erection

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   Anything erected or built.

   The Empire State Building was once the world's tallest erection.

2. 2
   noun

   Formal approval and official establishment of an institution such as a society or a monastery by higher church authorities.

   There is some obscurity attaching to the only other one of those alleged erections of parishes, the case of Foot Dee, near Aberdeen.

3. 3
   noun

   The physiological process by which erectile tissue, such as a penis or clitoris, becomes erect by being engorged with blood.

   I think that the case also demonstrates some singular aspects of the penis as a narrator of tales, specifically the way in which the erection of a penis falls outside a man's conscious control and therefore threatens a carefully constructed master legal narrative in which bodily self-control graphically represents the self-government contemplated by a democratic legal society.

4. 4
   noun

   The state or quality of being erect from engorgement with blood.

   […] but our experienc'd matron very soon, by chafing it with her hands, brought it to swell to that size and erection I had before seen it up to.

Borrowed from Latin ērectiō, ērectiōnis, noun of action from perfect passive participle ērectus, from verb erigō, from prefix ē- (“out of”) + regō, + action suffix -iō.

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