- practice#
- practice vb Practice, exercise, drill are comparable when they mean, as verbs, to perform or cause one to perform an act or series of acts repeatedly and, as nouns, such repeated activity or exertion.Practice fundamentally implies doing, especially doing habitually or regularly, often in contrast to thinking, believing, and professing or to theory and precept{
practice what you preach
}{the practice of one's religion
}{practice a profession
}{in theory every citizen votes, but in practice rarely more than half avail themselves of the privilege
}{thinking piously of saints and others who practiced mortification— Cheever
}Practice also implies a doing over and over again of certain acts for the sake of acquiring proficiency, dexterity, or skill or in the hope of attaining perfection{practice makes perfect
}{practice on the piano each day
}{rifle practice
}{I am not normally a scheming person; I . . . have had no practice in it whatsoever— Dahl
}Exercise fundamentally implies a keeping busy or a setting to work; it usually presupposes the possession of a power or of powers which can be developed or strengthened by activity, especially repeated activity, or can be manifested only in practice{give him plenty of opportunities to exercise his intelligence
}{a wise father avoids the exercise of authority except when other means fail
}{he had liberality, and he had the means of exercising it— Austen
}{so long as a child is with adults, it has no occasion for the exercise of a number of important virtues, namely, those required by the strong in dealing with the weak— Russell
}{will can only be exercised in the presence of something which retards or resists it— Ingey
}Like practice, exercise may be used also to imply acts performed repeatedly for the sake of an ulterior end, but exercise refers especially to those directed to the attainment of health or vigor (as of body or mind){Tom was being exercised like a raw recruit
}{grow mentally dull through lack of physical exercise
}{exercise is good for the muscles of mind and to keep it well in hand for work— J. R. Lowell
}{poetry is in France an exercise, not an expression. It is to real French expression, to prose, what gymnastics and hygiene are to health— Brownell
}Drill fundamentally connotes an intention to fix physical or mental habits as deeply as though they were bored in by the use of a drill; the term stresses repetition (as of military evolutions, of word pronunciations, or of grammatical rules) as a means of training and disciplining the body or mind or of forming correct habits{drill troops in marching and handling arms
}{a drill in arithmetic
}{this is a real danger in modern education, owing to the reaction against the old severe drill. The mental work involved in the drill was good; what was bad was the killing of intellectual interests— Russell
}practice n1 *habit, habitude, usage, custom, use, wont2 exercise, drill (see under PRACTICE vb)Analogous words: *use, utility, usefulness: usage, *form, convention, convenance: pursuit, calling, *workAntonyms: theory: precept
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
