scruple
IPA: skrˈupʌɫ
noun
- Hesitation to act from the difficulty of determining what is right or expedient; doubt, hesitation or unwillingness due to motives of conscience.
- (pharmacy) A weight of ¹⁄₂₈₈ of a pound, that is, twenty grains or one third of a dram, about 1.3 grams (symbol: ℈).
- A Hebrew unit of time equal to ¹⁄₁₀₈₀ hour.
- (obsolete, by extension) A very small quantity; a particle.
- (obsolete) A doubt or uncertainty concerning a matter of fact; intellectual perplexity.
verb
- (intransitive) To hesitate or be reluctant to act due to considerations of conscience or expedience.
- (intransitive) To excite scruples in; to cause to scruple.
- (transitive) To regard with suspicion; to question.
- (intransitive, obsolete) To question the truth of (a fact, etc.); to doubt; to hesitate to believe, to question.
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Examples of "scruple" in Sentences
- A scruple is a little sharp stone formerly used as a measure of weight.
- This absurd scruple is expressed almost in the same words by the continuator of
- It's interesting to note that the term "scruple" had at least three different definitions—and not all were for weight.
- His Clerk, Nickem, who was afflicted with no such darkness, but who ridiculed the idea of scruple in an attorney, often took part against him.
- I heartily wish that the same tenderness of conscience in all things may be seen, which if not, it will hardly be called a scruple of tenderness, but a cavil of malignity.
- Probole, or Prolatio, which the most orthodox divines borrowed without scruple from the Valentinians, and illustrated by the comparisons of a fountain and stream, the sun and its rays,
- Who has not at moments felt the scruple, which is with us always regarding animal life, following the signs of animation further still, till one almost hesitates to pluck out the little soul of flower or leaf?
- You say that you cannot leave your parish because you fear to give scandal; you fear to pain the poor people, who have been good to you and who have given you money, and your scruple is a noble one; I appreciate and respect it.
- That might have been unfair — she remembered how her husband, Claud, had sweated to get Koestler out of jail in Spain, only to be rewarded with apostasy — but in his last two decades Koestler abandoned every kind of scruple and objectivity and became successively bewitched by “theories” of levitation, ESP, telepathy, and UFOs.
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