abjure

If there was an abiding theme across X’s work and life, it was the attempt to subvert a fixed self, choosing to cycle through artistic personas and abjure her personal history.

From New York Times ● Mar. 18, 2023

By 1907, when Sargent was 51, he’d had enough: “No more paughtraits,” he wrote in a now-famous note, “I abhor and abjure them and hope never to do another especially of the Upper Classe.”

From Washington Post ● Mar. 5, 2020

People who are otherwise deemed sceptical abjure their reason and believe in miracles.

From The Guardian ● Apr. 10, 2019

Gottlieb tells the story of how James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, visited Hume on his deathbed, hoping to find that at the last minute the philosopher would abjure his doubts and embrace Christianity.

From The New Yorker ● Aug. 29, 2016

On July 5 Zabarella and Peter d’Ailly sent for him and offered to let him deny the heresies proved by witnesses if he would abjure those extracted from his books.

From A History of The Inquisition of The Middle Ages; volume II by Henry Charles Lea

India abjures formal alliances, which it sees as constraints on its independence.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 1, 2026

Because the play abjures psychology in favor of gesture, much as Swan apparently did in his choreopoems, nothing tells us whether he is in on the joke.

From New York Times ● May 2, 2019

Or, make that drama avoidance; this is a novel that abjures not just plot twists but plot advances.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 10, 2014

He abjures his cow pies for sunblush tomato and goat's cheese baguettes and begins to use a Remington Philishave.

From The Guardian ● Aug. 18, 2012

The one abjures the necessities of statesmanship, the other the self-restraints of patriotism.

From About Ireland by E. Lynn (Elizabeth Lynn) Linton

Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman did not immediately say whether he would retry McGhee for the murders, nor whether he would again seek the death penalty, which his predecessor abjured.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 3, 2025

With great subversiveness, Portis consistently abjured America’s postwar fetishes for progress, social mobility and affluence.

From Washington Post ● Apr. 13, 2023

Tunisia's army has historically abjured a political role and Saied has not yet tested the security forces by trying to mobilise them for a major crackdown on dissent.

From Reuters ● Dec. 18, 2022

His three Republican successors did not follow suit, Calvin Coolidge especially abjured such monarchical power.

From Fox News ● Jan. 10, 2019

In a sober ceremony, the Mexica abjured their old religion and embraced Christianity.

From "1491" by Charles C. Mann

As for abjuring Eurocentricity, the author himself refers to the “four allies plus China” that received permanent Security Council seats in 1945.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 9, 2026

Those that succeeded did so by offering apt substitutions for in-person performance or by abjuring it completely in favor of a frankly virtual experience.

From New York Times ● Sep. 30, 2022

Later Nate cites an additional, darker reason for abjuring female companionship: “You care a damn about a woman then you keep her as far away from this life as possible.”

From Washington Post ● Apr. 11, 2017

I have no logical or moral explanation for my abjuring of e-readers.

From Slate ● Jun. 17, 2015

After a royalist insurrection in 1655, a proclamation was issued announcing that persons suspected of Roman Catholicism would be required to take an oath abjuring the papal authority and transubstantiation.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 11, Slice 2 "French Literature" to "Frost, William" by Various