which makes all writings of the kind more attractive. The argument in defence of the paradox that it is a good thing ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins

... rich, or socially sought after, he can find, as I did, plenty of time in which to look around him and enjoy the scene. That exhilaration, that luxury of leisurely circumspection may never return, or only, as happily in my own case, with the grand climacteric. Once more I see and enjoy the gorgeous drama by ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... and from the disasters to or the successes of our national fame. Hence to himself and to his friends, more than to the watchful public even, Mr. Seward's course attracts an interest which may attend upon the very climacteric excellence of his statesman-career ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... those who feel that female dignity is compromised by it, I have here omitted a woman's flippant overestimate of the number of women in London society who suffer from nervous disorders at the climacteric [i.e. menopause]. ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright

... p.290. Another correspondent writes:—During 1849 the Morning Chronicle has completed its 81st year; next in seniority stands the Morning Post, at 77; and the Morning Herald, at 65. The Times in the numbering of its days, is in its 64th year, but has not really reached its grand climacteric, for its three years of infancy passed under the name of The Universal Register, it having only received its present appellation in the opening of 1788. The Morning Advertiser is wearing away ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.01 • Various

... been to, Yet more minute and vivid than remembrance, Of boyhood homes, sail between sleep and waking Like some mirage, refuting all experience With topsy-turvy ships, That steals by in dead calms through tropic haze: And many a man in his climacteric years, Thoughts and remembered words have roused from sleep With knowledge that he lacked on lying down: And I, lapped in a trance of reverie, doubt Some spore of episodes Anterior far beyond this body's birth, Dispersed like puffs of dust impalpable, Wind-carried ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various



Words linked to "Climacteric" :   biological time, menopause



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