INVENT • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Invent

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/ɪnvˈɛnt/ Listen

verb

Invent v. t. (past & past part. invented; pres. part. inventing)

To come or light upon; to meet; to find. (Obs.) "And vowed never to return again, Till him alive or dead she did invent."

To discover, as by study or inquiry; to find out; to devise; to contrive or produce for the first time; applied commonly to the discovery of some serviceable mode, instrument, or machine. "Thus first Necessity invented stools."

To frame by the imagination; to fabricate mentally; to forge; in a good or a bad sense; as, to invent the machinery of a poem; to invent a falsehood. "Whate'er his cruel malice could invent." "He had invented some circumstances, and put the worst possible construction on others."

Synonyms: To discover; contrive; devise; frame; design; fabricate; concoct; elaborate. See Discover.

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Etymology of 'Invent'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Invent" Quotes from Famous Books

... true, but after having, for half a century, been deprived of manufactures, you have little skill, and it would require many years for you to acquire it. Your foreign trade has disappeared with your manufactures, and the products of your looms would have no market but your own. When we invent a pattern we have the whole world for a market, and after having supplied the domestic demand, we can furnish of it for foreign markets so cheaply as to set at defiance all competition. Further than all this, we have, at very short intervals, periods ...

— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey

... war—not of government for the daily duties of village life, but of the Things of the Spirit which seemed calling within him to highest endeavor. He knew as yet nothing of Te-hua ceremonies—he had all to learn, yet he felt inspired to invent some expression for the joy which ...

— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan

... used to be. It has become a very complicated business. In old times we took the news as it came along, and that was all that was expected of us; but if we tried that way of doing things now, we'd have to shut up shop in a week. When we need news nowadays we simply make it. I don't mean that we invent news—that doesn't pay in the long run; people learn your game and you lose in the end. No, I mean that we create the events that make the news. We were running short of news last year, that's the whole truth of it; and so we got up this war. It's been a complete success. We've quadrupled ...

— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby

... that a literary reform undertaken in this spirit would not long consent to lend itself to the purposes of political or religious reaction, or to limit itself to any single influence like mediaevalism, but would strike out freely in a multitude of directions; would invent new forms and adapt old ones to its material, and would become more and more modern, various, and progressive. And such, in fact, was the history of Victor Hugo's intellectual development and of the whole literary movement in France which began ...

— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... circumstances control the human race. They make the Australian a savage; incapacitate the negro, who can never invent an alphabet or an arithmetic, and whose theology never passes beyond the stage of sorcery. They cause the Tartars to delight in a diet of milk, and the American Indian to abominate it. They make the dwarfish races ...

— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

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