different between habituate vs semperlenity

English

Etymology

From Middle English habituate (“physically established or present”, adjective), from Latin habitu?tus, past participle of habitu?re (“to bring into a condition or habit of body”).

Verb

habituate (third-person singular simple present habituates, present participle habituating, simple past and past participle habituated)

1. To make accustomed; to accustom; to familiarize.
   • 1644, Kenelm Digby, Two Treatises, Paris, “The First Treatise declaring the nature and operations of bodies,” Chapter 36, p. 311,^[1]

     […] it was the custome of our English doggs (who were habituated vnto a colder clyme) to runne into the sea in the heate of summer […]

   • 1694, John Tillotson, Sermon 2, in The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, London: B. Aylmer, 1696, p. 35,^[2]

     Men are usually first corrupted by bad counsel and company […] ; next they habituate themselves to their vicious practices […]

   • 1799, Hannah More, Strictures of the Modern System of Female Education, London: T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, Volume 1, “On the Prevailing System of Education, Manners, and Habits of Women of Rank and Fortune,” p. 185,^[3]

     It seems so very important to ground young persons in the belief that they will not inevitably meet in this world with reward and success according to their merit, but to habituate them to expect even the most virtuous attempts to be often, though not always disappointed, that I am in danger of tautology on this point.

   • 1847, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Chapter 7,^[4]

     My first quarter at Lowood seemed an age; and not the golden age either; it comprised an irksome struggle with difficulties in habituating myself to new rules and unwonted tasks.

   • 1998, Nadine Gordimer, The House Gun, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 50,^[5]

     […] quarrels in discotheques were settled by the final curse-word of guns. State violence under the old, past regime had habituated its victims to it. People had forgotten there was any other way.

2. (obsolete) To settle as an inhabitant.
   • 1690, William Temple, “Of Poetry” in Miscellanea. The Second Part in Four Essays, London: Ri. and Ra. Simpson, p. 312,^[6]

     After the Conquests made by Caesar upon Gaul, and the nearer Parts of Germany […] great Numbers of Germans and Gauls resorted to the Roman Armies and to the City it self, and habituated themselves there, as many Spaniards, Syrians, Graecians had done before upon the Conquest of those Countries.

Synonyms

• accustom
• inure

Related terms

• habit
• habitual
• habituation

Translations

English

Etymology

semper- +? lenity

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) enPR: s?m'p?l??n?t?, IPA^(key): /?s?mp??l?n?t?/

Noun

semperlenity (uncountable)

1. (archaic, rare) Unfaltering leniency; unvarying gentleness deriving from habituated or constitutional disposition.
   • 1740–6: William Master, A.M.^?, The Ministerial Duty Set Forth: In an Anniversary Sermon Preached before the University of Oxford, on the Last Sunday in June, 1740, page 33

     […] bility and Semperlenity, and Dead Calmne?s of Temper, or Want of Anger in the Subject?

   • 1772?: George Horne [aut.] and Vaughan Thomas [ed.], A Letter to the Right Hon. the Lord North, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, pages 4–5

     If, when convinced itself of the truth and rectitude of this profession and mode, it suffer the teachers of those who dissent^a from them to neglect such parts of the former as do not seem strictly essential to the being of Christianity, and to frame a form of worship, or to reject all forms as they think fit, it acts with a moderation that ought to satisfy, and even gratify, the recusants. But if it extend its indulgence so far as to suffer its Articles of Religion and its form of worship to be unreservedly vilified, and treated, daily and hourly, with the grossest abuses, and even charged with blasphemy; and such doctrines to be openly avowed as, according to its own faith, are no better than downright blasphemies; it then exceeds the bounds of moderation, and falls into that extreme of semperlenity^? and unconcern for the honour of our God and Saviour, which forebode the downfal of that Religion, which it has, on the most convincing reasons, espoused.

References

• The English Dictionarie, or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words by Henry Cockeram (1623), volume II
  Accustomed Gentlenesse, Semperlenity.
• “semper-lenity” defined as a derived term of the prefix “?semper-”, listed in the Oxford English Dictionary [2^nd Ed.; 1989]