> as lemmas

1574 tr. Life 70. Archbishopp Canterbury To Rdr. sig. Ev^v If thow beest at any time troubled, to make sense of the Englishe in some places, thinke that he was worse troubled, to make any reason off the latine in many places.

1642 S. Harmar Vox Populi sig. B2 He be carefull..that he keep his Letters even,..not linking words together like a chaine from one end of the line, to the other,..that the Reader can make no sence of it.

1666 in H. Paton Rep. Laing MSS (1914) I. 354 I feir your lorship sal not be able to maik sens out of my skriblen.

1734 J. Hunt Ess. Hist. & Revelations of Script. 24 That rendering scarce makes sense of the words.

1765 B. Heath Revisal Shakespear's Text 205 I would desire the reader to consider well this passage, and try whether he can make any sense of it.

1813 J. Hogg Queen's Wake 369 From that time forth, he never spoke another word that any person could make sense of.

1891 T. Hodgkin Theodoric the Goth xiii. 260 The passage..which describes these events is so corrupt that it is hardly possible to make sense of it.

1967 E. D. Hirsch Validity in Interpr. 238 The only way to avoid pure circularity in making sense of the text.

2012 S. Shale Moral Leadership in Med. p. vii I was taken by surprise, and could not immediately make sense of what he said.

1912 W. Temple in B. H. Streeter Foundations v. 220 [God's] sympathy..makes sense, and nothing else makes sense, of Pain.

1939 M. Lerner Ideas are Weapons xvi. 201 There is in us somewhere a drive to make sense of our experience.

1963 Landscape Autumn 22/1 Cultural geographers have not been very successful in making sense of the United States as a dynamic encounter of culture and land.

1981 I. Wedde Shirt Factory & Other Stories 134 I couldn't make sense of the tone of her interrogation.

2014 Yorks. Post 7 Nov. (Culture & Guide) 12/4 An impressive cast..tries valiantly to make sense of a dense script.