exorbitation
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Borrowed from Latin exorbitatio, from exorbitō (“to go off the track, deviate”) + -tio.
Noun
[edit]exorbitation (countable and uncountable, plural exorbitations)
- (now rare) The act of leaving the usual path or course; deviation.
- 1635, Tho[mas] Heywood, “The Seraphim”, in The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells. Their Names, Orders and Offices; The Fall of Lucifer with His Angells, London: […] Adam Islip, page 12:
- Nothing they are ſaue a meere perturbation / Of common Nature, an exorbitation / And bringing out of ſquare; […]
- 1868, Julia Ward Howe, “Return Voyage”, in From the Oak to the Olive: A Plain Record of a Pleasant Journey, Boston: Lee and Shepard, page 248:
- It does not recount how mercifully the captain of our steamer found a valet de place for us, and told him to take care of us, and bring us back at a given moment. Nor how our payment of ten francs for three persons, instead of Heaven knows what exorbitation, was owing to this circumstance.
Related terms
[edit]Further reading
[edit]- John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner, editors (1989), “exorbitation”, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, →ISBN.