subserve
Americanverb (used with object)
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subserves,
present (3rd person singular)
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subserved,
past participle, past
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subserving
present participle
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to be useful or instrumental in promoting (a purpose, action, etc.).
Light exercise subserves digestion.
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Obsolete. to serve as a subordinate.
verb
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to be helpful or useful to
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obsolete to be subordinate to
Other Word Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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subservesimple
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subservessimple
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have subservedperfect
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has subservedperfect
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am subservingprogressive
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are subservingprogressive
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is subservingprogressive
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have been subservingperfect progressive
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has been subservingperfect progressive
Past
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subservedsimple
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had subservedperfect
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was subservingprogressive
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were subservingprogressive
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had been subservingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of subserve
1610–20; < Latin subservīre, equivalent to sub- sub- + servīre to serve
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
These auditory and reward network pathways likely subserve the mind’s ability to form predictions and expectations during music listening.
From Scientific American ● Sep. 18, 2021
Resting-state fMRI has shown that brain networks that subserve motor and even cognitive functions like language, memory and emotion are continuously and dynamically active in the resting brain.
From Scientific American ● Aug. 7, 2017
In a paper published in The Lancet in February 1916, he posited a “physical or chemical change and a break in the links of the chain of neurons which subserve a particular function.”
From New York Times ● Jun. 10, 2016
In The Trial, setting and camera steadily subserve the subject.
From Time Magazine Archive
He took her away from you because he raised her as he has willed my cousin, his wife, to subserve to him.
From The Homesteader A Novel by Oscar Micheaux
If translated to humans, these findings have important implications for understanding how the hippocampus subserves various cognitive functions that rely on it, such as episodic memory, navigation and imagination.
From Scientific American ● Jun. 3, 2013
It simply subserves, extends, illuminates and liberates Shakespeare's poem.
From Time Magazine Archive
Fair dealing and kindliness, prudence and economy in order to procure the comforts and simpler luxuries of life, reading and knowledge for those uses which wisdom subserves, constituted the real essence of his teaching.
From Benjamin Franklin by John T. (John Torrey) Morse
In a word, everything is infinite, and subserves an infinite purpose.
From Nature and Culture by Harvey Rice
When freedom subserves this end, it is a good; when it defeats this end, it is an evil.
From Cotton is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments Comprising the Writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartrwright on This Important Subject by E. N. Elliott
Upon the whole, it must be insisted that religious belief has subserved a large purpose in the economy of human progress.
From History of Human Society by Frank W. (Frank Wilson) Blackmar
For if the passage had only given the meridian plane, but without permitting the astronomer to observe the southing of any fixed star, it would have subserved only one-half its purposes as a meridional instrument.
From The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 by Various
The magnification of the image reminds us of the second purpose which is subserved by a telescope.
From Pleasures of the telescope An Illustrated Guide for Amateur Astronomers and a Popular Description of the Chief Wonders of the Heavens for General Readers by Garrett Putman Serviss
WELFARE, public, subserved by passage of Freedmen's Bureau Bill, 149.
From History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States by William Horatio Barnes
In brief, unless some special purpose is subserved thereby, an audience should not long be left in the dark as to the form in which the dramatist thinks he has cast his play.
From Dramatic Technique by George Pierce Baker
Considering the hugging behavior and similar part of the gene, the authors say there’s evidence that “the neural mechanisms subserving social behaviors exist in O. bimaculoides.”
From Washington Post ● Sep. 20, 2018
Its repeated occurrence in Mr. Arnold's pages is but another instance of poetic feeling subserving the ends of criticism.
From Views and Reviews by Henry James
Practically the author of the dual government, he believed emphatically in subserving the lesser to the greater, although endowing the States with sufficient power for self-protection.
From The Conqueror by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
"The elements of the inorganic world are subserving the purposes of organic life."
From The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 by Aaron Walker
The first germs of science were very simple, existing in connection with Art, and subserving the purposes of priestcraft.
From The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 Devoted To Literature And National Policy by Various
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
