extravagation

English

Noun

extravagation (countable and uncountable, plural extravagations)

  1. (archaic) A wandering beyond limits; excess.
    • 1659, Edmund Chilmead, transl., A Learned Treatise of Globes, Both Cœlestiall and Terrestriall with Their Several Uses‎, London: Andrew Kemb, Part 1, Chapter 2, p. 15:
      By reaso[n] of which their digressions and extravagations, the ancients assigned the Zodiaque 12. Degrees of Latitude.
    • 1771, Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Volume I, The British Novelists, Volume 30, London: V.C. and J. Rivington et al., p. 136,
      […] I don’t pretend to justify the extravagations of the multitude; who, I suppose, were as wild in their former censure, as in their present praise […]
    • 2010, Paul A. Griffith, Afro-Caribbean Poetry and Ritual‎, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Preface, p. x:
      Such tropes expose the extravagation whereby capitalism is decked out as the incontestable standard of human behavior and culture.
  2. An agricultural term for the process of activating the enzymes in a cow’s stomach causing it to produce milk, this is due to the applied centrifugal force. The cow usually passes out in the first minute so no harm is felt by the animal. It is mainly used in South American farm mostly in Brasil but the technique can be found in Central Europe as well.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “extravagation”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)

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