(n.) A solemn form of supplication in the public worship of various churches, in which the clergy and congregation join, the former leading and the latter responding in alternate sentences. It is usually of a penitential character.
Example Sentences:
(1) Before issuing the ruling, the judge Shaban El-Shamy read a lengthy series of remarks detailing what he described as a litany of ills committed by the Muslim Brotherhood, including “spreading chaos and seeking to bring down the Egyptian state”.
(2) A well-meaning litany of no-nos: don't be racist, don't be sexist, don't be homophobic, don't shill the World Cup to countries with human-rights issues .
(3) Resorting to outside help to solve a problem that even the most patriotic of politicians now readily concedes is homegrown – the result of a litany of mistakes committed over the past 30 years – was never an option.
(4) The details in the report – including 13 incidents in which a total of 179 people died – rehearse a litany of horror.
(5) These challenges include: declining demand for power in the UK, currently falling at 1% a year as energy-saving measures take effect; a three-fold jump in the UK’s interconnection capacity with continental Europe by 2022, massively increasing the country’s ability to import cheaper supplies; and “a litany of setbacks” in Finland, France and China for EdF’s European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) model, the same type as planned for Hinkley Point.
(6) It's not just the kidneys – I could give you a litany of things that are wrong with me.
(7) The report, seen by the Guardian, is “deeply confused and deeply misleading” and a “litany of errors and false assumptions, clearly written ultimately as a disinformation tool”, according to two financial experts.
(8) An emotional Obama ran through a litany of Isis human-rights abuses, from rape to enslavement, calling them “cowardly acts of violence.” In a vague reference to Americans held captive by Isis or near its path in Iraq, Obama said the US would “do everything we can to protect our people,” a formulation that has preceded US military action in the past.
(9) Lahn said they found “a litany of pilots that have failed”, either due to lack of funding or broken equipment that wasn’t maintained.
(10) On appeal, he found his paperwork contained a litany of errors: it stated he had been a cat C prisoner (he was cat D); was in prison for murder (it was GBH); and had been moved from open conditions after six days for behaviour issues (he had been in an open prison for two years without incident and returned to closed conditions to be assessed for a course).
(11) National security state officials also decreed that it would "not be in the public interest" to report on the Pentagon Papers, or the My Lai massacre, or the network of CIA black sites in which detainees were tortured, or the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, or the documents negating claims of Iraqi WMDs, or a whole litany of waste, corruption and illegality that once bore the "top secret" label.
(12) Place names and plant names assume the status of chants or litanies: spectral taxa incanted as elegy, or as a means to conjure back.
(13) Blair Jenkins, chief executive of Yes Scotland, said Cameron's speech "was the same litany of empty threats and empty promises we have come to expect from the no campaign – and he is the prime minister who has been orchestrating the campaign of ridiculous scaremongering being directed against Scotland".
(14) There was nothing like the usual litany of careful gratitude towards the local political machinery.
(15) A vast and completely incomprehensible litany of activities is forbidden there.
(16) This is a litany of economic and public health disasters from just one bill.
(17) One activist, Alexei Navalny, has launched a new website detailing the litany of corruption allegations surrounding the Games, claiming that the 10 Olympic venues cost more than twice as much as necessary.
(18) On Monday Hywood told Fairfax staff not to believe the “litany of bizarre commentary on the state of the industry” and the “speculative lies” about Fairfax Media, including that it would stop printing the Monday to Friday metropolitan newspapers by the end of the year.
(19) The HSE's latest report on Sellafield, posted online, discloses a litany of problems at the crowded site which sprawls over six square miles on the edge of the Lake District and is home to more than a thousand nuclear facilities, some dating back more than 50 years.
(20) In response to this litany of misery, politicians of all parties point to the only metric that matters to them and cry: but crime is falling.
Ritual
Definition:
(a.) Of or pertaining to rites or ritual; as, ritual service or sacrifices; the ritual law.
(n.) A prescribed form of performing divine service in a particular church or communion; as, the Jewish ritual.
(n.) Hence, the code of ceremonies observed by an organization; as, the ritual of the freemasons.
(n.) A book containing the rites to be observed.
Example Sentences:
(1) Over the years it has become something of a Westminster ritual.
(2) Stonehenge stood at the heart of a sprawling landscape of chapels, burial mounds, massive pits and ritual shrines, according to an unprecedented survey of the ancient grounds.
(3) Should I be killed, I would like to be buried, according to Muslim rituals, in the clothes I was wearing at the time of my death and my body unwashed, in the cemetery of Sirte, next to my family and relatives.
(4) If the villagers fail to respect the social code, by not using her new name or by reminding her of her indignity, they have to perform a reparative ritual, at which a goat is sacrificed.
(5) The unprogrammed component of patient ritual involvement differs between the two settings, while the formal ritual 'script' is identical.
(6) When it happens, it will be Africa's first clinic specifically for performing FGM-restoration surgery, including clitoroplasty – a highly symbolic act at the heart of a region where the ritual is prevalent.
(7) A total of 77 families with an adolescent member completed the Family Ritual Questionnaire, and the adolescents completed a measure of self-esteem.
(8) Our behavioral studies have identified a number of conditioned psychophysiological responses associated with the self-injection ritual.
(9) The Treasurer Joe Hockey walks to a doorstop interview with the media this morning at the Ministerial entrance to Parliament House in Canberra, Tuesday 13th May 2013 Photograph: Mike Bowers, Guardian Australia There is a certain commonality associated with the annual rituals of the treasurer.
(10) Critics of initiation say traditional leaders have failed to update their teachings from the times when the ritual was put in place to select and grade warriors.
(11) As for unwinding, the rituals of it give a satisfying end to the shape of my day.
(12) The Digo healer applies hypnosis, somatiic exercises, stimulating music, and drugs in his three-day ritual performed mainly for psychosomatic and chronic illness.
(13) Real-life exposure with self-imposed response prevention is usually an effective procedure for lasting reduction of chronic compulsive rituals in well motivated patients.
(14) Mr Major and Mr Blair ritually made light of the poll results but Dr Mawhinney led Tory claims that ICM's private findings for them were consistent with its public work for the Guardian.
(15) The Mediterranean diet involves a set of skills, knowledge, rituals, symbols and traditions concerning crops, harvesting, fishing, animal husbandry, conservation, processing, cooking and particularly the sharing and consumption of food.
(16) Scores of archaeologists working in a waterlogged trench through the wettest summer and coldest winter in living memory have recovered more than 10,000 objects from Roman London , including writing tablets, amber, a well with ritual deposits of pewter, coins and cow skulls, thousands of pieces of pottery, a unique piece of padded and stitched leather – and the largest collection of lucky charms in the shape of phalluses ever found on a single site.
(17) Such rituals of authority, though virtually abolished in Britain, may well exist in a different form in present day residential institutions for children in some Third World countries that have borrowed from now outdated European practices.
(18) So too will the evening ritual of spreading out a plastic sheet over a bed to turn it into a dining table.
(19) The functions subserved by possession behaviour are reviewed, and comparisons are drawn between personal possession, ritual possession, and altered states of consciousness in Western society.
(20) The classic European blood libel, like many other classic European creations, had a strict set of images which must always contain a cherubic Gentile child sacrificed by those perfidious Jews, his blood to be used for ritual purposes.