English

Verb

disused

1. simple past tense and past participle of disuse

Adjective

disused ‎(not comparable)

1. no longer in use
   • 1589, George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, Chapter XIIII,

     But as time & experience do reforme euery thing that is amisse, so this bitter poeme called the old Comedy, being disused and taken away, the new Comedy came in place, more ciuill and pleasant a great deale and not touching any man by name, but in a certain generalitie glancing at euery abuse,

   • 1815, Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, Chapter XXXVII,

     In Scotland the custom, now disused in England, of inviting the relations of the deceased to the interment is universally retained.

   • 1881, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Willowwood" in The House of Life, Stanza II,

     And now Love sang: but his was such a song, / So meshed with half-remembrance hard to free, / As souls disused in death's sterility / May sing when the new birthday tarries long.

   • 1894, George Santayana, "On a Volume of Scholastic Philosophy" in Sonnets and Other Verses, New York: Duffield & Co., 1906, p. 55,

     The breath that stirred his lips he soon resigned / To windy chaos, and we only find / The garnered husks of his disusèd words.

   • 1933, George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, Chapter XIX,

     The tables, for instance, were to be covered with baize, but when the patron found that baize was expensive he bought instead disused army blankets, smelling incorrigibly of sweat.

   • 1956, Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond, New York: New York Review Books, 2003, Chapter 9, p. 72,

     […] the disused, wrecked Byzantine churches that brooded, forlorn, lovely, ravished and apostate ghosts, about the hills and shores of that lost empire.

   • 1997, Toni Morrison, Paradise, New York: Knopf, p. 172,

     All around in shadow lurked the shapes of trunks, wooden boxes, furniture, disused and broken.

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