Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Strictness or severity, as in action or judgment.
- noun A harsh or trying circumstance; a hardship or difficulty: synonym: difficulty.
- noun Archaic A harsh or severe act.
- noun Strictness in adhering to standards or a method; exactitude.
- noun A standard or exacting requirement, as of a field of study.
- noun Medicine Shivering or trembling, as caused by a chill.
- noun Physiology A state of rigidity in living tissues or organs that prevents response to stimuli.
- noun Obsolete Stiffness or rigidity.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The state or property of being stiff or rigid; stiffness; rigidity; rigidness.
- noun The property of not bending or yielding; inflexibility; stiffness; hence, strictness without allowance, latitude, or indulgence; exactingness: as, to execute a law with rigor; to criticize with rigor.
- noun Severity of life; austerity.
- noun Sternness; harshness; cruelty.
- noun Sharpness; violence; asperity; inclemency: as, the rigor of winter.
- noun That which is harsh or severe; especially, an act of injustice, oppression, or cruelty.
- noun (rī′ gor). [NL.] In pathology, a sudden coldness, attended by shivering more or less marked, which ushers in many diseases, especially fevers and acute inflammation: commonly called
chill . It is also produced by nervous disturbance or shock. [In this sense always spelledrigor .] - noun Synonyms and Rigor, Rigidity, Rigidness, inclemency. There is a marked tendency to use rigidity of physical stiffness. Rigidity seems to take also the passive, while rigor takes the active, of the moral senses; as, rigidity of manner, of mood; rigor in the enforcement of laws. Rigidness perhaps holds a middle position, or inclines to be synonymous with rigidity. Rigor applies also to severity of cold. See
austere .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun Rigidity; stiffness.
- noun (ed.) A sense of chilliness, with contraction of the skin; a convulsive shuddering or tremor, as in the chill preceding a fever.
- noun (Physiol.) a form of rigor mortis induced by heat, as when the muscle of a mammal is heated to about 50° C.
- noun death stiffening; the rigidity of the muscles that occurs at death and lasts till decomposition sets in. It is due to the formation of myosin by the coagulation of the contents of the individual muscle fibers.
- noun The becoming stiff or rigid; the state of being rigid; rigidity; stiffness; hardness.
- noun (Med.) See 1st
Rigor , 2. - noun Severity of climate or season; inclemency
- noun Stiffness of opinion or temper; rugged sternness; hardness; relentless severity; hard-heartedness; cruelty.
- noun Exactness without allowance, deviation, or indulgence; strictness; ; -- opposed to
lenity . - noun Severity of life; austerity; voluntary submission to pain, abstinence, or mortification.
- noun obsolete Violence; force; fury.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun US Alternative spelling of
rigour . - noun slang an abbreviated form of
rigor mortis .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the quality of being valid and rigorous
- noun something hard to endure
- noun excessive sternness
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Whatever this kind of blog discourse may lack in conventional "rigor" is certainly balanced out by its immediacy and its enthusiasm.
Statement of Purpose 2008
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Further, as physicists understand, but many economists do not, rigor is not the same as mathematical formalism.
Caldwell, Hayek, and Math, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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So the book added a certain rigor and pushed me to make the ‘project’ whole and complete on some level.
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His nutty campaign for AP and International Baccalaureate and his love of anything to which the word rigor can be attached is the reason why educators push this stuff too hard.
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The lack of mathematical rigor is remedied by getting clues from experimental observations.
Aiguy's Computer 2008
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The Seattle Prep curriculum and academic rigor is known to prepare any child admitted for just about any university of their choice.
Sound Politics: A failed school district should dissolve itself, now 2006
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What used to be a vibrant subculture is now a corpse rigid in rigor mortis.
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Irish women's history in general had lagged behind its British and North American counterparts, although it has certainly come out of its pioneering stages with a growing body of research of increasing analytical rigor from the 1990s to present day.
Gutenber-e Help Page 2005
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De Manian rigor is of course, for Guillory, a sham, an excuse for the pathos and the lurid figures it generates; 14 but the de Manian master-trope of rigor "facilitates an imaginary reduction of the social totality to the structure of trope," allowing "rhetorical reading to function as a political theory just by virtue of being no more than a theory of literature"
Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man 2005
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Previous experiments of my own had shown that the production of one gram of lactic acid in rigor leads to the liberation of about 500 calories.
adoarns commented on the word rigor
as in chill
December 3, 2006