seeming

• seeming friendship
• O, good my lord, you have lost a friend / And I dare swear you borrow not that face / Of seeming sorrow—it is sure your own. - c. 1596–1599 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, […]....
• I'le hide my anger in a seeming calm, And what I have to do, consult the while, And mask my vengeance underneath a smile. - 1671, Aphra Behn, The Amorous Prince, or, The Curious Husband, London: Thomas Dring, act II,...

Synonyms: apparent ostensible

• My loue is strengthned though more weake in seeming I loue not lesse, thogh lesse the show appeare, - 1609, William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 102”, in Shake-speares Sonnets. […], London: By G[eorge] Eld for T[homas] T[horpe]...
• And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming - 1845 February, — Quarles [pseudonym; Edgar Allan Poe], “The Raven”, in The American Review, volume I, number II, New York, N.Y.; London: Wiley & Putnam,...
• I am not what I seemed to her, he thought, and doubtless she is not what she seemed to me, but it is our lot to be irrevocably condemned to seemings and to deserve them too. - 1971, Iris Murdoch, An Accidental Man, New...

• Nothing more cleare vnto their seeming, then that a new Jerusalem being often spoken of in Scripture, they vndoubtedly were themselues that newe Ierusalem, - 1604, Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall...
• […] in her ears the sound Yet rung of his perswasive words, impregn’d With Reason, to her seeming, and with Truth; - 1667, John Milton, “Book VIII”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be...