license

Speech parts

1. license - Noun

2. license - Verb

Meaning

Authority or liberty given to do or forbear any act; especially, a formal permission from the proper authorities to perform certain acts or to carry on a certain business, which without such permission would be illegal; a grant of permission; as, a license to preach, to practice medicine, to sell gunpowder or intoxicating liquors.

The document granting such permission.

Excess of liberty; freedom abused, or used in contempt of law or decorum; disregard of law or propriety.

That deviation from strict fact, form, or rule, in which an artist or writer indulges, assuming that it will be permitted for the sake of the advantage or effect gained; as, poetic license; grammatical license, etc.

To permit or authorize by license; to give license to; as, to license a man to preach.

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Examples

None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. John Milton

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age. Marshall McLuhan

Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works. Steve Ballmer

The freedom of poetic license. Cicero

Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, ''What will you have, sir'' And I said, ''A glass of hemlock.'' Ernest Hemingway

The most fundamental liberal failure of the current era: the failure to embrace a moral vision of America based on the transcendent faith that human beings are more than the sum of their material appetites, our country is more than an economic machine, and freedom is not license but responsibility. Bill Moyers

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