Janus
Pronunciation Proper noun
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Pronunciation Proper noun
- (Roman god) The god of doorways, gates and transitions, and of beginnings and endings, having two faces looking in opposite directions.
- 1789, Edward Gibbon, chapter XLI, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume V, London: Printed for A[ndrew] Strahan, and T[homas] Cadell, in the Strand, OCLC 30106274 ↗; republished Philadelphia, Pa.: Published by William Y. Birch & Abraham Small, No. 37, South Second Street; printed by Robert Carr, 1805, OCLC 15453273 ↗, page 166 ↗:
- In the ages of victory, as often as the senate decreed some distant conquest, the consul denounced hostilities, by unbarring, in solemn pomp, the gates of the temple of Janus. Domestic war now rendered the admonition superfluous, and the ceremony was superseded by the establishment of a new religion. But the brazen temple of Janus was left standing in the forum; of a size sufficient only to contain the statue of the god, five cubits in height, of a human form, but with two faces, directed to the east and west.
- 1879 February 27, A[lexander] M[artin] Sullivan, “On the Zulu War” (speech before the House of Commons of the United Kingdom); quoted in William Jennings Bryan, editor, Irish Orations (The World's Famous Orations), volume VI, New York, N.Y.: Funk & Wagnalls, 1906, OCLC 23127203 ↗, and republished on Bartleby.com[https://web.archive.org/web/20151004053252/http://www.bartleby.com/268/6/19.html], 2002, archived from the original ↗ on 4 October 2015:
- We find ourselves once again sitting in Committee of the Whole House to vote a war subsidy. The present occupants of the Treasury Bench are determined that so long as they retain their places the Temple of Janus shall not be closed.
- 1789, Edward Gibbon, chapter XLI, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume V, London: Printed for A[ndrew] Strahan, and T[homas] Cadell, in the Strand, OCLC 30106274 ↗; republished Philadelphia, Pa.: Published by William Y. Birch & Abraham Small, No. 37, South Second Street; printed by Robert Carr, 1805, OCLC 15453273 ↗, page 166 ↗:
- (attributively) Used to indicate things with two face#Noun|faces (such as animals with diprosopus) or aspects; or made of two different materials; or having a two-way action.
- (chemistry, attributively) Used to indicate an azo dye with a quaternary ammonium group, frequently with the diazo component being safranine.
- Janus green B is a dye used widely in histology to stain#Verb|stain cells for microscopic examination.
- (chemistry, attributively) Used to indicate an azo dye with a quaternary ammonium group, frequently with the diazo component being safranine.
- (figuratively) A two-faced person, a hypocrite.
- A moon of Saturn.
This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.002