Noun

(en noun)

Each of the four divisions of a year: spring, summer, autumn and winter; yeartide.

* Addison

the several seasons of the year in their beauty

A part of a year when something particular happens: mating season'', ''rainy season'', ''football season .

*

, title= Mr. Pratt's Patients, chapter=1 , passage=Then there came a reg'lar terror of a sou'wester same as you don't get one summer in a thousand, and blowed the shanty flat and ripped about half of the weir poles out of the sand. We spent consider'ble money getting 'em reset, and then a swordfish got into the pound and tore the nets all to slathers, right in the middle of the squiteague season .}}

(obsolete) That which gives relish; seasoning.

* 1599 , (William Shakespeare), (Much Ado About Nothing) ,

O! she is fallen

Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea

Hath drops too few to wash her clean again,

And salt too little which may season give

To her foul-tainted flesh.

* 1605 , (Shakespeare), The Tragedy of Macbeth, III, 4

You lack the season of all natures, sleep.

(cricket) The period over which a series of Test matches are played.

(North America, broadcasting) A group of episodes of a television or radio program broadcast in regular intervals with a long break between each group, usually with one year between the beginning of each.

The third season of ''Friends'' aired from 1996 to 1997.

(obsolete) An extended, undefined period of time.

* 1656 , , The Mortification of Sin

So it is in a person when a breach hath been made upon his conscience, quiet, perhaps credit, by his lust, in some eruption of actual sin; — carefulness, indignation, desire, fear, revenge are all set on work about it and against it, and lust is quiet for a season , being run down before them; but when the hurry is over and the inquest is past, the thief appears again alive, and is as busy as ever at his work.

Noun

(en noun)

A cause:

# That which causes something: an efficient cause, a proximate cause.

#* 1996 , (w), : Evolution and the Meanings of Life , page 198:

There is a reason why so many should be symmetrical: The selective advantage in a symmetrical complex is enjoyed by all the subunits

# A motive for an action or a determination.

#* 1806 , Anonymous, Select Notes to Book XXI, in, (Alexander Pope), translator, The (Odyssey) of (Homer) , volume 6 (London, F.J. du Roveray), page 37:

This is the reason why he proposes to offer a libation, to atone for the abuse of the day by their diversions.

#* 1881 , (Henry James), (The Portrait of a Lady) , chapter 10:

Ralph Touchett, for reasons best known to himself, had seen fit to say that Gilbert Osmond was not a good fellow

# An excuse: a thought or a consideration offered in support of a determination or an opinion; that which is offered or accepted as an explanation.

#* 1966 , (Graham Greene), ((Penguin Classics) edition, ISBN 0140184945), page 14:

I have forgotten the reason' he gave for not travelling by air. I felt sure that it was not the correct ' reason , and that he suffered from a heart trouble which he kept to himself.

(label) Rational]] thinking (or the capacity for it; the cognitive [[faculty, faculties, collectively, of conception, judgment, deduction and intuition.

* 1970 , (Hannah Arendt), On Violence (ISBN 0156695006), page 62:

And the specific distinction between man and beast is now, strictly speaking, no longer reason (the lumen naturale of the human animal) but science

*{{quote-magazine, date=2014-06-21, volume=411, issue=8892, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Magician’s brain , passage=The [Isaac] Newton that emerges from the [unpublished] manuscripts is far from the popular image of a rational practitioner of cold and pure reason . The architect of modern science was himself not very modern. He was obsessed with alchemy.}}

(label) Something reasonable, in accordance with thought; justice.

* (rfdate) (Edmund Spenser):

I was promised, on a time, To have reason for my rhyme.

Ratio; proportion.

(Barrow)