Meaning of New Year's resolution | Babel Free

Definitions

A vow that one makes on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day for the coming year.

Equivalents

Examples

“He made a New Year’s resolution to quit smoking.”

“Felt that I had reason, from the stupidity of my heart, to fear that my New-Year's resolutions were made too much in my own strength.”

“If you direct me, on your authority as a priest of our Church, to renounce these acquaintances as dangerous, and to put by all the books of Dissenters, I am here, ready, from this moment, to obey. It shall be my New Year's resolution.”

“Young man—young woman! There [the "book of human character"] is the journal of your daily life; there is the remembrancer that records no compliments, no flatteries, only the plain honest truth; blotted it may be with passages of sin and shame, and let us hope here and there with penitent tears; dedicated, let us pray, for its future pages, with a new year's resolution that shall be answered and blessed in the record.”

“I never saw but one person who succeeded in keeping a New Year's resolution, and he had pined away so rapidly in his physical and grown so abnormally in his moral man, that it was really painful to look at him.”

“The public library is safely and surely a blessing to the community. It drives out the dram-shops faster than New Year's resolutions. It is the friend of good manners, clean homes, and sweet reasonableness.”

“The railway department made one unanimous New Year's resolution,—"To work for a reduction of accidents, an improvement in service and an increase in revenue."”

“In a broad sense, New Year's resolutions have accompanied the world's cultures and civilizations for millennia. As far back as ancient Mesopotamia, people were resolved to set their affairs in order, clean their homes, return borrowed items, settle debts, and mend broken relationships before the turn of each year. […] The Puritans of Great Britain, a radical group of Christians born from the Protestant Reformation, have been credited with laying the groundwork for the modern New Year's resolutions in the West.”

“Despite her bad-girl persona, Lex had quickly ferreted out the true Amelia, and he undoubtedly already realized she was the type who would, eventually, want the white picket fence, kids, the whole deal. Despite his New Year's resolution though … would he want all that?”

“A 2022 New Year resolution for the industry must be to restore the publication and distribution of timetables.”

CEFR level