Noun

(policies)

(obsolete) The art of governance; political science.

* a. 1616 , (William Shakespeare), Henry V , I.1:

List his discourse of Warre; and you shall heare / A fearefull Battaile rendred you in Musique. / Turne him to any Cause of Pollicy , / The Gordian Knot of it he will vnloose, / Familiar as his Garter

(obsolete) A state; a polity.

(obsolete) A set political system; civil administration.

(obsolete) A trick; a stratagem.

* a. 1594 , (William Shakespeare), Titus Andronicus :

'Tis pollicie , and stratageme must doe / That you affect, and so must you resolue, / That what you cannot as you would atcheiue, / You must perforce accomplish as you may.

A principle of behaviour, conduct etc. thought to be desirable or necessary, especially as formally expressed by a government or other authoritative body.

The Communist Party has a policy of returning power to the workers.

Wise or advantageous conduct; prudence, formerly also with connotations of craftiness.

* 1813 , Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice , Modern Library Edition (1995), page 140:

These bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I with greater policy concealed my struggles, and flattered you

* Fuller

The very policy of a hostess, finding his purse so far above his clothes, did detect him.

(now, rare) Specifically, political shrewdness or (formerly) cunning; statecraft.

* 1946 , (Bertrand Russell), History of Western Philosophy , I.25:

Whether he believed himself a god, or only took on the attributes of divinity from motives of policy , is a question for the psychologist, since the historical evidence is indecisive.

(Scotland, now, chiefly, in the plural) The grounds of a large country house.

* 1955 , (Robin Jenkins), The Cone-Gatherers , Canongate 2012, page 36:

Next morning was so splendid that as he walked through the policies towards the mansion house despair itself was lulled.

(obsolete) Motive; object; inducement.

* Sir Philip Sidney

What policy have you to bestow a benefit where it is counted an injury?

Noun

(policies)

A contract of insurance

* Your insurance policy covers fire and theft only.

(obsolete) An illegal daily lottery in late nineteenth and early twentieth century USA on numbers drawn from a lottery wheel (no plural )

A number pool lottery

Noun

(es)

A series of events to produce a result, especially as contrasted to product.

* {{quote-news, year=2011, date=September 27, author=Alistair Magowan, work=BBC Sport

, title= Bayern Munich 2-0 Man City , passage=But they came up against an impressive force in Bayern, who extended their run to 10 wins on the trot, having scored 28 goals in the process and conceding none.}}

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-22, volume=407, issue=8841, page=68, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= T time , passage=Yet in “Through a Latte, Darkly”, a new study of how Starbucks has largely avoided paying tax in Britain, Edward Kleinbard […] shows that current tax rules make it easy for all sorts of firms to generate what he calls “stateless income”: […]. In Starbucks’s case, the firm has in effect turned the process of making an expensive cup of coffee into intellectual property.}}

This product of last month's quality standards committee is quite good, even though the process was flawed.

(legal) The act of serving a defendant with a summons or a writ.

(biology) An outgrowth of tissue or cell.

(anatomy) A structure that arises above a surface.

(computing) A task or program that is or was executing.

(manufacturing) A set of procedures used to produce a product, most commonly in the food and chemical industries.

* 1960', Mack Tyner, '''''Process''' Engineering Calculations: Material and Energy Balances'' - Ordinarily a '''process''' plant will use a steam boiler to supply its ' process heat requirements and to drive a steam-turbine generator.

* 1987', J. R. Richards, ''Principles of control system design'' in ''Modelling and control of fermentation '''process'''es'' - The words ''plant'' or '''''process''''' infer generally any dynamic system, be it primarily mechanical, electrical, or chemical ' process in nature, and may extend also to include social or economic systems.

A path of succession of states through which a system passes.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2012-01

, author=Robert L. Dorit , title=Rereading Darwin , volume=100, issue=1, page=23 , magazine= citation , passage=We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that operate on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year.}}

(lb) Successive physiological responses to keep or restore health.