EXPEDIENCE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Expedience

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/ɪkspˈidiəns/ Listen

noun

Expediency, Expedience n.

The quality of being expedient or advantageous; fitness or suitableness to effect a purpose intended; adaptedness to self-interest; desirableness; advantage; advisability; sometimes contradistinguished from moral rectitude or principle. "Divine wisdom discovers no expediency in vice." "To determine concerning the expedience of action." "Much declamation may be heard in the present day against expediency, as if it were not the proper object of a deliberative assembly, and as if it were only pursued by the unprincipled."

Expedition; haste; dispatch. (Obs.) "Making hither with all due expedience."

An expedition; enterprise; adventure. (Obs.) "Forwarding this dear expedience."

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Etymology of 'Expedience'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Expedience" Quotes from Famous Books

... senate by the casting vote of Vice-President Adams; "not," as Washington remarked in a letter to Tobias Lear on the sixth of May, "as it is said and generally believed, from a disinclination to the ulterior expedience of the measure, but from a desire to try the effect of negotiation previous thereto." Mr. Monroe, acting under instructions from the Virginia legislature, proposed in the senate to suspend by law the article of the treaty of peace which secured to British creditors the right of recovering ...

— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... revenge and expedience. If the rocket's fuel blew up instead of burning as intended, it would annihilate the camp. It would wipe out every living creature present. But there would be fragments left by the explosion. There would be corpses. There would be ...

— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... own meaning to himself more distinctly. With respect to that truth, wheresoever it lies, Kant's doctrine applies—that all men have a right to it; that perhaps you have no right to suppose of any race or nation that it is not prepared to receive it; and, at any rate, that no circumstances of expedience can justify you in keeping ...

— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey