sed-, sedat-, -sid, -sess

1. A person who resides or dwells in a place.
2. A physician who joins the medical staff of a hospital as a salaried employee for a specified period to gain advanced training; usually, in a particular field, being in full-time attendance at the hospital and often living on the premises.
3. A diplomatic representative, inferior in rank to an ambassador, residing at a foreign court.
4. Something which is encoded and permanently available to a computer user, as a font in a printer's ROM or software on a CD-ROM.
5. A computer program that is currently active or standing by in a computer memory.

1. Of, relating to, or characteristic of a residue.
2. Remaining as a residue.
3. The quantity left over at the end of a process; a remainder.
4. A payment made to a performer, writer, or director for each repeat showing of a recorded television show or commercial.

1. Entitled to the residue of an estate (after payment of debts and specific gifts): "He was entitled to the residuary part of the estate."
2. Relating to or indicating a remainder; such as, residual quantity.

1. The remainder of something after removal of parts or a part.
2. Matter remaining after completion of an abstractive chemical or physical process; such as, evaporation, combustion, distillation, or filtration; residuum.
3. In law: The remainder of a testator's estate after all claims, debts, and bequests are satisfied.

1. A meeting at which a spiritualist attempts to receive communications from the spirits of the dead.
2. A meeting of people to receive spiritualistic messages.
3. A meeting, session, or sitting, as of a learned or legislative body.

Historical background

The origins of séance are surprisingly mundane, given the mysterious atmosphere associated with the word. It comes from French séance, “seat, session”, from Old French seoir, “to sit”.

In French, as in English, the word came to be used specifically for a meeting of people to receive spiritualistic messages (a sense first recorded in English in 1845), but earlier in French and English the word had been used for meetings more generally.

One can do many things while seated. Certainly the second recorded use of the word in English, in 1803, does not promise the frisson of an encounter with the spirit world: “your séances . . . which I have a shrewd suspicion must be something dull.” Perhaps the writer was referring to the meetings of a legislature or learned society, which sometimes put attendees to sleep rather than into a trance.

1. A closed automobile having two or four doors and a front and rear seat.
2. A portable enclosed chair for one person, having poles in the front and rear and carried by two other people; a sedan chair.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, an enclosed chair carried by porters at the front and rear on two long poles passed through handles on the sides of the box.

1. Tending to avoid excitement or great activity and to be calm and relaxed.
2. To cause a person or animal to be very calm or go to sleep by giving a drug: "When I saw him after the accident, he was still in shock and was heavily sedated.
3. Etymology: From Latin sedatus, "composed, moderate, quiet, tranquil"; "to settle, to be calm" causative of sedere "to sit".

The verb meaning "to treat with sedatives" is a 1945 back-formation from the noun derivative of sedative.

1. A medication with tranquilizing properties.
2. Tending to calm or soothe.
2. Allaying irritability or excitement; assuaging pain; lowering functional activity.

Most sedatives (tranquillizers) can also promote sleep. Overdosage of a sedative medication can lead to dangerous respiratory depression (slowed breathing).

A drug that calms a patient down, easing agitation and permitting sleep. Sedatives generally work by modulating signals within the central nervous system.

These sedatives can dangerously depress important signals needed to maintain heart and lung function if they are misused or accidentally combined, as in the case of combining prescription sedatives with alcohol.

Most sedatives also have addictive potential. For these reasons, sedatives should be used under supervision, and only as needed.

1. Requiring continuance in a sitting posture.
2. Accustomed or addicted to sitting still; engaged in sedentary pursuits; not in the habit of taking physical exercise.
3. Established in one place; not moving from place to place; opposed to ambulatory.
4. Inhabiting the same region through life; not migratory; also, of mollusca, etc.; confined to one spot, not locomotory.

1. The matter that settles to the bottom of a liquid; lees; dregs.
2. Solid fragments of inorganic or organic material that come from the weathering of rock and are carried and deposited by wind, water, or ice.
3. Insoluble material that sinks to the bottom of a liquid, as in hypostasis.

1. Of, containing, resembling, or derived from sediment.
2. Forming at the bottom of a liquid.

1. The process by which particles in suspension in a liquid form sediment.
2. Formation of rocks; the process by which rocks are formed by the accumulation of sediment.