capaciousness


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ca·pa·cious

 (kə-pā′shəs)
adj.
Capable of containing a large quantity; spacious or roomy: a capacious office building. See Synonyms at spacious.

[From Latin capāx, capāc-, from capere, to take; see kap- in Indo-European roots.]

ca·pa′cious·ly adv.
ca·pa′cious·ness n.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:
Noun1.capaciousness - intellectual breadth; "the very capaciousness of the idea meant that agreement on fundamentals was unnecessary"; "his unselfishness gave him great intellectual roominess"
breadth, largeness, comprehensiveness - the capacity to understand a broad range of topics; "a teacher must have a breadth of knowledge of the subject"; "a man distinguished by the largeness and scope of his views"
2.capaciousness - spatial largeness and extensiveness (especially inside a building); "the capaciousness of Santa's bag astounded the child"; "roominess in this size car is always a compromise"; "his new office lacked the spaciousness that he had become accustomed to"
bigness, largeness - the property of having a relatively great size
airiness - the property of something spacious and abounding in fresh air
seating capacity - the number of people that can be seated in a vehicle or auditorium or stadium etc.
Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection. © 2003-2012 Princeton University, Farlex Inc.
References in classic literature ?
They fell away voluminously into the capaciousness of her bosom.
The very capaciousness of Seaton's categories may cause confusion.
The speaker finds each mode of writing history insufficient for expressing the capaciousness of his relationship with Eton College.
The features of the "interregnum" make people question the novel's famous elasticity and capaciousness. However, if novel is dead, then it will be reduced to the ghost that lingers on the literary castles and keeps the business of engaging, formulating, and shaping the world.
This essay on Bell is adjacent to Elyse Blankley's similarly revisionary essay, "Deviant Desires and the Queering of Leonard Woolf," in which the capaciousness of the term "queer" is helpfully scrutinized before the compelling argument is made to consider the "queer straightness" (224) of Leonard Woolf in his life and his writings, including his still relatively neglected novel, The Wise Virgins (1914).
They do, however, seem to point to the capaciousness of an aesthetic approach to the world, where the object of aesthetics is neither the artwork, nor the 'art-ification' of life, but where aesthetics instead attends to the whole gamut of sensual and affectual life, to the pulsions and propulsions of our material and sentimental world.
Such is the capaciousness of the book, however, that for all the many times that the Knight is either himself harmed or harms others according to the terms of his questing, now and then it actually works out.
But there are so few writers with the capaciousness, the compassion, to attempt all these points of view.
Yet it is this very capaciousness that biographers and interpreters have struggled with, and as a result, there are very few readable accounts of Chomsky and his project.
So "open" minded and "close" minded allow us to explore the kinship between spatial capaciousness and the mind's capacity to make room for possibilities.
Kaye notes the improvisational nature of many New Deal programs and, also, their capaciousness. Arguing that these programs went beyond economic reform, he provides evidence for ways in which these programs contributed to a surge in economic, social, and cultural democracy.
The capaciousness of his use of "republican" is evident in the book's opening epigram--a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince.