Word Finder - absurd

definition

An absurdity.

definition

(often preceded by the) The opposition between the human search for meaning in life and the inability to find any; the state or condition in which man exists in an irrational universe and his life has no meaning outside of his existence.

definition

Contrary to reason or propriety; obviously and flatly opposed to manifest truth; inconsistent with the plain dictates of common sense; logically contradictory; nonsensical; ridiculous; silly.

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Inharmonious; dissonant.

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Having no rational or orderly relationship to people's lives; meaningless; lacking order or value.

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Dealing with absurdism.

It had an absurd ritual and a strange uniform.

I'm curious, and it's absurd I'm not allowed to talk to anyone!

He is a most absent-minded and absurd fellow, but he has a heart of gold.

The idea was absurd, even for someone as chauvinistic as Romas.

Leaning back against the counter, she laughed out loud at her absurd thought.

How perfectly absurd to say that Helen is 'already talking fluently!'

Nearly every mail brings some absurd statement, printed or written.

The source of this equally absurd and infamous libel has never been discovered.

Oh, how absurd you are!

But it would be absurd to suppose that we could reach those conclusions by simple reference to the trades themselves.

For absurd and impracticable schemes in Italy and elsewhere he neglected Germany, and sought to involve its princes in wars undertaken solely for private aggrandizement or personal jealousy.

A perfectly absurd and stupid fellow, and a gambler too, I am told.

After Palmerston's enforced resignation, there was a new and more absurd hubbub.

The same may be said of the many, often absurd, accusations subsequently brought against him by jealous rivals or ignorant contemporaries who hated Godunov's reforms as novelties.

The distance of Constantinople from Vienna and the obstinacy of the sultan would probably have prevented a settlement, but the return of Napoleon rendered all such proposals almost absurd, and the scheme was dropped.

Nor is it at all absurd to suppose that,long after he began the Meteorologica, Aristotle himself added the preface in the process of gathering his general treatises on natural science into a system.

If this sounds absurd, at present it is—but in the future, the price of technologies to do this will fall to nearly zero.

In other words, if a business deduction seems absurd, it probably is.

All men may perhaps be aiming everywhere at the same moral ideal,' but it is absurd to.

The whole field of labour and contracts was covered by minute regulations, which, good in theory, were absurd in practice, and which failed altogether, but not until labour had been disorganized for several years.

Then came the passing by the Convention on the 3rd of May 1793 of the absurd "maximum."

It may be convenient to use the terms "vitality" and "vital force" to denote the causes of certain great groups of natural operations, as we employ the names of "electricity" and "electrical force" to denote others; but it ceases to be proper to do so, if such a name implies the absurd assumption that "electricity" and "vitality" are entities playing the part of efficient causes of electrical or vital phenomena.

Of a scepticism which professes to doubt the validity of every reasoning process and every operation of all our faculties it is, of course, as impossible as it would be absurd to offer any refutation.

One of the most remarkable results of the European intervention in the Boxer rising in China (I goo) was the absurd price paid for so-called "loot" of furs, particularly in mandarins' coats of dyed and natural fox skins and pieces, and natural ermine, poor in quality and yellowish in colour; from three to ten times their value was paid for them when at the same time huge parcels of similar quality were warehoused in the London docks, because purchasers could not be found for them.

A note by Cyril Lucar states that it was written by Thecla, a noble lady of Egypt, but this is probably merely his interpretation of an Arabic note of the 14th century which states that the MS. was written by Thecla, the martyr, an obviously absurd legend; another Arabic note by Athanasius (probably Athanasius III., patriarch c. 1308) states that it was given to the patriarchate of Alexandria, and a Latin note of a later period dates the presenta tion in 1098.

To suppose this preface, presupposing many sciences, to have been written in 356, when the Meteorologica had been already commenced, would be absurd; but equally absurd would it be to reject that date on account of the preface, which even a modern author often writes long after his book.

Now it is not likely that Aristotle either, after having so often identified pleasure with activity, would say that the identification is absurd though it appears true to some persons, of whom he would in that case be one, or, having once disengaged the pleasure of perceiving and thinking from the acts of perceiving and thinking, would go backwards and confuse them.

