moresn.

1648 N. Ward Mercurius Anti-mechanicus Ep. Ded. sig. A3 In the meane time, pray be not offended, if I for manner sake and morês be guiltie of Orthographie, I cannot redeem or unbuy what custome hath bargained for.

1898 Catal. Yale Univ. 1898–9 204 Professor Sumner:-..Systematic Societology..knowledge and pseudo-knowledge, world philosophy, otherworldliness, industrial theories, mores, codes, mental training, traditional wisdom.

1906 W. G. Sumner Folkways i. 30 The mores are the folkways, including the philosophical and ethical generalizations as to societal welfare which are suggested by them, and inherent in them, as they grow.

1927 J. Dowd Negro in Amer. Life xxi. 154 The adjustment of the South to her new educational problem is only one of the many adjustments incident to her passing from the mores of slavery to the mores of freedom; and any sociologist knows that it is impossible to change the mores of a people suddenly.

1948 Mind 57 511 It frequently happens that any individual variations from cultural traits cause great indignation. When this is so the cultural traits in question are called mores-traits.

1958 J. K. Galbraith Affluent Society xviii. 200 Television and the violent mores of Hollywood and Madison Avenue must contend with the intellectual discipline of the school.

1975 Verbatim Feb. 4/2 The fact of the matter is that mores, politics, and sentiment change.

1988 D. Hogan Lebanon Lodge 6 They were rich, erudite and worldly people now, scoffing at the mores of the people around them.

2000 Independent 24 Apr. i. 13/2 The straitlaced Australia of the 1930s, when ‘wowsers’ (killjoys) dictated social mores.

1902 W. M. Wheeler in Science 20 June 975/1 Its usage [sc. that of the Greek word ἦθος] in the sense of habit, manners, etc. (Lat. consuetudo, mores) expresses what we mean by animal behavior.]

1911 V. E. Shelford in Biol. Bull. 21 30 The term form covers all matters of structure, size, proportion and in common usage, color also. As opposed to this and as covering all the physiological, and behavior characters just referred to, we will use the Latin word mores. The mores of a species or community of species are not independent of the form or forms: the two are correlated.

1913 V. E. Shelford Animal Communities Temperate Amer. ii. 33 Ecology..considers physiological life histories primarily in nature, for this reason the central problem of ecology is the mores problem.

1954 A. M. Woodbury Princ. Gen. Ecol. xi. 197 An insect may pass through an egg stage, a larval stage, a pupal stage, and an adult stage, each of which would represent a mores, an ecological unit in a community.

1962 H. Hanson Dict. Ecol. 229 Mores, the general behavioural attributes of motile organisms, or groups of animals possessing particular ecological characteristics.

1973 P. A. Colinvaux Introd. Ecol. viii. 117 The fish had different physiologies, habits, behavior, and modes of life, a collection of parameters which he [sc. Shelford] called the mores of the animals... His word mores, which has an awkward and alien sound, disappeared, but the idea he was seeking to express by it later found an outlet in Elton's ‘niche’ and became a central ecological concept.