| 释义 |
meaningful, a.|ˈmiːnɪŋfʊl|
[f. meaning vbl. n.1 + -ful.]
a. Full of meaning or expression; significant.
b. Amenable to interpretation; having a recognizable purpose or function; spec. in Logic, resulting from the application of the rules of a language or sign system; able to function as a term in such a system.
1852Tait's Mag. XIX. 552 All the little meaningful gifts. 1879G. Macdonald Sir Gibbie xiii, It was a..meaningful smile. 1922Times Educ. Suppl. 29 Apr. 200/2 The pupils see at once that their studies are meaningful. 1934Cohen & Nagel Introd. Logic ix. 185 It has been said that to the two alternatives true and false, there is a third, the meaningless... The question of what constitutes a meaningful expression is a large one. 1940W. V. Quine Math. Logic iv. 164 Under Russell's scheme an abstraction prefix..can be applied outright to any meaningful formula. 1942T. C. Pollock Nature of Lit. ix. 192 If the charge is made that a particular work..is..‘meaningless’..a good critic may be able to discriminate privately..that it is..highly meaningful. 1952C. P. Blacker Eugenics ix. 203 It is a different matter to test the tests and to prove them to be meaningful and workable. 1953Mind LXII. 8 We often ask what a word means, but we do not ordinarily ask whether a word is meaningful or not. If it were not meaningful we would not call it a word. 1954Essays in Crit. IV. 349 Tragedy affirms a cosmos of which man is a meaningful part. 1959B. Wootton Social Sci. & Social Path. iii. 92 Meaningful conclusions are, moreover, inhibited by the inadequacy of the available evidence. 1970O. Dopping Computers & Data Processing i. 18 We can add the information contents from different parts of the message and obtain a meaningful result from the addition. 1971Sat. Rev. (U.S.) 18 Dec. 59/1 All of us..see a need to be related in a meaningful way to the black experience. In our case, this means teaching black people. 1973Times 9 Feb. 24/4 Federation met again last month to try to get meaningful talks going again on a new disputes machinery. 1973Physics Bull. May 281/3 The phoneme is the smallest meaningful unit of sound a listener can perceive.
Hence ˈmeaningfully adv.
1890S. J. Duncan Soc. Departure 262 Orthodocia glanced at me..meaningfully. 1937Mind XLVI. 385 The finitist must hold..that of ‘the sequence of time intervals’ also, it cannot meaningfully be supposed that it denotes an infinite extension. 1955Sci. Amer. Aug. 84/2 We cannot meaningfully look for any further sense of ‘rational’. 1961J. McCabe Mr. Laurel & Mr. Hardy (1962) vi. 122 He must arrange the sequence of action clearly, meaningfully, dramatically. |