habituals

Noun

habitual (plural habituals)

1. (colloquial) One who does something habitually, such as a serial criminal offender.
   • It has been suggested that we should classify prisoners as casuals and habituals. If a casual is to be distinguished from an habitual simply by the length of his sentence, this classification would hardly answer.1870 January 20, G. Hutchinson, “XXIV. The Present State of the Prison Question in British India.”, in Twenty-fifth Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the Prison Association of New York, and...
2. A construction representing something done habitually.
   • Since any situation that can be protracted sufficiently in time, or that can be iterated a sufficient number of times over a long enough period – and this means, in effect, almost any situation – can be expressed as a habitual, it follows that habituality is in principle combinable with various...1976, Bernard Comrie, “Perfective and Imperfective”, in Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics; 2), Cambridge, Cambridgeshire...

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