All 6 Uses of
contract
in
Gulliver's Travels
- It is allowed, that senates and great councils are often troubled with redundant, ebullient, and other peccant humours; with many diseases of the head, and more of the heart; with strong convulsions, with grievous contractions of the nerves and sinews in both hands, but especially the right; with spleen, flatus, vertigos, and deliriums; with scrofulous tumours, full of fetid purulent matter; with sour frothy ructations: with canine appetites, and crudeness of digestion, besides many others, needless to mention.†
Chpt 3 *
- The heat I had contracted by coming very near the flames, and by labouring to quench them, made the wine begin to operate by urine; which I voided in such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished, and the rest of that noble pile, which had cost so many ages in erecting, preserved from destruction.†
Chpt 1
- that, as soon as years will permit, they consume their vigour, and contract odious diseases among lewd females;†
Chpt 4 *
- I had not yet been a year in this country before I contracted such a love and veneration for the inhabitants, that I entered on a firm resolution never to return to humankind, but to pass the rest of my life among these admirable Houyhnhnms, in the contemplation and practice of every virtue, where I could have no example or incitement to vice.†
Chpt 4
- I did indeed observe that the Yahoos were the only animals in this country subject to any diseases; which, however, were much fewer than horses have among us, and contracted, not by any ill-treatment they meet with, but by the nastiness and greediness of that sordid brute.†
Chpt 4
- The first money I laid out was to buy two young stone-horses, which I keep in a good stable; and next to them, the groom is my greatest favourite, for I feel my spirits revived by the smell he contracts in the stable.†
Chpt 4
Definitions:
-
(1)
(contract as in: legal contract) an agreement - typically written and enforceable by law
-
(2)
(contract as in: contract the disease) to get -- especially in reference to a disease
-
(3)
(contract as in: the metal contracted) when something gets shorter or smaller
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(4)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
A grammatical sense of the word form contraction describes can't as a shortened form of can not.