Word.ws English Dictionary

obeyance

obeyance noun: obedience.

Noun (1)

obeyance (uncountable)

  1. obedience
    • Poor fellow! how happy would a companion make you, to whom you could relate your battles, bouts, and courtships; but mum is the order, and Jack is used to an implicit obeyance of head-quarter orders.1829, Various, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction
    • One of the instructions given by experienced aviators to pupils, and for which they insist upon implicit obeyance, is: "If your machine gets more than 30 feet high, or comes closer to the ground than 6 feet, descend at once."1912, W.J. Jackman, Thos. H. Russell, Flying Machines

Noun (2)

obeyance (uncountable)

  1. (nonstandard) abeyance
    • The disfiguring wrinkles that make many necks unsightly may be kept in obeyance by massaging.1897, Dorothy Quigley, What Dress Makes of Us

Origin of obeyance

From obey + -ance.

Misspelling or alteration of abeyance, by association with obey.

Questions about obeyance

What does obeyance mean?
Obeyance means obedience.
What part of speech is obeyance?
Obeyance is a noun.

Words near obeyance in the dictionary

  1. obetrioside
  2. obex
  3. obey
  4. obey'd
  5. obeyable
  6. obeyance
  7. obeyed
  8. obeyedst
  9. obeyer
  10. obeyers
  11. obeyest

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: obeyance (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.

Last updated:

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