patriarchal

patriarchal is defined in Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1913) with 2 senses, and appears in Roget's Thesaurus (1911) with 40 related terms. The full text of each entry is reproduced verbatim below.

Definitions

  1. 1.Characteristic of a patriarch; venerable. About whose patriarchal knee Late the little children clung. Tennyson.
  2. 2.(Ethnol.) Having an organization of society and government in which the head of the family exercises authority over all its generations. Patriarchal cross (Her.), a cross, the shaft of which is intersected by two transverse beams, the upper one being the smaller. See Illust. (2) of Cross. -- Patriarchal dispensation, the divine dispensation under which the patriarchs lived before the law given by Moses.

Source: Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913 edition (public domain, via GCIDE / Project Gutenberg).

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