Noun

(uncountable) Recognition]] of the distinction between good and evil or between right and wrong; respect for and obedience to the rules of right conduct; the mental disposition or characteristic of [[behave, behaving in a manner intended to produce morally good results.

* 1841 , , Heroes and Hero Worship , ch. 3:

Without morality , intellect were impossible for him; a thoroughly immoral man'' could not know anything at all! To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first ''love'' the thing, sympathize with it: that is, be ''virtuously related to it.

* 1910 , , Theft: A Play In Four Acts , "Characters":

Ellery Jackson Hubbard. . . . A man radiating prosperity, optimism and selfishness. Has no morality whatever. Is a conscious individualist, cold-blooded, pitiless, working only for himself, and believing in nothing but himself.

* 1911 , , Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens , ch. 16:

Science and art without morality are not dangerous in the sense commonly supposed. They are not dangerous like a fire, but dangerous like a fog.

* 1965 , " King Moves North," Time , 30 Apr.:

It may be true that you cannot legislate morality , but behavior can be regulated.

(countable) A set of social rules, customs, traditions, beliefs, or practices which specify proper, acceptable forms of conduct.

* 1912 , , Pygmalion , act 5:

I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle class morality .

* 1917 , . The Yukon Trail , ch. 14:

He smiled a little. "Morality is the average conduct of the average man at a given time and place. It is based on custom and expediency."

(countable) A set of personal guiding principles for conduct or a general notion of how to behave, whether respectable or not.

* 1781 , , "Sheffield" in Lives of the Poets :

His morality was such as naturally proceeds from loose opinions.

* 1994 , "Man Convicted of Murder in '92 Bludgeoning," San Jose Mercury News , 4 Nov., p. 2B:

Deputy District Attorney Bill Tingle called Jones "the devil's right-hand man" and said he should be punished for his "atrocious morality ."

(countable, archaic) A lesson or pronouncement which contains advice about proper behavior.

* 1824 , , St. Ronan's Well , ch. 16:

"She had done her duty"—"she left the matter to them that had a charge anent such things"—and "Providence would bring the mystery to light in his own fitting time"—such were the moralities with which the good dame consoled herself.

* 1882 , , "Vanitas Vanitatum" in Ballads , p. 195:

What mean these stale moralities ,

Sir Preacher, from your desk you mumble?

(uncountable, rare) Moral philosophy, the branch of philosophy which studies the grounds and nature of rightness, wrongness, good, and evil.

* 1953 , J. Kemp, "Review of The Claim of Morality'' by N.H.G. Robinson," ''The Philosophical Quarterly , vol. 3, no. 12, p. 278:

Robinson sums up the conclusion of the first part of his book as being "that the task of the moralist is to set in their proper relation to one another the three different types of moral judgment . . . and so reveal the field of morality as a single self-coherent system".

(countable, rare) A particular theory concerning the grounds and nature of rightness, wrongness, good, and evil.

* 1954 , , "Ethics and Moral Controversy," The Philosophical Quarterly , vol. 4, no. 14, p. 11:

Hume's morality' which ‘implies some sentiment common to all mankind’; Kant's '''morality''' for all rational beings; Butler's ' morality with its presupposition of ‘uniformity of conscience’.

Noun

(social) Effectiveness.

# (countable) Capability or influence.

#*

An incident which happened about this time will set the characters of these two lads more fairly before the discerning reader than is in the power of the longest dissertation.

#*

Thwackum, on the contrary, maintained that the human mind, since the fall, was nothing but a sink of iniquity, till purified and redeemed by grace.The favourite phrase of the former, was the natural beauty of virtue; that of the latter, was the divine power of grace.

#* {{quote-book, year=1913, author=

, title=Lord Stranleigh Abroad, chapter=4 citation , passage=“[…] That woman is stark mad, Lord Stranleigh. Her own father recognised it when he bereft her of all power in the great business he founded. […]”}}

#* 1998 , (Eckhart Tolle), (The Power of Now)

Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power , and reality of the eternal present.

# Control, particularly legal or political (jurisdiction).

#* 1949', Eric Blair, aka '''(George Orwell) , ''(Nineteen Eighty-Four)

The Party seeks power' entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in '''power'''. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only '''power''', pure '''power'''. [...] We know that no one ever seizes '''power''' with the intention of relinquishing it. '''Power''' is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of '''power''' is ' power .

#* 2005 , Columbia Law Review , April

In the face of expanding federal power , California in particular struggled to maintain control over its Chinese population.

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

, title= Can China clean up fast enough? , passage=It has jailed environmental activists and is planning to limit the power of judicial oversight by handing a state-approved body a monopoly over bringing environmental lawsuits.}}

# (chiefly in the plural) The people in charge of legal or political power, the government.

# An influential nation, company, or other such body.

#* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-16, author= John Vidal

, volume=189, issue=10, page=8, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Dams endanger ecology of Himalayas , passage=Most of the Himalayan rivers have been relatively untouched by dams near their sources. Now the two great Asian powers , India and China, are rushing to harness them as they cut through some of the world's deepest valleys.}}

(physical, uncountable) Effectiveness.

# Physical force or strength.

# Electricity or a supply of electricity.

#* {{quote-book, year=1913, author=

, title=Lord Stranleigh Abroad, chapter=4 citation , passage=“My father had ideas about conservation long before the United States took it up.

#* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-07-20, volume=408, issue=8845, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Out of the gloom , passage=[Rural solar plant] schemes are of little help to industry or other heavy users of electricity. Nor is solar power yet as cheap as the grid. For all that, the rapid arrival of electric light to Indian villages is long overdue. When the national grid suffers its next huge outage, as it did in July 2012 when hundreds of millions were left in the dark, look for specks of light in the villages.}}

# A measure of the rate of doing work or transferring energy.

# A rate to magnify an optical image by a lens or mirror.

(mathematics) Effectiveness.

# A product of equal factors. Notation and usage: x''^''n'', read as "''x'' to the power of ''n''" or "''x'' to the ''n''th power", denotes ''x'' × ''x'' × ... × ''x'', in which ''x'' appears ''n'' times, where ''n is called the exponent; the definition is extended to non-integer and complex exponents.

# (set theory) Cardinality.

# (statistics) The probability that a statistical test will reject the null hypothesis when the alternative hypothesis is true.

(biblical, in plural) In Christian angelology, an intermediate level of angels, ranked above archangels, but exact position varies by classification scheme.