SAT Prep — Vocabulary — ABDICATE

ABDICATE (v. tr.) To renounce (sovereignty, office, etc.); relinquish formally; resign; in civil law, to disown or disinherit. (v. intr.) To renounce office or power. — abdication (n.) The act of abdicating; renunciation, esp. of sovereign power. — abdicative (a.) Involving abdication.

SYNONYMS: abandon, forswear, hand over, relinquish, renounce, resign

"Like every other ecclesiastical dignity, the papal throne may also be resigned. The reasons which make it lawful for a bishop to abdicate his see, such as the necessity or utility of his particular church, or the salvation of his own soul, apply in stronger manner to the one who governs the universal church."
— Charles G. Hebermann, Editor in Chief. "Abdication." The Catholic Encyclopedia. 1913.

"Chairman Bill Gates may be preparing to abdicate the throne, but he's still fighting the good fight by touting the marketplace's enthusiastic response to Windows Vista."
— Kevin McLaughlin. "Bill Gates says Windows Vista selling at a 'rapid pace.'" May 8, 2008. ChannelWeb.

"Although he claimed that he had no lust for power, he clung to his two chairs of power tenaciously and inflicted one wound after another to the body of Pakistan. Instead of becoming a symbol of stability he became the chief cause of instability. Except for his loyalists and beneficiaries, the great majority wanted him to abdicate power."
— Asif Haroon Raja. "Musharraf as a civilian president." May 8, 2008. Asian Tribune.

"In these post-Warren Court times, with our obsession with courts and rights, it is all too easy to relieve — formally or functionally — lawmakers of their solemn duty to uphold the First Amendment. To allow them to abdicate their constitutional responsibility, however, is to ignore a very old Madisonian truism, namely, that the law is what we do or don’t make it."
— Ronald K.L. Collins. "What to make of 'make' in the First Amendment." May 8, 2008. First Amendment Center.

"By a solemn abdicative act dated in July 1790 Leopold resigned the Tuscan sovereignty according to the treaty of Vienna, to his second son Ferdinand Archduke of Austria who ascended the throne as Ferdinand III at one-and-twenty years of age: it was published at Florence on the seventh of March 1791, and on the eighth of April Leopold and the young Grand Duke of Tuscany, with the King and Queen of Naples entered the city."
— Henry Edward Napier. Florentine History: From the Earliest Authentic Records to the Accession of Ferdinand the Third, Grand Duke of Tuscany. 1847.

Vocabulary Limerick — ABDICATE

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