counterpoise

Molina, the embodiment of theatrical excellence, is perfectly cast as the rational counterpoise to Brady’s zealotry.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 7, 2023

Hope, Berger proposed, is what we counterpoise to the essential revelation of history—that we’ll decline, that we’ll die.

From The New Yorker ● Jan. 9, 2017

What Sofiya succeeds in doing in her novel is to counterpoise, to her husband’s inability to conjure love, her own utterly different vision.

From Slate ● Feb. 1, 2015

At times Bond acts as a counterpoise to Wanamaker's despair; at other times, as when she voices Eleanor's escalating insecurities, she brings her own tragic intensity to the role.

From The Guardian ● May 7, 2013

The communal system was springing up, the towns were receiving royal encouragement as a counterpoise to the authority of the nobles.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 11, Slice 2 "French Literature" to "Frost, William" by Various

In a cluttered information age, where attention is a prized and scarce commodity, Nuzzi and Lizza—with their perfectly counterpoised surnames—have somehow broken through.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 6, 2025

The baby is not a metaphor, the narrator warns us, yet her wild, untrammeled, inscrutable being is everywhere counterpoised by the internet’s similarly enigmatic existence.

From New York Times ● Feb. 16, 2021

In the more lush musical passages, she counterpoised a subtle sense of freeze-framing, with the dancers halting momentarily so we could absorb the length and reach of their unfolding shapes.

From Washington Post ● Oct. 25, 2019

It’s composed in a rare register: mourning and fury counterpoised by humor and a refusal of despair.

From New York Times ● Feb. 20, 2018

The government of Carthage,530 like that of Sparta and Rome, united three different authorities, which counterpoised and gave mutual assistance to one another.

From The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Grecians (Vol. 1 of 6) by Charles Rollin

P. B. Luther and Ignatius Loyola.—A parallel or counterpoising view of these two characters has been quoted in several publications, some of recent date; but in all it is attributed to a wrong source.

From Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. by George Bell

Tested in this way, a body would, of course, weigh precisely the same anywhere; for if the gravitation of the body is altered, so is also in equal proportion the gravitation of the counterpoising weights.

From The Story of the Heavens by Sir Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball

But that Fierceness and Strength, Sweetness and Selflessness, have only intensified as, with further evolution, they have extended further into Life and Consciousness, is shown when they tear themselves asunder from their counterpoising attributes.

From Feminism and Sex-Extinction by Arabella Kenealy

Peace, as opposed to war, is a tremendous counterpoising of forces, and it simply means an organised resistance.

From Father Payne by Arthur Christopher Benson

The attraction exerted on a flat armature across air gaps 2 millimeters thick was measured by counterpoising.

From Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 by Various