RIGOUR

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does rigour mean? 

• RIGOUR (noun)
  The noun RIGOUR has 3 senses:

1. the quality of being valid and rigorous

2. something hard to endure

3. excessive sternness

  Familiarity information: RIGOUR used as a noun is uncommon.

 Dictionary entry details 

• RIGOUR (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The quality of being valid and rigorous

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

cogency; rigor; rigour; validity

Hypernyms ("rigour" is a kind of...):

believability; credibility; credibleness (the quality of being believable or trustworthy)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Something hard to endure

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

asperity; grimness; hardship; rigor; rigorousness; rigour; rigourousness; severeness; severity

Context example:

the asperity of northern winters

Hypernyms ("rigour" is a kind of...):

difficultness; difficulty (the quality of being difficult)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "rigour"):

sternness (the quality (as of scenery) being grim and gloomy and forbidding)

Sense 3

Meaning:

Excessive sternness

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

hardness; harshness; inclemency; rigor; rigorousness; rigour; rigourousness; severeness; severity; stiffness

Context example:

the rigors of boot camp

Hypernyms ("rigour" is a kind of...):

sternness; strictness (uncompromising resolution)

 Context examples 

The measure of that danger is the rigour of their precautions.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

This bore some resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

She knew not how such an offence as hers might be classed by the laws of worldly politeness, to what a degree of unforgivingness it might with propriety lead, nor to what rigours of rudeness in return it might justly make her amenable.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of the solitary rocks and promontories by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape—Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space,—that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)