portass

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

Old French porte-hors (“a kind of portable prayer-book”).

Noun

portass (plural portasses)

  1. (obsolete) A breviary; a prayer book.
    • Camden.
      An old priest always read in his portass mumpsimus domine for sumpsimus; whereof when he was admonished, he said that he now had used mumpsimus thirty years, and would not leave his old mumpsimus for their new sumpsimus.
    • Geoffrey Chaucer, The Shipman's Tale.
      By God and by this portehors I swere.
    • Edmund Spenser, Faerie Queene.
      In his hand his portesse still he bare, That much was worn, but therein little red; For of devotion he had little care.
    • John Bale's The Image of Both Churches.
      Their portases, bedes, temples, aultars.
    • Robert Wever, An Enterlude called lusty Juventus.
      Let me see your portous, gentle sir John.
    • 1535, Stephen Gardiner's De vera obedientia, Michael Wood.
      Boner hath set up again in Paules Salesburi Latin portace.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for portass in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.)

Anagrams
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