The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations by David Grambs
Authors: David Grambs
Ads: Link
cluster of weapons or armor
trophy
Colored red ochre, blue and tan, they paraded along the walls in that peculiar frontal way of Egyptians, with vultures on their palms, sheaves of wheat, water lilies and lutes. They were accompanied by lion, scarabs, owl, oxen and dismembered feet. E. L. DOCTOROW, Ragtime
curved band (often with an inscription on it)
ribbon
thin curling or spiral form like a leafless stem
tendril
Light and Colors
And there I saw myself as a man might expect, except that my skin was very white, as the old fiend’s had been white, and my eyes had been transformed from their usual blue to a mingling of violet and cobalt that was softly iridescent. My hair had a high luminous sheen, and when I ran my fingers back through it I felt a new and strange vitality there.
ANNE RICE, The Vampire Lestat
The woman’s face was Chinese, brown and withered like a ginger root; she wore dark blue clothes, a necklace of turquoises and sharp little silver knives, and her hair in pigtails like two grey wires.
RUMER GODDEN, Black Narcissus
Framed in the pale triangle ahead, the mountain showed again, gray at first, then silver, then pink as the earliest sun rays caught the summit. J
AMES HILTON, Lost Horizon
“And not only paper, but cotton fibre, linen fibre, wool fibre, woody fibre, and bone, Kemp, flesh, Kemp, hair, Kemp, nails and nerves, Kemp, in fact the whole fabric of a man except the red of his blood and the black pigment of hair, are all made up of transparent, colourless tissue. So little suffices to make us visible one to the other. For the most part the fibres of a living creature are no more opaque than water.“
H . G . WELLS, The Invisible Man
LIGHT
without light
dark, dusky, unlighted, unilluminated, unlit, obscure,
tenebrous, stygian, caliginous, fuliginous, sunless
having or showing forth little light
dim, dingy, murky, darkish
shadowy
shady, gloomy, umbral, umbrageous
giving forth light
shining, beaming, bright, illuminated, illumined, luminous,
irradiated, radiant, lucent, lustrous, luminiferous
very bright
brilliant, glaring, blazing, blinding, refulgent, effulgent
lighted
lit, lit up, alight, aglow, irradiated
sparkling
glittering, scintillating, coruscating, twinkling
sparkling or shining in a subdued way
shimmering, shimmery
giving off reflected light
glinting, gleaming
shining with reflected light
glistening
flashing
fulgurant, fulgurating
The houses of the central village were quite unlike the casual and higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of the mountain villages he knew; they stood in a continuous row on either side of a central street of astonishing cleanness; here and there their part-coloured facade was pierced by a door, and not a solitary window broke their even frontage. They were parti-coloured with extraordinary irregularity; smeared with a sort of plaster that was sometimes grey, sometimes drab, sometimes slate-coloured or dark brown; ...
H. G. WELLS, “The Country of the Blind”
The advance guard of the expected procession now appeared in the great gateway, a troop of halberdiers. They were dressed in striped hose of black and tawny, velvet caps graced at the sides with silver roses, and doublets of murrey- and-blue cloth embroidered on the front and back with the three feathers, the prince’s blazon, woven in gold. Their halberd staves were covered with crimson velvet, fastened with gilt nails, and ornamented with gold tassels.
MARK TWAIN, The Prince and the Pauper
These men who looked steadily into their platinum igniter flames as they lit their eternally burning black pipes. They and their charcoal hair and soot-colored brows and bluish-ash-smeared cheeks where they had shaven close; but their heritage showed.
RAY BRADBURY, Fahrenheit 451
flashing occasionally or fitfully
winking
flashing regularly
blinking, stroboscopic
flashing weakly or going out
fluttering,
trophy
Colored red ochre, blue and tan, they paraded along the walls in that peculiar frontal way of Egyptians, with vultures on their palms, sheaves of wheat, water lilies and lutes. They were accompanied by lion, scarabs, owl, oxen and dismembered feet. E. L. DOCTOROW, Ragtime
curved band (often with an inscription on it)
ribbon
thin curling or spiral form like a leafless stem
tendril
Light and Colors
And there I saw myself as a man might expect, except that my skin was very white, as the old fiend’s had been white, and my eyes had been transformed from their usual blue to a mingling of violet and cobalt that was softly iridescent. My hair had a high luminous sheen, and when I ran my fingers back through it I felt a new and strange vitality there.
ANNE RICE, The Vampire Lestat
The woman’s face was Chinese, brown and withered like a ginger root; she wore dark blue clothes, a necklace of turquoises and sharp little silver knives, and her hair in pigtails like two grey wires.
RUMER GODDEN, Black Narcissus
Framed in the pale triangle ahead, the mountain showed again, gray at first, then silver, then pink as the earliest sun rays caught the summit. J
AMES HILTON, Lost Horizon
“And not only paper, but cotton fibre, linen fibre, wool fibre, woody fibre, and bone, Kemp, flesh, Kemp, hair, Kemp, nails and nerves, Kemp, in fact the whole fabric of a man except the red of his blood and the black pigment of hair, are all made up of transparent, colourless tissue. So little suffices to make us visible one to the other. For the most part the fibres of a living creature are no more opaque than water.“
H . G . WELLS, The Invisible Man
LIGHT
without light
dark, dusky, unlighted, unilluminated, unlit, obscure,
tenebrous, stygian, caliginous, fuliginous, sunless
having or showing forth little light
dim, dingy, murky, darkish
shadowy
shady, gloomy, umbral, umbrageous
giving forth light
shining, beaming, bright, illuminated, illumined, luminous,
irradiated, radiant, lucent, lustrous, luminiferous
very bright
brilliant, glaring, blazing, blinding, refulgent, effulgent
lighted
lit, lit up, alight, aglow, irradiated
sparkling
glittering, scintillating, coruscating, twinkling
sparkling or shining in a subdued way
shimmering, shimmery
giving off reflected light
glinting, gleaming
shining with reflected light
glistening
flashing
fulgurant, fulgurating
The houses of the central village were quite unlike the casual and higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of the mountain villages he knew; they stood in a continuous row on either side of a central street of astonishing cleanness; here and there their part-coloured facade was pierced by a door, and not a solitary window broke their even frontage. They were parti-coloured with extraordinary irregularity; smeared with a sort of plaster that was sometimes grey, sometimes drab, sometimes slate-coloured or dark brown; ...
H. G. WELLS, “The Country of the Blind”
The advance guard of the expected procession now appeared in the great gateway, a troop of halberdiers. They were dressed in striped hose of black and tawny, velvet caps graced at the sides with silver roses, and doublets of murrey- and-blue cloth embroidered on the front and back with the three feathers, the prince’s blazon, woven in gold. Their halberd staves were covered with crimson velvet, fastened with gilt nails, and ornamented with gold tassels.
MARK TWAIN, The Prince and the Pauper
These men who looked steadily into their platinum igniter flames as they lit their eternally burning black pipes. They and their charcoal hair and soot-colored brows and bluish-ash-smeared cheeks where they had shaven close; but their heritage showed.
RAY BRADBURY, Fahrenheit 451
flashing occasionally or fitfully
winking
flashing regularly
blinking, stroboscopic
flashing weakly or going out
fluttering,
Similar Books