It is absurd to make this document responsible for the introduction of the bloody persecution of witches; for, according to the Sachsenspiegel, the civil law already punished sorcery with death.

To' this use has been attached the absurd origin from "ne ' god," the words in which, according to the 12th century chronicle, Rollo, duke of the Normans, refused to kiss the foot of Charles III., the Simple, king of the West Franks.

The prejudices which he brought up to London were scarcely less absurd than those of his own Tom Tempest.

Though alarmed by the revolutionary agitation in Germany, which culminated in the murder of his agent, the dramatist Kotzebue, Alexander approved of Castlereagh's protest against Metternich's policy of " the governments contracting an alliance against the peoples," as formulated in the Carlsbad decrees, 1819, and deprecated any intervention of Europe to support " a league of which the sole object is the absurd pretensions of absolute power."

When two thinkers of such eminence (probably the two greatest ethical thinkers of antiquity) have arrived independently at this strange"--conclusion, have agreed in ascribing to cravings, felt in this life, so great, and to us so inconceivable, a power over the future life, we may well hesitate before we condemn the idea as intrinsically absurd, and we may take note of the important fact that, given similar conditions, similar stages in the development of religious belief, men's thoughts, even in spite of the most unquestioned individual originality, tend though they may never produce exactly the same results, to work in similar ways.

The stories of his having swooned after signing the brief, and of having lost hope and even reason, are too absurd to be entertained.

Compared with the results of English or Dutch colonization the conversion and civilization of the Filipinos is a most remarkable achievement s Notwithstanding the undeniable vices, follies and absurd illiberalities of the Spanish colonial regime, the Philippines were the only group in the East Indies that improved in civilization in the three centuries following their discovery.

On the other hand, it would be absurd to imagine that the combats with Grendel and his mother and with the fiery dragon can be exaggerated representations of actual occurrences.

It is obviously absurd, in the face of the foregoing facts, to regard it as the end of a middle age in anything but in its own field.

I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.

If you are suffering from heartbreak, the technical challenge of a haiku can sometimes shake you out of your feelings long enough to let you focus on the positive, even the absurd.

Of Christianity he can have been able to learn very little, even in Medina; as may be seen from the absurd travesty of the institution of the Eucharist in v.

Every one who takes up the book in the proper religious frame of mind, like most of the Moslems, reads pieces directed against long-obsolete absurd customs of Mecca just as devoutly as the weightiest moral precepts - perhaps even more devoutly, because he does not understand them so well.

The middle ages had been satisfied with absurd and visionary notions about the world around them, while the body of man was regarded with too much suspicion to be studied.

It was absurd to expect foreign nations to deal with a second-rate man as commander-in-chief while Washington was in the field, and he seems to have had no further trouble of this kind.

This, together with the fact that over the altar of his private chapel at Bristol he had a cross of white marble, gave rise to an absurd rumour that the bishop had too great a leaning towards Romanism.

In laying the foundations of a science of ancient chronology he relied sometimes upon groundless, sometimes even upon absurd hypotheses, frequently upon an imperfect induction of facts.

It is thus absurd to speak of a " Portuguese conquest of India "; in a land campaign they would have been outnumbered and destroyed by the armies of any one of the greater Indian states.

The nauseous taste repelled even the self-sacrificing industry of Burnouf, when he found the later Tantra books to be as immoral as they are absurd.

Apart from this extravagant eulogy, it is absurd to regard Apollonius merely as a vulgar charlatan and miracle-monger.

There was also a considerable amount of new legislatiofl with the object of protecting the minor subjects of the crown, and the system of trial by jurors was advanced to the detriment of the absurd old practices of trial by ordeal and trial by wager of battle.

It would have been absurd to declare that his rule was tyrannical or his policy disastrous.

His chosen instruments were two men whom his enemies called his favorites, though it was absurd to apply the name either to an elderly statesman like Michael de la Pole, who was made chancellor in 1384, or to Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, a young noble of the oldest lineage, who was the kings other confidant.