(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.
Tenable
Definition:
(a.) Capable of being held, naintained, or defended, as against an assailant or objector, or againts attempts to take or process; as, a tenable fortress, a tenable argument.
Example Sentences:
(1) Although an unequivocal decision is not possible from existing knowledge, psychomotor or complex partial seizures of temporal lobe epilepsy would be the most tenable diagnosis.
(2) The tenability of the formulation is readily testable by clinical research.
(3) He told the court: “We have been trying at the bar to imagine whether we can think of any other group of legal or natural persons, terrorist suspects, arms dealers, Jews, in respect of whose evidence one might even begin to think that one could tenably say, ‘Well, of course, in looking at this evidence I have been very careful because I know from the past that these people are a bit devious and a bit unworthy, and the only thing they’re really interested in is subverting public health.’ ” Yet last week’s judgment, running to 1,000 paragraphs, confirmed in excoriating detail just how determined big tobacco has been down the decades to achieve precisely this goal.
(4) Brain models, to be tenable, must pass an extended Turing test in which the capacity to self organize through the Darwinian mechanism of variation and selection is a key element.
(5) The belief that alcoholism is rare among Jews appears to be tenable no longer.
(6) The IMF also thinks “it is no longer tenable” to imagine that Greece can move from having one of the eurozone’s weakest productivity growth rates to the highest.
(7) The judge has ordered the company to help the FBI bypass the passcode on an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino killers, but many in the tech community simply don’t think a compromise is tenable.
(8) It seems that the postulated advantages of intratumoral application--increased concentration and depot effect in the tumor tissue--are no longer tenable, thus large-scale clinical trials with intratumoral bleomycin treatment cannot be justified.
(9) We divided this strip into three fields, A-I, R, and RT, although an alternative interpretation that A-I and R are parts of a single field remains tenable.
(10) Thus, the classical theory of migraine is no longer tenable as viewed strictly and rigidly.
(11) Some Conservative MPs say his position as Speaker is no longer tenable.
(12) tsi-23 is therefore thought to be a host mutation, and the available evidence for a scattered phage genome being the cause of the defective nature of PBSX is thus less tenable.
(13) This model demonstrates that the two hit model, as originally proposed by Knudson for retinoblastoma in children, is not tenable for tumors in adults.
(14) An alternative explanation of the potentiated recovery in terms of retardation of habituation proved hardly tenable (Experiment 5).
(15) Thus, the historical concept of conjugation reactions as general detoxication processes is no longer tenable.
(16) The idea that they can lock us out and there will be no change is no longer tenable.
(17) This experience suggests that arterial kinks may constitute tenable indications for operative treatment in patients with transient cerebral ischemia who lack typical stenotic or ulcerative plaques to account for their symptoms.
(18) The use of steroid and antibiotic prophylaxis no longer is tenable on the basis of recent studies showing their inability to favorably influence the outcome of caustic injuries.
(19) But I’m not convinced that where we are now is tenable.
(20) It is no longer tenable that patients should die as a result of complications of malnutrition simply because they cannot or are unable to take adequate oral nutrition.