(v. t.) To fall or rush upon suddenly and lay hold of; to gripe or grasp suddenly; to reach and grasp.
(v. t.) To take possession of by force.
(v. t.) To invade suddenly; to take sudden hold of; to come upon suddenly; as, a fever seizes a patient.
(v. t.) To take possession of by virtue of a warrant or other legal authority; as, the sheriff seized the debtor's goods.
(v. t.) To fasten; to fix.
(v. t.) To grap with the mind; to comprehend fully and distinctly; as, to seize an idea.
(v. t.) To bind or fasten together with a lashing of small stuff, as yarn or marline; as, to seize ropes.
Example Sentences:
(1) Batson believes there is a “mood” that needs to be seized upon.
(2) George Osborne said the 146,000 fall in joblessness marked "another step on the road to full employment" but Labour and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) seized on news that earnings were failing to keep pace with prices.
(3) Can somebody who is not a billionaire, who stands for working families, actually win an election into which billionaires are pouring millions of dollars?” Naming prominent and controversial rightwing donors, he said: “It is not just Hillary, it is the Koch brothers, it is Sheldon Adelson.” Stephanopoulos seized the moment, asking: “Are you lumping her in with them?” Choosing to refer to the 2010 supreme court decision that removed limits on corporate political donations, rather than address the question directly, Sanders replied: “What I am saying is that I get very frightened about the future of American democracy when this becomes a battle between billionaires.
(4) Among the dead were two young young officers, Major Mujahid Ali and Captain Usman, whose life stories the media seized upon, helped by the military's public relations machine.
(5) Remember, if he did seize group power and dispose of the Independent , he'd still be boss of the rest of INM: 200 or so papers and magazines around the world, dominant voices in Australasia, South Africa, India and Ireland itself, 100 million readers a week.
(6) Lieberman said: "[Amazon's] decision to cut off WikiLeaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material.
(7) Generals who have mutinied have seized the capital of South Sudan's largest state, Jonglei, and its main oil-producing area, Unity State.
(8) The coroner also raised concerns that although the aim of the operation in which Duggan was killed was to take guns off the streets, little attempt was made to seize weapons believed to be held by Hutchinson-Foster.
(9) Employers seize the workers’ passports and the only body that can issue a permit for a worker to leave Qatar is the employer himself.
(10) Backlogs and staff shortages have long been seized upon by veterans groups lobbying for more resources, but it is the apparent cover-up of the scale of the problem that has transformed these latest complaints into a growing political problem for the White House.
(11) Social media has seized on the story, turning the Eastern Washington University’s professor of African studies into a figure vilified and mocked for cultural appropriation in the midst of fraught debates over transgender identity and police shootings of black people.
(12) A Yazidi lawmaker, a Kurdish security official and an Iraqi official from the nearby city of Sinjar gave similar accounts, saying Isis fighters had massacred scores of Yazidi men on Friday afternoon after seizing Kocho.
(13) "This is a formidable challenge, requiring step changes in the rate at which we improve our energy efficiency and in low-carbon innovation.The Carbon Trust's proposals recognise the need for us to be smarter in focusing our investments, including to help businesses seize the economic opportunities of the transition."
(14) The US and Iran have had no diplomatic relations since 1979, when a group of student protesters seized the US embassy in Tehran and took US officials hostage.
(15) The militants have also seized a huge chunk of territory straddling the Iraq-Syria border, and have declared a self-styled caliphate in the territory they control.
(16) But the Tories edited out a crucial final sentence in which Balls told BBC Radio Leeds on 9 January : “But I think we can be tougher and we should be and we will.” Labour seized on the Tory editing of the Balls interview to accuse the Tories of misleading people to defend their refusal to tackle tax avoidance.
(17) The Ukrainian president, Oleksandr Turchynov, had given pro-Russian locals in eastern Ukraine until Monday morning to give up their arms and the buildings they had seized, but instead a pro-Russian mob took over yet another government building in Horlivka that day.
(18) The terrorists know that if Iraq and Afghanistan survive their assault, come through their travails, seize the opportunity the future offers, then those countries will stand not just as nations liberated from oppression, but as a lesson to humankind everywhere and a profound antidote to the poison of religious extremism.
(19) In 2014, they seized on Osborne’s declaration of a “northern powerhouse” to promote One North, a plan for a £15bn network, dubbed HS3, between Lancashire and Yorkshire.
