DORMIAT. Latin; literally, let him sleep. To take out a dormiat, i.e. a license to sleep. The licensed person is excused from attending early prayers in the Chapel, from a plea of being indisposed. Used in the English universities.—Gradus ad Cantab.
DOUBLE FIRST. At the University of Cambridge, Eng., a student who attains high honors in both the classical and the mathematical tripos.
The Calendar does not show an average of two "Double Firsts" annually for the last ten years out of one hundred and thirty-eight graduates in Honors.—Bristed's Five Years in an Eng. Univ., Ed. 2d, p. 91.
The reported saying of a distinguished judge,… "that the standard of a Double First was getting to be something beyond human ability," seems hardly an exaggeration.—Ibid., p. 224.
DOUBLE MAN. In the English universities, a student who is a proficient in both classics and mathematics.
"Double men," as proficients in both classics and mathematics are termed, are very rare.—Bristed's Five Years in an Eng. Univ., Ed. 2d, p. 91.
It not unfrequently happens that he now drops the intention of being a "double man," and concentrates himself upon mathematics. —Ibid., p. 104.
To one danger mathematicians are more exposed than either classical or double men,—disgust and satiety arising from exclusive devotion to their unattractive studies.—Ibid., p. 225.
DOUBLE MARKS. It was formerly the custom in Harvard College with the Professors in Rhetoric, when they had examined and corrected the themes of the students, to draw a straight line on the back of each one of them, under the name of the writer. Under the names of those whose themes were of more than ordinary correctness or elegance, two lines were drawn, which were called double marks.
They would take particular pains for securing the double mark of the English Professor to their poetical compositions.—Monthly Anthology, Boston, 1804, Vol. I. p. 104.