relic

noun

1. 1

   That which remains; that which is left after loss or decay; a remaining portion.

   […] let him not ask our pardon; The nature of his great offence is dead, And deeper than oblivion we do bury The incensing relics of it […]

   Though a Cup of cold water from ſome hand may not be without it's reward, yet ſtick not thou for Wine and Oyl for the Wounds of the Distreſſed, and treat the poor, as our Saviour did the Multitude, to the reliques of ſome baskets.

   1797, Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, London: T. Cadell Jun. & W. Davies, Volume 2, Chapter 6, p. 184, It appeared, from […] the ruins scattered distantly along its skirts, to be a part of the city entirely abandoned by the modern inhabitants to the reliques of its former grandeur.

   She exerted the last relics of her wasted strength to gain a prominent position upon a ledge of the rocks behind her […]

2. 2

   Something old and outdated, possibly kept for sentimental reasons.

   Published in 1982, the now out-of-print computer guide is a real relic, full of dozens of black-and-white pictures of large, bulky computers that you would sooner find in the Smithsonian than on anybody's desk today.

3. 3

   A part of the body of a saint, or an ancient religious object, kept for veneration.

   Why ſhould onely I, Of all the other Princes of the World, Be caſ’d-vp, like a holy Relique?

   No Anchorite in the exstasy of devotion, ever adored a relique with more fervour than that with which I kissed this inimitable proof of my charmer’s candour, generosity and affection!

   […] the duke, in order to support their drooping hopes, ordered a procession to be made with the reliques of St. Valori, and prayers to be said for more favourable weather.

   During that time he had been living with his youthful memory of her; but she had doubtless had other and more tangible companionship. Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something apart; but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim chapel, where there was not time to pray every day....

4. 4

   A particle or entity that has existed since the Big Bang.

   One of the primary targets of current and especially future cosmological observations are light thermal relics of the hot big bang.

verb

1. 1

   To cause (an object) to appear old or worn, to distress.

   Age has become a fetish in the world of guitars where large amounts of money are paid for a specially “reliced” guitar. As one company, Relic Guitars, which offers this service claims, “The idea behind relicing a guitar is to artificially replicate the natural wear that occurs over many years […]”

   The whole idea of relicing an instrument is to accelerate the wear and tear that normally occurs over decades.

   He's since run his own shop, building, winding/making pickups, doing restorations and relicing guitars.

adjective

1. 1

   Pertaining to the Big Bang.

   A more realistic model must include the presence of perturbations whose extra energy can produce distortions of the relic radiation spectrum.

   While Lasserre acknowledges that physicists are still decades away from observing a direct relic neutrino signal, he says that this work represents an important step forward in the search for the holy grail of neutrino physics.

   We carry out model-independent analysis to obtain the temperature at the end of inflation and the estimate for the upper bound on the Hubble parameter to circumvent the problem due to relic gravitational waves

   This has been very successfully employed by measuring the relic abundances of the light elements, which were synthesized about three minutes after the beginning of the universe during big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN).

Forms

plural

relics

past tense

reliced, relicked

past participle

reliced, relicked

present participle

relicing, relicking

third person singular

relics