Definition of "temperament"

temperament

/ˈtɛm.pə.ɹə.mənt/

noun
countable and uncountable, plural temperaments
1. A person's usual manner of thinking, behaving or reacting.
  Quotations
  President Taft did not have the temperament either to dominate or to work with his Congress.
  1928, Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Happy Warrior Alfred E. Smith‎, Houghton Mifflin, page 13
2. A tendency to become irritable or angry.
3. (music) The altering of certain intervals from their correct values in order to improve the moving from key to key.
4. (psychology) Individual differences in behavior that are biologically based and are relatively independent of learning, system of values and attitudes.
5. (obsolete) A moderate and proportionable mixture of elements or ingredients in a compound; the condition in which elements are mixed in their proper proportions.
  Quotations
  If I will aske meere Philosophers, what the soule is, I shall finde amongst them, that will tell me, it is nothing, but the temperament and harmony, and just and equall composition of the Elements in the body, which produces all those faculties which we ascribe to the soule […]
  1624, John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVIII., in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin, New York: Modern Library (1952), pp. 442-444
6. (obsolete) Any state or condition as determined by the proportion of its ingredients or the manner in which they are mixed; consistence, composition; mixture.

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