VICISSITUDE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does vicissitude mean? 

• VICISSITUDE (noun)
  The noun VICISSITUDE has 2 senses:

1. a variation in circumstances or fortune at different times in your life or in the development of something

2. mutability in life or nature (especially successive alternation from one condition to another)

  Familiarity information: VICISSITUDE used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• VICISSITUDE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A variation in circumstances or fortune at different times in your life or in the development of something

Classified under:

Nouns denoting natural events

Context example:

the project was subject to the usual vicissitudes of exploratory research

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

fluctuation; variation (an instance of change; the rate or magnitude of change)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Mutability in life or nature (especially successive alternation from one condition to another)

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

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

mutability; mutableness (the quality of being capable of mutation)

 Context examples 

The vicissitudes of the human mind had not yet been exhausted by her.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

I regarded myself as a refuge, for her, from the dangers and vicissitudes of life.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine; she read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

In the evening I started, by that conveyance, down the road I had traversed under so many vicissitudes.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Drawing a chair before one of the coffee-room fires to think about him at my leisure, I gradually fell from the consideration of his happiness to tracing prospects in the live-coals, and to thinking, as they broke and changed, of the principal vicissitudes and separations that had marked my life.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

The discussion of some topics, even with Mrs. Micawber herself (so long the partner of my various vicissitudes, and a woman of a remarkable lucidity of intellect), is, I am led to consider, incompatible with the functions now devolving on me.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

In bidding adieu to the modern Babylon, where we have undergone many vicissitudes, I trust not ignobly, Mrs. Micawber and myself cannot disguise from our minds that we part, it may be for years and it may be for ever, with an individual linked by strong associations to the altar of our domestic life.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)