Definition of "claim" []

• To demand, ask for, or take as one's own or one's due: claim a reward; claim one's luggage at the airport carousel. (verb-transitive)
• To take in a violent manner as if by right: a hurricane that claimed two lives. (verb-transitive)
• To state to be true, especially when open to question; assert or maintain: claimed he had won the race; a candidate claiming many supporters. (verb-transitive)
• To deserve or call for; require: problems that claim her attention. (verb-transitive)
• A demand for something as rightful or due. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Since the time that photography laid its claim to be reckoned among the fine arts the attention of artists has been attracted first by the _claim_ and thereafter, with acknowledgments, to the _performance."
• "To regard sickness as a false claim, is to abate the fear of it; but this does not destroy the so-called fact of the _claim_."
• "_claim_, but it is observable that the claim failed, and that the supposed villain was adjudged to be a free man."