abandon

verb

1. (transitive)To give up or relinquish control of, to surrender or to give oneself over, or to yield to one's emotions.

   “[…] he abandoned himself […] to his favourite vice.”

2. (transitive)To desist in doing, practicing, following, holding, or adhering to; to turn away from; to permit to lapse; to renounce; to discontinue.

   “In order to grant the rich these pleasures, the social contract is reconfigured. […] The public realm is privatised, the regulations restraining the ultra–wealthy and the companies they control are abandoned, and Edwardian levels of inequality are almost fetishised.”

3. (transitive)To leave behind; to desert, as in a ship, a position, or a person, typically in response to overwhelming odds or impending dangers; to forsake, in spite of a duty or responsibility.

   “Many baby girls have been abandoned on the streets of Beijing.”

   “He was abandoned on the island with no one to help him.”

   “She abandoned her husband for a new man.”

   “Hope was overthrown, and yet could not be abandoned.”

4. (obsolete, transitive)To subdue; to take control of.
5. (obsolete, transitive)To cast out; to banish; to expel; to reject.

   “Being all this time abandoned from your bed.”

6. (transitive)To no longer exercise a right, title, or interest, especially with no interest of reclaiming it again; to yield; to relinquish.

   “I hereby abandon my position as manager.”

7. (transitive)To surrender to the insurer (an insured item), so as to claim a total loss.

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)A yielding to natural impulses or inhibitions; freedom from artificial constraint, with loss of appreciation of consequences. (Now especially in the phrase with abandon.)

   “with gay abandon, with wild abandon”

   “The Italian painters have an abandon in their chiar' oscuro which mellows up their flesh tints in a way that no other school can imitate : the frigidity of their outline is another remarkable feature, and the harmony of their impasto is unique.”

   “I envy those chroniclers who assert with reckless but sincere abandon: 'I was there. I saw it happen. It happened thus.'”

   “They needed to have an abandon in their performance that you just can’t get out of people in the middle of the night when they’re barefoot.”

   “My dreams were largely based on the works of Dickens (his Mugby Junction stories), Thackeray (Jeames on the Gauge Question), and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories I kept devouring with gluttonous abandon.”

2. (countable, obsolete, uncountable)Abandonment; relinquishment.