1 [C,usually pl.,U] a moral rule or a strong belief that influences your actions:
He has high moral principles. * I refuse to lie about it; it's against my principles. * Stick to your principles and tell him you won't do it. * She refuses to allow her family to help her as a matter of principle. * He doesn't invest in the arms industry on principle.
2 [C] a law, a rule or a theory that sth is based on:
the principles and practice of writing reports * The principle behind it is very simple. * There are three fundamental principles of teamwork. * Discussing all these details will get us nowhere; we must get back to first principles (= the most basic rules).
3 [C] a belief that is accepted as a reason for acting or thinking in a particular way:
the principle that free education should be available for all children
4 [sing.] a general or scientific law that explains how sth works or why sth happens:
the principle that heat rises * A tidal current turbine is similar in principle to a windmill.
IDIOMS
in principle
1 if something can be done in principle, there is no good reason why it should not be done although it has not yet been done and there may be some difficulties:
In principle there is nothing that a human can do that a machine might not be able to do one day.
2 in general but not in detail:
They have agreed to the proposal in principle but we still have to negotiate the terms.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
Where does this definition of principle come from?
This entry for principle is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is principle a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, principle is tagged as noun.
Does principle appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — principle appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
