embraces

Noun

embrace (plural embraces)

1. An act of putting arms around someone and bringing the person close to the chest; a hug.
   • [E]yes, looke your laſt, / Armes take your laſt embrace: and lips, O you / The doores of breath, ſeale with a righteous kiſſe / A dateleſſe bargain to ingroſſing death: […]c. 1591–1595 (date written), [William Shakespeare], […] Romeo and Iuliet. […] (Second Quarto), London: […] Thomas Creede, for Cuthbert Burby, […], published 1599, →OCLC, [Act V, scene iii]
2. (figuratively) An enclosure partially or fully surrounding someone or something.
   • When he reached the ridge the outlying fog crept across the summit, caught him in its embrace, and wrapped him from her gaze.1882, Bret Harte, “Flip: A California Romance. Chapter II.”, in Flip; and Found at Blazing Star, Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company […], →OCLC, page 44
3. (figuratively) Full acceptance (of something).
   • And it was the white blood which sent him to the minister, which rising in him for the last and final time, sent him against all reason and all reality, into the embrace of a chimera, a blind faith in something read in a printed Book.1932, William Faulkner, chapter 19, in Light in August, [New York, N.Y.]: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, →OCLC; republished London: Chatto & Windus, 1933, →OCLC, pages 424–425
4. (figuratively) An act of enfolding or including.
   • In India men are enjoined to be fully awake to the fact that they are in the closest relation to things around them, body and soul, and that they are to hail the morning sun, the flowing water, the fruitful earth, as the manifestation of the same living truth which holds them in its embrace.1913 November, Rabindranath Tagore, “The Relation of the Individual to the Universe”, in Sādhanā: The Realisation of Life, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC, page 8

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