SUFFERANCE • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Sufferance

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noun

Sufferance n.

1.

The state of suffering; the bearing of pain; endurance. "He must not only die the death, But thy unkindness shall his death draw out To lingering sufferance."

2.

Pain endured; misery; suffering; distress. "The seeming sufferances that you had borne."

3.

Loss; damage; injury. (Obs.) "A grievous... sufferance on most part of their fleet."

4.

Submission under difficult or oppressive circumstances; patience; moderation. "But hasty heat tempering with sufferance wise."

5.

Negative consent by not forbidding or hindering; toleration; permission; allowance; leave. "In their beginning they are weak and wan, But soon, through sufferance, grow to fearful end." "Somewhiles by sufferance, and somewhiles by special leave and favor, they erected to themselves oratories."

6.

A permission granted by the customs authorities for the shipment of goods. (Eng.)

Estate of sufferance (Law), the holding by a tenant who came in by a lawful title, but remains, after his right has expired, without positive leave of the owner.

On sufferance, by mere toleration; as, to remain in a house on sufferance.

Synonyms: Endurance; pain; misery; inconvenience; patience; moderation; toleration; permission.

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Etymology of 'Sufferance'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Sufferance" Quotes from Famous Books

... survivors. He returned with Myrtle to her native village, and they established themselves, at the request of Miss Silence Withers, in the old family mansion. Miss Cynthia, to whom Myrtle made a generous allowance, had gone to live in a town not many miles distant, where she had a kind of home on sufferance, as well as at The Poplars. This was a convenience just then, because Nurse Byloe was invited to stay with them for a month or two; and one nurse and two single women under the same roof keep each other in a stew all the time, as the old ...

— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... to mingle with us on an equal footing." Society might condescend to them, be friendly and helpful to them, but—admit them of its own flesh and blood?—well, not quite that! "We forgive you, but on sufferance; it is really a great concession; you must show ...

— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... Eloi, according to the hypothesis of the Time Traveller, are the descendants of the leisured classes; the Morlocks of the workers. "The Eloi, like the Carlovingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance; since the Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the day-lit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service." All this ...

— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford

... fastidious and exigeant as to the pretensions of others. He has been so long accustomed to the society of Whig Lords, and so enchanted by the smile of beauty and fashion, that he really fancies himself one of the set, to which he is admitted on sufferance, and tries very unnecessarily to keep others out of it. He talks familiarly of works that are or are not read "in our circle;" and seated smiling and at his ease in a coronet-coach, enlivening the owner by his brisk sallies and Attic conceits, is shocked, as he passes, to ...

— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... more, as so continually in the Acts, Rome is friendly to the Christian teachers and saves them from Jewish fury. To point out that early protection and benevolent sufferance is one purpose of the whole book. The days of Roman persecution had not yet come. The Empire was favourable to Christianity, not only because its officials were too proud to take interest in petty squabbles between two ...

— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

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