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DINT
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Interchangeable with 'means' in the expression 'by means of'
Classified under:
Nouns denoting acts or actions
Hypernyms ("dint" is a kind of...):
agency; means; way (thing or person that acts to produce a particular effect or achieve an end)
Context examples:
I could not think about you so much without doating on you, faults and all; and by dint of fancying so many errors, have been in love with you ever since you were thirteen at least.
(Emma, by Jane Austen)
And so, by dint of alternate coaxing and commanding, he contrived to get them all once more enclosed in their separate dormitories.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
Hard he was of hand and harder of heart, hated by his foes, and yet not loved by those whom he protected, for twice he had been taken prisoner, and twice his ransom had been wrung by dint of blows and tortures out of the starving peasants and ruined farmers.
(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
My stool was such a tower of observation, that as I watched him reading on again, after this rapturous exclamation, and following up the lines with his forefinger, I observed that his nostrils, which were thin and pointed, with sharp dints in them, had a singular and most uncomfortable way of expanding and contracting themselves—that they seemed to twinkle instead of his eyes, which hardly ever twinkled at all.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
No, indeed, you know your duty too well for me to—even supposing—She stopt, felt herself getting into a puzzle, and could not be prevailed on to add another word, not by dint of several minutes of supplication and waiting.
(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)
As he sat on my sofa, with his long knees drawn up under his coffee-cup, his hat and gloves upon the ground close to him, his spoon going softly round and round, his shadowless red eyes, which looked as if they had scorched their lashes off, turned towards me without looking at me, the disagreeable dints I have formerly described in his nostrils coming and going with his breath, and a snaky undulation pervading his frame from his chin to his boots, I decided in my own mind that I disliked him intensely.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
The carriage came; and he entered the house again at the same moment, just in time to spend a few minutes with the family, and be a witness—but that he saw nothing—of the tranquil manner in which the daughters were parted with, and just in time to prevent their sitting down to the breakfast-table, which, by dint of much unusual activity, was quite and completely ready as the carriage drove from the door.
(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)
No matter what it was, I, the moon-struck slave of Dora, perambulated round and round the house and garden for two hours, looking through crevices in the palings, getting my chin by dint of violent exertion above the rusty nails on the top, blowing kisses at the lights in the windows, and romantically calling on the night, at intervals, to shield my Dora—I don't exactly know what from, I suppose from fire.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
