a. [f. FRACTION + -ARY2. Cf. Fr. fractionnaire.] a. = FRACTIONAL. b. Dealing with or carried on by fractions or fragments. c. Tending to divide into fractions.
a. 1674. Jeake, A Compleat Body of Arithmetick (1696), 32. But the further practise therewith must be referred to Fractionary or Contract Operations.
1847. Gilfillan, Leigh Hunt on the Pension LIst, in Tait’s Mag., XIV. 523/2. Every man that had read so much as his [Hood’s] ‘Song of the Shirt,’ or his ‘Bridge of Sighs,’ felt himself in debt to their author, and rejoiced at whatever was done, whether through private contribution or through the public funds, to discharge even a fractionary part of what would never in whole be defrayed.
b. 1840. Mrs. Carlyle, Lett., I. 128. Fritters away my time in fractionary writing, against the grain, and leaves me neither sense nor spirit for writing the letters which would suggest themselves in course of nature.
1847. De Quincey, Secret Societies, in Tait’s Mag., XIV. Oct., 666/1. It is certain that the military condition per se supplies some advantages towards a meditative apprehension of vast problems beyond what can be supplied by the fractionary life of petty brokerage or commerce.
c. 1867. William Alexander, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, in Contemporary Review, V. 154. The ‘fractionary’ ecclesiastical spirit of the African Christians has been traced in the enormous numbers of the African bishops.
