(v. i.) To hold one's self aloof; to forbear or refrain voluntarily, and especially from an indulgence of the passions or appetites; -- with from.
(v. t.) To hinder; to withhold.
Example Sentences:
(1) Also critical to Mr Smith's victory was the decision over lunch of the MSF technical union's delegation to abstain on the rule changes.
(2) Abstainer rates in the total population controlled for treatment decreased with increasing WPY (P less than 0.005).
(3) The adjusted odds ratio of having one or more hospitalization for current drinkers relative to life-long abstainers in females was 0.67 (95 per cent confidence interval 0.57-0.79) and in males was 0.74 (0.57-0.96).
(4) Britain and France formally announced this week they would abstain, along with Portugal and Bosnia.
(5) Although close to 50% of this sample were abstainers, 11% of the drinkers were found to be heavy drinkers, averaging more than two drinks daily, while 18% were high-maximum drinkers, consuming at least five drinks on an occasion prior to pregnancy.
(6) Compared to abstainers, the heaviest drinkers had the highest systolic (JM, p = 0.001; WM, p less than 0.01) and diastolic (JM, p less than 0.002; WM, p less than 0.05) blood pressures.
(7) The Labour leadership is understood to be pressing for its MPs to abstain on the grounds that the party’s policy is under review and the real vote on Trident will come in the decisive “main gate” decision on renewal next year.
(8) But the prime minister failed to win the support of more than half of his 303 MPs after 136 Tories rejected the measure and around 40 Tory MPs either did not vote or actively abstained.
(9) 36% of the group had abstained from further drug taking, 27% were taking them periodically, 32% had to be treated again and 5% had deteriorated (trend towards invalidism).
(10) Their occurrence rules out any organic involvement almost with certainty, and allows abstaining from additional examinations, or keeping them within minimum limits.
(11) They all abstain from social media for fear of getting embroiled in some brouhaha.
(12) Heidi Allen, the Conservative MP for South Cambridgeshire, abstained in last week’s vote but said she and others would defy the party whip if concessions were not offered.
(13) Fourteen months later, 41 subjects (41%) were classified as resumers; 62 (59%) were abstainers.
(14) This finding indicates that many young people exaggerate the risk of losing status among their peers because they abstain from drinking.
(15) At their explosive 80-minute meeting, the union's delegates - who hold 4.5 per cent of the vote - voted by 19-17 to abstain because the OMOV rule change included a further measure promoting more women MPs, one of the union's longstanding causes.
(16) All subjects had been instructed to abstain from smoking for at least 10 h before and during the examination.
(17) The CDC and other health agencies have been operating for months on the assumption that Zika causes brain defects, and they have been warning pregnant women to use mosquito repellent, avoid travel to Zika-stricken regions and either abstain from sex or rely on condoms.
(18) On same-sex marriage, Leadsom said she supported partnerships between gay couples but had reservations about the legislation that led her to abstain during the parliamentary vote.
(19) The salivary cotinine concentration after 1 week in 60 abstainers was 183 ng.ml-1.
(20) Never smoking abstainers die at about the same rate as never smoking moderate drinkers.
Drunkard
Definition:
(n.) One who habitually drinks strong liquors immoderately; one whose habit it is to get drunk; a toper; a sot.
Example Sentences:
(1) To crush any residual affinity for the monarchy, British propaganda against Thibaw “went into high gear”, said Thant Mtint-U, painting the monarch as an ogre, despot and drunkard.
(2) Then last week Erdogan defended his anti-alcohol legislation by obliquely calling Ataturk and his closest ally, Ismet Inonu, a couple of "drunkards".
(3) Their politicians dance like drunkards along the cliff's edge of default.
(4) Many of the practices and beliefs of the Washingtonian Total Abstinence Movement were adopted by reformatory homes for "drunkards" that were established in Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia in the mid-1800s.
(5) During her trial, which cost £100,000, Sherwood spent 20 hours in the witness box defending herself against accusations of being a liar, a drunkard and a bad mother.
(6) The leader of Karachi’s dominant political party has been accused by a respected former mayor of being an Indian agent and a dictatorial drunkard who has mismanaged the affairs of Pakistan’s biggest city from his base in north London.
(7) Society's reactions towards these perceived "alcoholics" are class specific: the lower classes are identified as "drunkards" and dealt with through public welfare and control, while the middle and upper classes as well as the newly appearing women alcoholics, are perceived as being ill and sent for medical or psychiatric treatment.
(8) He paid as much attention to the floorboards or the tangle of buddleia in the yard below as he would to a woman's belly, Leigh Bowery's feminine bulk, Bruce Bernard's stoic drunkard's poise, Lord Goodman's vanity, Sue the Benefits Supervisor's affected boredom.
(9) You can feel her curves beneath you as you move, and if you’re still you can feel her sway and vibrate like a drunkard.
(10) "Mergers of equals tend to be the two drunkards being propped up by the lamp-post.
(11) Received wisdom pours out the usual litany: random mutations, catastrophic mass extinctions and other mega-disasters, super-virulent microbes all ensure that the drunkard's walk is a linear process in comparison to the ceaseless lurching seen in the history of life.
(12) By contrast, North, the priest and “establishment humanitarian” character (tellingly also a “confirmed drunkard”, or by today’s lax standards, a hipster epicure) fails in his pledge to save Kirkland from the lash.
(13) Eschewing the conventional two-handed mode, he instead came out with one fist like a drunkard windmilling at a rival in an alley.
(14) Gambling away his savings, Grant – a "clever bloke" who thinks he can only be happy in English exile – becomes trapped among the kind of chauvinistic, philistine drunkards he affects to despise, yet slowly he begins to emulate them.
(15) The reparative changes in neurons and interneuronal connections revealed suppose possible reversibility of the morphological changes observed in the offspring of drunkards.
(16) Something Chevening has always lacked, as far as I’m aware, is an Isis flag in an upstairs window, a drunkard shouting rape threats on the doorstep and a skinhead breeding pit bulls in the basement.
(17) At around 11 o'clock on a Sunday night just over two weeks ago, Ram Singh, a 33-year-old school bus driver known as a troublesome drunkard, and his younger brother Mukesh headed back down the narrow lanes to the squalid one-bedroom brick home where they had spent the afternoon drinking.
(18) Finally, penalties for drunkards, including loss of salvation, are proportionally more frequent and comprehensive in the New Testament.
(19) A higher level of cells with a changed number of chromosomes in leucocyte blood culture of chronic alcohol users (drunkards) and spermatogency cells of alcoholized rats has been noticed.
(20) As with cinema later, many of these versions were freely, even crazily inventive – an Urdu Hamlet interspersed with songs and a comic subplot where the prince murders a rival for Ophelia's hand; a version of Measure for Measure with Isabella cast as a Muslim avenger, and Angelo as a drunkard.