Verb

(en verb)

To approach and speak to boldly or aggressively, as with a demand or request.

*{{quote-news, date = 21 August 2012

, first = Ed , last = Pilkington , title = Death penalty on trial: should Reggie Clemons live or die? , newspaper = The Guardian , url = http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/21/death-penalty-trial-reggie-clemons?newsfeed=true , page = , passage = The Missouri prosecutors' case against Clemons, based partly on incriminating testimony given by his co-defendants, was that Clemons was part of a group of four youths who accosted the sisters on the Chain of Rocks Bridge one dark night in April 1991. }}

(obsolete) To join side to side; to border; hence, to sail along the coast or side of.

* So much [of Lapland] as accosts the sea. - Fuller

(obsolete) To approach; to come up to.

(Shakespeare)

To speak to first; to address; to greet.

* Milton

Him, Satan thus accosts .

* 1847 , , (Jane Eyre), Chapter XVIII

She approached the basin, and bent over it as if to fill her pitcher; she again lifted it to her head. The personage on the well-brink now seemed to accost her; to make some request—"She hasted, let down her pitcher on her hand, and gave him to drink."

(obsolete) To adjoin; to lie alongside.

* Spenser

the shores which to the sea accost

* Fuller

so much [of Lapland] as accosts the sea

To solicit sexually.

Verb

(en-verb)

To renounce or dissolve all bonds of affiance, faith, or obligation with; to reject, refuse, or renounce.

* 1603-1625 , (Beaumont and Fletcher)

For thee I have defied my constant mistress.

To challenge (someone) to do something difficult.

* 1671 , (John Milton), (Samson Agonistes)

I once again / Defie thee to the trial of mortal fight.

* 1900 , Edith King Hall, Adventures in Toyland Chapter 6

*:"So you actually think yours is good-looking?" sneered the Baker. "Why, I could make a better-looking one out of a piece of dough."

*:"I defy you to," the Hansom-driver replied. "A face like mine is not easily copied. Nor am I the only person of that opinion. All the ladies think that I am beautiful. And of course I go by what they think."

To refuse to obey.

* 2005 , , Presidential Radio Address - 19 March 2005

*:Before coalition forces arrived, Iraq was ruled by a dictatorship that murdered its own citizens, threatened its neighbors, and defied the world.

*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-10, volume=408, issue=8848, magazine=(The Economist), author=Lexington

, title= Keeping the mighty honest , passage=British journalists shun complete respectability, feeling a duty to be ready to savage the mighty, or rummage through their bins. Elsewhere in Europe, government contracts and subsidies ensure that press barons will only defy the mighty so far.}}

To not conform to or follow a pattern or certain set of rules.

* 1955 , Anonymous, The Urantia Book Paper 41

*:By tossing this nineteenth electron back and forth between its own orbit and that of its lost companion more than twenty-five thousand times a second, a mutilated stone atom is able partially to defy gravity and thus successfully to ride the emerging streams of light and energy, the sunbeams, to liberty and adventure.

* 2013 , Jeré Longman in the New York Times, W.N.B.A. Hopes Griner Can Change Perceptions, as Well as Game Itself

*:“To be determined,” Kane said, “is whether Griner and her towering skill and engaging personality will defy the odds and attract corporate sponsors as part of widespread public acceptance four decades after passage of the gender-equity legislation known as Title IX.”