0 past simple and past participle of abdicate
1 If a king or queen abdicates, he or she makes a formal statement that he or she no longer wants to be king or queen:
King Edward VIII abdicated (the British throne) in 1936.
2 to stop controlling or managing something that you are in charge of:
She abdicated all responsibility for the project.
Not only were the violators not punished, but local officials stopped convening meetings or demanding compulsory labour, as though they had abdicated their authority.
On the contrary, he had let himself be prevailed upon to abandon his kingdom without a government and had thus abdicated the throne.
The point is that government has a responsibility to decide which cannot be abdicated by deference to a belief in the inevitability of market forces.
As they condescended (or abdicated their distinction), visitors were required to act like the people they were trying to help.
They thus abdicated their monopoly on leadership.
Condescension originally denoted an act whereby an authority figure temporarily abdicated the privileges of his or her position for the benefit of a dependant.
Morality as such was abdicated in favour of an immutable 'cosmic process'.
If he abdicated from his position of wanting the compulsory powers, a great deal of the difficulty would go.
