[f. STAGNANT a.: see -ANCY.]
1. The condition of being stagnant or without motion, flow or circulation.
1659. Hammond, On Ps. cx. 7. The stagnancy or standing still of these waters.
1665. Needham, Med. Medicinæ, 410. The bloud should be preserved from Stagnancy.
1853. Ruskin, Stones Ven., III. i. § 47. 31. We would not wantonly … stay the mountain winds into pestilential stagnancy.
1873. Morley, Rousseau, I. vii. 263. Suddenly heated stagnancies of the blood.
1885. J. Payn, Luck Darrells, II. xxiv. 161. The sleepy moat, preserved from stagnancy by a thread of running stream.
b. transf. and fig.
1837. Carlyle, Fr. Rev., I. V. v. When the long-enthralled soul, from amid its chains and squalid stagnancy, arises.
1849. Robertson, Serm., Ser. I. ii. (1866), 19. It stirs the stagnancy of our existence.
1903. F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality, I. 6. That unseen world appeared … as a realm of law; a region not of mere emotional vagueness or stagnancy of adoration, but of definite progress.
2. Anything stagnant.
1681. Cotton, Wond. Peake, 55. For, though the Country People are so wise To call these Rivers, they’r but Stagnancies, Left by the flood.
1699. L. Wafer, Voy. (1729), 310. The Stagnancies and Decliuities of the ground, and the very droppings of the trees, in the wet season, afford water enough.
1818. Coleridge, Lett. to Mrs. Gillman, Lett. (1895), 692. The number of unnecessary fish ponds and other stagnancies immediately around the house.
b. transf. and fig.
1871. Carlyle, in Mrs. Carlyle, Lett., I. 147. Those sad currents and sad stagnancies of thought.
1902. [see PECCANCY 1].
