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DECEMBER
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
The last (12th) month of the year
Synonyms:
Classified under:
Nouns denoting time and temporal relations
Hypernyms ("December" is a kind of...):
Gregorian calendar month (a month in the Gregorian calendar)
Meronyms (parts of "December"):
December 31; New Year's Eve (the last day of the year)
Christmas; Christmas Day; Dec 25; Xmas (a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Christ; a quarter day in England, Wales, and Ireland)
Christmas; Christmastide; Christmastime; Noel; Yule; Yuletide (period extending from Dec. 24 to Jan. 6)
mid-December (the middle part of December)
Holonyms ("December" is a part of...):
Gregorian calendar; New Style calendar (the solar calendar now in general use, introduced by Gregory XIII in 1582 to correct an error in the Julian calendar by suppressing 10 days, making Oct 5 be called Oct 15, and providing that only centenary years divisible by 400 should be leap years; it was adopted by Great Britain and the American colonies in 1752)
Context examples:
When December was well along, Grey Beaver went on a journey up the Mackenzie.
(White Fang, by Jack London)
The first of December was a wintry day indeed to them, for a bitter wind blew, snow fell fast, and the year seemed getting ready for its death.
(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)
November, December, and half of January passed away.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
It was on a clear morning, in the latter days of December, that I first saw the white cliffs of Britain.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
Another new image, obtained with the VISIR instrument on the VLT, shows the infrared light being emitted by the dust surrounding Betelgeuse in December 2019.
(ESO Telescope Sees Surface of Dim Betelgeuse, ESO)
The current solar cycle began in December 2008, and is now decreasing in intensity and heading toward solar minimum.
(Two Significant Solar Flares Imaged by NASA's SDO, NASA)
The bushfires, which are among the worst in the country’s history, have been fuelled by record temperatures — 41.9 °C on 17 December — and several months of intense droughts.
(Australian bushfire smoke drifts to South America, SciDev.Net)
‘December 22nd. Twenty-four geese at 7s. 6d.’
(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
On the fifth of December, 1715, we cast anchor in the Downs, about nine in the morning, and at three in the afternoon I got safe to my house at Rotherhith.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
During the mission’s approach phase, between mid-August and early December, the spacecraft traveled 1.4 million miles (2.2 million km) on its journey from Earth to arrive at a location 12 miles (19 km) from Bennu on Dec. 3.
(NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Discovers Water on Asteroid, NASA)
