Word.ws English Dictionary

absit

absit noun: formal permission to be away from a college for the greater part of the day or more.

Noun (1)

absit (plural absits)

  1. (UK) Formal permission to be away from a college for the greater part of the day or more.
    • In the evening, after some difficulty, he persuaded his tutor to give him an absit to sleep at Huntingdon that night, and drove over there after dinner in a fly with Egerton, Castleton, and Grey.1868, George Charles L. Tottenham, Charlie Villars at Cambridge, page 198
    • Another associated matter was the subject of a discussion, on one occasion only, on the effect of an absit on a student's residence if he used it to be away from Cambridge from Saturday to Monday 'as is allowed at at least one College'.1983, W. W. Grave, Fitzwilliam College Cambridge, 1869-1969, page 53

Noun (2)

absit (plural absits)

  1. A portion of fermenting dough diluted to a paste with water and then cooked.
    • A portion of the fermented paste may be mixed with three parts of water and boiled, resulting in an absit.1987, Larry R. Beuchat, Food and Beverage Mycology, →ISBN, page 296
    • The cooking gelatinizes the starch and makes the absit viscous.2011, Elke Arendt, Fabio Dal Bello, Gluten-Free Cereal Products and Beverages, →ISBN, page 135

Examples of absit in a sentence

  • An exeat was needed to be away for the night and, in theory at least, an absit for the greater part of the day.1992, Eric Lionel Mascall, Saraband: The Memoirs of E.L. Mascall, →ISBN, page 56:
  • 'It is a most shameful thing that he should keep me on like this...I am awfully cross because now I am not able to come home for an absit [overnight leave] on Thursday which I very much wanted to do.'2015, William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, →ISBN:
  • An absit is not made, and the baking is carried out on an open hotplate.2012, S P Cauvain, Breadmaking: Improving Quality, →ISBN, page 764:

Forms of absit

pluralabsits

Origin of absit

Borrowed from Latin absit (“let (him or her) be absent”), the third-person singular present active subjunctive of absum (“be absent”).

Borrowed from Amharic አብሲት (ʾäbsit, “proofing dough”).

Phrases with absit

Questions about absit

What does absit mean?
Absit means formal permission to be away from a college for the greater part of the day or more.
How do you use absit in a sentence?
An exeat was needed to be away for the night and, in theory at least, an absit for the greater part of the day.
What part of speech is absit?
Absit is a noun.
What is the plural of absit?
The plural of absit is absits.

Words near absit in the dictionary

  1. absisted
  2. absistence
  3. absistences
  4. absisting
  5. absists
  6. absit
  7. absit invidia
  8. absit omen
  9. absite
  10. absitively
  11. absitively posilutely

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: absit (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “absit.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/absit. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.