due course

English

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Noun

due course (usually uncountable, plural due courses)

1. (idiomatic) Regular or appropriate passage or occurrence
   • a. 1399, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

     You all know that in the due course of time / If you continue scratching on a stone, / Little by little some image thereon / Will he engraven.

   • 1590, William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

     Let us be cleared / Of being tyrannous, since we so openly / Proceed in justice, which shall have due course, / Even to the guilt or the purgation.

   • This is all according to the due Course of Things: […]

   • a. 1803, Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

     […] but it did not oppress them by any means so long; and, after a due course of useless conjecture, that “it was a strange business, and that he must be a very strange man,” grew enough for all their indignation and wonder; […]

   • 1898, Justin McCarthy, The Story of Gladstone's Life, page 27:

     The Reform Bill, although the Duke of Wellington described it as " a revolution by due course of law," set up in fact but a very limited suffrage, […] ]

Quotations

• For quotations using this term, see Citations:due course.