(20) The president’s supporters seized on the incident to plant seeds of confusion and false equivalency: if that Russia story was wrong, perhaps all of them are wrong?
Wrest
Definition:
(v. t.) To turn; to twist; esp., to twist or extort by violence; to pull of force away by, or as if by, violent wringing or twisting.
(v. t.) To turn from truth; to twist from its natural or proper use or meaning by violence; to pervert; to distort.
(v. t.) To tune with a wrest, or key.
(n.) The act of wresting; a wrench; a violent twist; hence, distortion; perversion.
(n.) Active or moving power.
(n.) A key to tune a stringed instrument of music.
(n.) A partition in a water wheel, by which the form of the buckets is determined.
Example Sentences:
(1) Security forces have also tried to wrest back the Sunni stronghold of Tikrit from a loose alliance of Isis fighters, other jihadist groups and former Saddam Hussein loyalists.
(2) Residents of five blocks in Nottingham, called City Heights, set off fireworks to celebrate wresting control of their development from Peverel after a long legal battle.
(3) A long campaign to wrest control of the parliamentary agenda from government triumphed today when MPs voted overwhelmingly to establish an elected backbench committee to take responsibility for tracts of Commons business.
(4) The truce was short-lived, and by the following February, hundreds of Taliban fighters had recaptured the area, prompting the British, aided by the US Army's 82nd airborne division, to conduct a massive operation in late 2007 to wrest back control of the district centre.
(5) Their composure was shattered from the moment Alex McCarthy gifted the visitors an equaliser, all authority wrested away in the blink of an eye and Liverpool , suddenly focused where previously they had been limp and ineffective, the more persuasive threat in what time that remained.
(6) They must have thought they had wrested control of this contest having started the second half with such urgency, the excellent Sergio Agüero – "a powerful tank," according to Mourinho – darting behind Gary Cahill to collect Samir Nasri's pass and thump a glorious finish high beyond Petr Cech at his near post.
(7) 8 March 2008: Anwar leads an opposition coalition to wrest a third of parliament's seats and five states from the incumbent National Front coalition, which has ruled Malaysia since it became independent from Britain in 1957.
(8) Iraqi units, described by commanding general Lloyd Austin as the centerpiece of the war for the moment , are not ready to wrest Mosul or other significant territory from Isis .
(9) Iraq’s armed forces, backed by Shia militia, have begun a fresh campaign to wrest control and “liberate” Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, now a stronghold of Islamic State (Isis), the country’s prime minister has said.
(10) The terminals were wrested from the control of Field Marshal Khalid Haftar, the head of the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA), a force that dominates in eastern Libya and enjoys Russian and Egyptian support.
(11) The forward bustled in, stealing the ball and holding off the centre-half as he attempted to wrest it back, before ripping a glorious shot from a horribly tight angle into the far top corner as Ben Foster edged out to smother.
(12) Najib's coalition hopes to win back a large number of parliamentary seats and several states that Anwar's opposition alliance wrested from it in 2008 elections.
(13) Take Tarlair Lido in Aberdeen, recently granted £300,000 for immediate repairs which makes its swimming future imaginable, or Brighton 's art deco Saltdean Lido , wrested by campaigners from a developer who was not, shall we say, "swimming friendly".
(14) Cameron and Gove are against this, because if London wrested more control of schools back to local government level, then other local authorities would clamour for the same thing.
(15) This is what the revolution is about: Ukrainians trying to wrest control of their country from the oligarchs of Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk and elsewhere who – with help from east and west – have robbed them for 23 years.
(16) The raid represented an attempt by Macierewicz to wrest immediate control of the centre from Dusza, who had been appointed to run it by Poland’s former centre-right government ousted in October elections by the radical Law and Justice party.
(17) Good docs appear to wrest a degree of coherence from the contingent mess of life My life has been spoiled by docs.
(18) In front of a record crowd for a women’s final of 32,912 at Wembley, Carter’s 18th-minute goal was enough to wrest the trophy back from Chelsea Ladies, last year’s league and cup winners, who could have no complaints after coming up second best in almost every area of the pitch.
(19) The problem is not believed to be the paucity of sports rights that afflicted the programme during the 1990s as Sky attempted to wrest control of every big event from the BBC, but that viewers now see Grandstand as old-fashioned.
(20) It won't help the cause one jot to say this, but for those of us who came of age in the 1960s, here comes our final right to wrest from the old moral and religious orthodoxy: the right to die as we please.