PERUSAL

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does perusal mean? 

• PERUSAL (noun)
  The noun PERUSAL has 1 sense:

1. reading carefully with intent to remember

  Familiarity information: PERUSAL used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PERUSAL (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Reading carefully with intent to remember

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Synonyms:

perusal; perusing; poring over; studying

Hypernyms ("perusal" is a kind of...):

reading (the cognitive process of understanding a written linguistic message)

Derivation:

peruse (examine or consider with attention and in detail)

 Context examples 

Widely different was the effect of a second perusal.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

So I snuffed the candle and resumed the perusal of "Marmion."

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Bless me, Copperfield!”—and then entered on the perusal of Mrs. Micawber's epistle.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

She had gone to her letters, and found it all as she supposed; and the re-perusal of these letters, after so long an interval, her poor son gone for ever, and all the strength of his faults forgotten, had affected her spirits exceedingly, and thrown her into greater grief for him than she had known on first hearing of his death.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

But Henry was too much amused by the interest he had raised to be able to carry it farther; he could no longer command solemnity either of subject or voice, and was obliged to entreat her to use her own fancy in the perusal of Matilda's woes.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

When his letter to Mrs. Weston arrived, Emma had the perusal of it; and she read it with a degree of pleasure and admiration which made her at first shake her head over her own sensations, and think she had undervalued their strength.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

But how can it, when it's so contradictory that I don't know whether I've written a promising book or broken all the ten commandments? cried poor Jo, turning over a heap of notices, the perusal of which filled her with pride and joy one minute, wrath and dismay the next.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

She paused over it for some time with indignant astonishment; then read it again and again; but every perusal only served to increase her abhorrence of the man, and so bitter were her feelings against him, that she dared not trust herself to speak, lest she might wound Marianne still deeper by treating their disengagement, not as a loss to her of any possible good but as an escape from the worst and most irremediable of all evils, a connection, for life, with an unprincipled man, as a deliverance the most real, a blessing the most important.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

Elizabeth noticed every sentence conveying the idea of uneasiness, with an attention which it had hardly received on the first perusal.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

I saw a girl sitting on a stone bench near; she was bent over a book, on the perusal of which she seemed intent: from where I stood I could see the title—it was Rasselas; a name that struck me as strange, and consequently attractive.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)