competencen.

a1640 P. Massinger City-Madam (1658) iv. i. 99 I shall be enabl'd To make payment of my debts to all the world, And leave my self a competence.

1640 in J. Nicholson Minute Bk. War Comm. Covenanters Kirkcudbright 17 Oct. (1855) 65 To appoynt to hir ane competance out of hir said husband's estate.

1744 E. Young Complaint: Night the Sixth 26 A Competence is vital to Content.

1816 J. Austen Emma I. ii. 25 An easy competence—enough to secure the purchase of a little estate. View more context for this quotation

1871 J. S. Blackie Four Phases Morals i. 6 He had been left some small competence by his father.

1882 J. H. Shorthouse John Inglesant (new ed.) II. 51 Earn a competence and fame.

1738 J. Swift Imit. Horace ii. vi. (R.) Preserve, Almighty Providence! Just what you gave me, competence.

1752 S. Johnson Rambler No. 206. ⁋5 They..growled away their latter years in discontented competence.

1827 W. Wordsworth Excursion in Poet. Wks. V. vi. 278 Robbed of competence, And her obsequious shadow, peace of mind.

1864 Ld. Tennyson Enoch Arden in Enoch Arden, etc. 5 Seven happy years of health and competence.

1790 E. Burke Refl. Revol. in France 291 To make men act zealously is not in the competence of law. View more context for this quotation

1796 E. Burke Let. to Noble Lord 3 Conferring upon me that sort of honour, which it is alone within their competence..to bestow.

1805 J. Foster Ess. ii. vi. 198 Even the experience of failure augments his competence.

1860 J. Tyndall Glaciers of Alps ii. xxi. 343 To doubt my own competence to understand it.

1880 W. B. Carpenter in 19th Cent. 595 Naturalists of the highest competence in their respective departments.

1708–15 J. Kersey Dict. Anglo-Britannicum Competence, or Competency in Law, the Power of a Judge, for the taking Cognisance of a Matter.

1827 H. Hallam Constit. Hist. Eng. II. xvii. 666 The court of session..possessed no competence in criminal proceedings.

1886 Sir E. Fry in Law Times Rep. 53 623/1 It was within his competence to say that he would not appoint a new trustee.

1851 E. B. Browning Casa Guidi Windows i. ix. 27 By force of his own fair works' competence.

a1856 W. Hamilton Lect. Metaphysics (1860) IV. App. 465 It shows, at a glance, the competence or incompetence of any conclusion.

1877 G. K. Gilbert Rep. Geol. Henry Mts. (U.S. Geogr. & Geol. Surv. Rocky Mt. Region) v. 110 A stream which can transport débris of a given size, may be said to be competent to such débris. Since the maximum particles which streams are able to move are proportioned to a sixth power of their velocities, competence depends on velocity.

1914 G. K. Gilbert Transport Debris by Running Water 86 A current flowing over debris of various sizes transports the finer, but cannot move the coarser; the fineness of the debris it can barely move is the measure of its competence.

1914 G. K. Gilbert Transport Debris by Running Water 187 The group of constants designated by Greek letters..may be called competence constants.

1960 B. W. Sparks Geomorphol. v. 80 Competence is measured by the weight of the largest fragment which the stream can transport.

1932 C. H. Waddington in Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) B. 221 223 This competence is a new potentiality which has arisen. The idea of competence covers two concepts already in use, reactionsfähig and labil determiniert. Reactionsfähig means that the tissue..is competent to differentiate to a certain tissue but requires a definite stimulus.

1954 New Biol. 17 122 The group of cells..passes into a relatively brief phase of sensitivity (called ‘competence’) to the influence of neighbouring tissues.

1964 N. Chomsky in Proc. 9th Internat. Congr. Linguists 915 The description of linguistic competence provided by the grammar is not to be confused with an account of actual performance.

1966 N. Chomsky in T. A. Sebeok Current Trends in Linguistics III. 3 A distinction may be made between what the speaker of a language knows implicitly (what we may call his competence) and what he does (his performance). A grammar, in the traditional view, is an account of competence. It describes and attempts to account for the ability of a speaker to understand an arbitrary sentence of his language and to produce an appropriate sentence on a given occasion... Performance provides evidence for the investigation of competence.

1968 N. Chomsky & M. Halle Sound Pattern Eng. i. 3 One fundamental factor involved in the speaker-hearer's performance is his knowledge of the grammar that determines an intrinsic connection of sound and meaning for each sentence. We refer to this knowledge—for the most part, obviously, unconscious knowledge—as the speaker-hearer's ‘competence’.

1969 Language 45 323 Linguistic inquiry has succeeded only when..it began to ask about the individual's organization of language—what has come to be called his ‘linguistic competence’.

1969 Language 45 323 The distinction between performance and competence in the child is a critical one for understanding how language emerges in the individual.