moiety

Noun

moiety (plural moieties)

1. A half.
   • They were faire Ladies, till they fondly ſtriu’d / With th’Heliconian maides for mayſtery; / Of whom they ouer-comen, were depriu’d / Of their proud beautie, and th’one moyity / Transform’d to fiſh, for their bold ſurquedry, / But th’vpper halfe their hew retayned ſtill, / And their ſweet skill in...1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto XII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 31, pages 370–371
   • The death of Anthony / Is not a ſingle doome. In the name lay / A moity of the world.c. 1606–1607 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Anthonie and Cleopatra”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard...

   Synonyms:

   half, mediety

2. A share or portion, especially a smaller share.
   • "Thou must stand in the flame while thy senses will endure, and when it embraces thee suck the fire down into thy very heart, and let it leap and play around thy every part, so that thou lose no moiety of its virtue."1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC
   • To get lands you often had to deal with a hundred or four hundred owners, or an entire community. […] Other properties, originally bought by a farming group for so many pesos primitivos, had through the years seen the moieties endlessly subdivided.1928 March, Carleton Beals, “The First Wild Oil Rush in Mexico”, in Current History: A Monthly Magazine, volume XXVII, number 6, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →OCLC, page 856, column 2
3. Each descent group in a culture which is divided exactly into two descent groups.
   • The villages are divided into two patrilineal totemic moieties and two patrilineal ceremonial moieties. The totemic moieties are subdivided into patrilineal clans (ngaiva): there are between fifty and a hundred clans of which between ten or twenty are represented in any one village[…].1973, Francis Korn, “A Question of Preferences: The Iatmül Case”, in Elementary Structures Reconsidered: Lévi-Strauss on Kinship, Berkeley; Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, →ISBN...
   • The moieties are linked to or bear the names of beings or forces expressing the cosmic dichotomy. Most common are heaven and earth moieties, "above" and "below," or moieties named after birds and land animals (or aquatic animals), as is the case among the Winnebago and in the phratry system of the...1979, Åke Hultkrantz, “The Great Tribal Ceremonies”, in Monica Setterwall, transl., The Religions of the American Indians, Berkeley; Los Angeles, Calif.; London: University of California Press...
4. A specific segment of a molecule.
   • Aniline has both a phenyl and an amino moiety.
   • We are therefore driven to the conclusion that the proteid food is split into a urea moiety and a fatty moiety, that the urea moiety is at once discharged, and that such of the fatty moiety as is not made use of directly by the body is stored up as adipose tissue.1877, M[ichael] Foster, “The Metabolic Phenomena of the Body”, in A Text Book of Physiology, London: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC, page 395