mutual

[ myoo-choo-uh l ]

SEE DEFINITION OF mutual

EXAMPLES FROM THE WEB FOR MUTUAL

The oath taken in the presence of the people becomes a mutual covenant.

Ascribes to the difference in each of their tempers their mutual love.

All ferocity must be misinterpretation of the divine law of harmony and mutual help.

Our meeting, after mutual recognition, was affectionate and cordial.

I oppose you only on account of our love and for our mutual happiness.

They often talked together of their mutual wish to adopt her.

The mother and son parted with feelings of mutual dissatisfaction.

And this we must not say to each other even now, by all the bonds of mutual honor and self-respect.

A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.

This persistency had struck the savant, and he asked a mutual friend to introduce him.

WORD ORIGIN

late 15c., originally of feelings, from Middle French mutuel (14c.), from Latin mutuus "reciprocal, done in exchange," from PIE root *mei- "to change, exchange" (see mutable).

Mutual Admiration Society (1851) seems to have been coined by Thoreau. Mutual fund is recorded from 1950. The Cold War's mutual assured destruction attested from 1966. (Assured destruction was an early 1960s term in U.S. military policy circles in reference to nuclear weapons as a deterrent, popularized c.1964 by Robert McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense under Lyndon Johnson, e.g. statement before House Armed Services Committee, Feb. 18, 1965; the mutual perhaps first added by Donald Brennan, conservative defense analyst and a public critic of the policy, who also noted the acronym MAD.)

mutual

EXAMPLES FROM THE WEB FOR MUTUAL

WORD ORIGIN

MORE RELATED WORDS FOR MUTUAL

reciprocal

related

relational

shared