Definition of "pure"

Such was the origin of a friendship as warm and pure as any that ancient or modern history records.

1849–1861, Thomas Babington Macaulay, chapter 7, in The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, volumes (please specify |volume=I to V), London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans

A guinea is pure gold if it has in it no alloy.

1725, Isaac Watts, Logick: Or, The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth, […], 2nd edition, London: […] John Clark and Richard Hett, […], Emanuel Matthews, […], and Richard Ford, […], published 1726

Laye hondes sodely[suddenly] on no man nether be partaker of other mes[men's] synnes: kepe thy silfe pure.

c. 1530, William Tyndale (translator), Bible, 1 Timothy, 5:22

The [Isaac] Newton that emerges from the [unpublished] manuscripts is far from the popular image of a rational practitioner of cold and pure reason. The architect of modern science was himself not very modern. He was obsessed with alchemy.

2014 June 21, “Magician’s brain”, in The Economist, volume 411, number 8892

Well when ah's youngah, ah'd just light a candle rahn de dinna table play pure crazy 8s and spades vif my brotha til we lot dozed off...

2013 April 12, “Exclusive: Meet Derpuntae - Bermuda's first meme”, in The Bermuda Sun‎, archived from the original on 2022-12-12

I just get pure shy with the interview cats.

1996, Trainspotting (film)

... the establishment of an inferior College, and the consequent connexion of the many thousands of British practitioners in medicine and surgery with a subordinate institution, and one that should be subservient to the government of the pures.

1845, The Lancet, page 187

Took a drop of the pure, to keep my spirits from sinking, […]

c. 1870, D. K. Gavan, Rocky Road to Dublin

All interpretive frames will impose their categories on the object of historical analysis, and I am not proposing that this narrative of the "pures"; be rejected in favor of some phantasmatic framework that claims to derive more purely from the sources themselves. I will show in chapter 3 that, since the "pures" possibly did not even exist […]

1998, Christopher Leigh Connery, The Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China, Rowman & Littlefield, page 30

[…] Dogs'-dung is called ‘Pure’, from its cleansing and purifying properties.

1851, H. Mayhew, London Labour and the London poor, vII. 142/1

Mary smelled the rancid odor of the tannery on the right side of the road. […] "What is that, Mary?" Jake asked."'Tis a bag for collecting pure. That is going to be your job, Jake. You are to collect pure.""Pure? What is pure?""Pure is another word for dung," Mary answered.

2001, Wendy Lawton, chapter 8, in The Tinker's Daughter

[…] surely there was something better for him than chasing the pure (footnote: A term, technically speaking, for dog muck, much prized by the tanneries.) […]

2013, Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam, page 28