Definition of "indent" in Anglais

noun

1. A cut or notch in the margin of anything, or a recess like a notch.

2. A stamp; an impression.

3. A certificate, or intended certificate, issued by the government of the United States at the close of the Revolution, for the principal or interest of the public debt.

4. A requisition or order for supplies, sent to the commissariat of an army.

verb

1. (transitive) To notch; to jag; to cut into points like a row of teeth

   • to indent the edge of paper

2. (intransitive) To be cut, notched, or dented.

3. To dent; to stamp or to press in; to impress

   • indent a smooth surface with a hammer
   • to indent wax with a stamp

4. (historical) To cut the two halves of a document in duplicate, using a jagged or wavy line so that each party could demonstrate that their copy was part of the original whole.

5. (intransitive, reflexive, obsolete) To enter into a binding agreement by means of such documents; to formally commit (to doing something); to contract.

   • The Polanders indented with Henry, Duke of Anjou, their new-chosen king, to bring with him an hundred families of artificers into Poland.
   • 1803, John Browne Cutting, “A Succinct History of Jamaica” in Robert Charles Dallas, The History of the Maroons, London: Longman and Rees, Volume 1, pp. xlii-xliii, […] he accidentally met with the commander of a trading vessel bound to Barbadoes, and being actuated by an adventurous spirit, [he] bargained for a passage by indenting himself to serve a planter for four years after his arrival in that island.

6. (transitive, obsolete) To engage (someone), originally by means of indented contracts.

   • to indent a young man to a shoemaker; to indent a servant

7. (typography) To begin (a line or lines) at a greater or lesser distance from the margin. See indentation, and indention. Normal indent pushes in a line or paragraph. "Hanging indent" pulls the line out into the margin.

   • to indent the first line of a paragraph one em
   • to indent the second paragraph two ems more than the first

8. (obsolete, intransitive) To crook or turn; to wind in and out; to zigzag.

9. (military, India, Singapore, dated elsewhere) To make an order upon; to draw upon, as for military stores.

   • What is the rule observed in India in indenting upon England for military stores ?