5. That which prescribes a method of procedure; a rule or regulation made by competent authority; as,
the rules and orders of the senate.
The church hath authority to establish that for an order at one time which at another time it may abolish.
Hooker. 6. A command; a mandate; a precept; a direction.
Upon this new fright, an order was made by both houses for disarming all the papists in England.
Clarendon. 7. Hence: A commission to purchase, sell, or supply goods; a direction, in writing, to pay money, to furnish
supplies, to admit to a building, a place of entertainment, or the like; as, orders for blankets are large.
In those days were pit orders — beshrew the uncomfortable manager who abolished them.
Lamb. 8. A number of things or persons arranged in a fixed or suitable place, or relative position; a rank; a row; a
grade; especially, a rank or class in society; a group or division of men in the same social or other position; also,
a distinct character, kind, or sort; as, the higher or lower orders of society; talent of a high order.
They are in equal order to their several ends.
Jer. Taylor.
Various orders various ensigns bear.
Granville.
Which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little short of crime.
Hawthorne.
9. A body of persons having some common honorary distinction or rule of obligation; esp., a body of
religious persons or aggregate of convents living under a common rule; as, the Order of the Bath; the
Franciscan order.
Find a barefoot brother out,
One of our order, to associate me.
Shak.
The venerable order of the Knights Templars.
Sir W. Scott. 10. An ecclesiastical grade or rank, as of deacon, priest, or bishop; the office of the Christian ministry; —
often used in the plural; as, to take orders, or to take holy orders, that is, to enter some grade of the
ministry.
11. (Arch.) The disposition of a column and its component parts, and of the entablature resting upon it,
in classical architecture; hence (as the column and entablature are the characteristic features of classical
architecture) a style or manner of architectural designing.
The Greeks used three different orders, easy to distinguish, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. The Romans
added the Tuscan, and changed the Doric so that it is hardly recognizable, and also used a modified
Corinthian called Composite. The Renaissance writers on architecture recognized five orders as orthodox
or classical, — Doric (the Roman sort), Ionic, Tuscan, Corinthian, and Composite. See Illust. of
Capital.
12. (Nat. Hist.) An assemblage of genera having certain important characters in common; as, the Carnivora
and Insectivora are orders of Mammalia.
The Linnæan artificial orders of plants rested mainly on identity in the numer of pistils, or agreement in
some one character. Natural orders are groups of genera agreeing in the fundamental plan of their
flowers and fruit. A natural order is usually (in botany) equivalent to a family, and may include several
tribes.
