toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

archaic
in a sentence

show 118 more with this conextual meaning
  • Though the whole thing should be archaic and wrong, it worked.†   (source)
  • They plunged through heavy walls of sound, mountains of archaic thought, valleys of mood music, bad shoe sessions and footling bats and suddenly heard a girl's voice.†   (source)
  • Or are you in an archaic mood?†   (source)
  • The apparently foreign. language was a simple corruption of archaic seedship English not so far removed from the indigene argot of the plantations.†   (source)
  • All threeof these mythologies work as sources of material, of correspondences, of depth for the modern writer (and every writer is modern—even John Dryden was not archaic when he was writing), and provided they're recognizable to the reader, they enrich and enhance the reading experience.†   (source)
  • Even the archaic form of communication known as e-mail is strangely unreliable.†   (source)
  • Desktops encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects inadequate team spirit.†   (source)
  • Legwarmers lend a note of paramilitary poise, a hint of archaic warriorhood.†   (source)
  • Only the summer before, he had forgotten how to speak English and had reverted to his native archaic French.†   (source)
  • I should know better than to use such an archaic, inaccurate term.†   (source)
  • A master luthier, Illien transformed the archaic, fragile, unwieldy court lute into the marvelous, versatile, seven-string trouper's lute we use today.†   (source)
  • He punctuated his speech with little "hah"s and "hum"s and archaic expressions, on top of which his penchant for modern slang teetered precariously.†   (source)
  • The shaman's declamations were repeatedly truncated by gusts of wind, but Eragon caught snatches of the ancient language-strangely twisted and mispronounced-interspersed with dwarf and Urgal words, all of which were united by an archaic dialect of Eragon's own tongue.†   (source)
  • Such individuals can be considered to be murder-prone in the sense of either carrying a surcharge of aggressive energy or having an unstable ego defense system that periodically allows the naked and archaic expression of such energy.†   (source)
  • The earrings were heavy and archaic, suggesting the shape of a feathered arrow: Rufus never really liked them.†   (source)
  • The buildings, particularly the ones for the prison staff, were clean and contemporary; but the housing for the prisoners was archaic and dirty.†   (source)
  • He was singing the news with his old, out-of-tune voice, accompanying himself with the same archaic accordion that Sir Walter Raleigh had given him in the Guianas and keeping time with his great walking feet that were cracked from saltpeter.†   (source)
  • Torture is such an old-fashioned archaic word.†   (source)
  • He sang archaic European hymns in his church choir, and joined an otherwise all-African dance troupe that competed in a nationally televised tribal dance contest for Saba Saba, Tanzania's independence day.†   (source)
  • It's old and wooden and archaic but I won't use another one, and I won't take the chance that it'll disappear if I leave it here; so I go back to get it.†   (source)
  • It was almost lunchtime, and the earliest arrivals were drifting into the headquarters mess halls, the enlisted men and officers separating into different dining halls on facing sides of the archaic rotunda.†   (source)
  • We're not going back to a more archaic form of execution," Judge Haig said.†   (source)
  • What a delightfully archaic term!†   (source)
  • The words are archaic.†   (source)
  • I'm sure that's a pretty archaic way of thinking (not to mention unliberated) and I may get over it in time.†   (source)
  • A fiche is an archaic stab at legitimacy, almost totally restricted to private banks on the Continent.†   (source)
  • The words of great truths that everyone had heard since birth, when crossed in unintelligible babble, seemed a fitting end, and the archaic Biblical rhythms, spoken like interweaving songs, gave the River Guard courage to add to the courage they had had before.†   (source)
  • They say it plays absolutely no role in our emotions and that its use as a symbol for love is based on archaic theories of it being the seat of the soul or something ridiculous like that.†   (source)
  • Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence.†   (source)
  • But yesterday was a past period in history, with laws and rules archaic as ancient Rome's.†   (source)
  • But here they had to rely on such archaic devices as paper and pencil-and even, incredible to relate, shorthand.†   (source)
  • Through the interstices, so to speak, of this tapestry of noise I heard two people in the next room making whoopee—the old man's archaic term for fornication.†   (source)
  • Usually these groups guard treasures hidden from the waves of conquest, the golden artifacts of an archaic Montezuma, or a mine so rich that its discovery would change the world.†   (source)
  • It was the image, ghost, archaic (as even Will Jr knew) but still compelling, that had once made Hodge seem to himself a fool and now made him a disappointment to his elder son.†   (source)
  • They liked and they marvelled at everything, most of all at the unceasing chatter of their quaint old driver, in whose speech archaic Russian forms, Tartar idioms, and local oddities of diction were punctuated with obscurities of his own invention.†   (source)
  • The sales staff began explaining the theory and practice of the archaic visual book while Reich slowly searched for the tattered brown volume that was his goal.†   (source)
  • I hope popular forms of psychotherapy will soon be considered archaic.
  • On Luna, we consider monogamy to be nothing more than archaic sentimentality.†   (source)
  • "It's an archaic instrument with no room for subtlety.†   (source)
  • A fist is more than the sum of its fingers, says the King, quoting an archaic proverb.†   (source)
  • I converted the archaic units to meters.†   (source)
  • It seemed archaic somehow, but I had seen it somewhere.†   (source)
  • Despite the archaic appearance of Vatican City, every single entrance, both public and private, is equipped with the most advanced sensing equipment known to man.†   (source)
  • This is the kind of touch they like: folk art, archaic, made by women, in their spare time, from things that have no further use.†   (source)
  • The system had filed him among the rejects, and what he was studying was considered — at the decision-making levels, the levels of real power — an archaic waste of time.†   (source)
  • Speaking in an archaic form of Greek, the gargoyle invited him to a meeting on the roof of the Cathedral of Notre Dame.†   (source)
  • His Italian skills were rocky at best, and the tiny penmanship and archaic language was making it slow going.†   (source)
  • It's archaic.†   (source)
  • To allow the talentless to have exalted privileges and suppress what could be the greatest minds in the world for the sake of an archaic organization system is cruel, and it only stops us from becoming the best we can be.†   (source)
  • Bishop Colenso, whose views on everything were considered unsound that day and are archaic in this, was the little dean's particular pet.†   (source)
  • Not archaic, just arcane.†   (source)
  • Its phrasing was very old, archaic.†   (source)
  • These flakes, it says in candid lettering the colours of lollipops, of fleecy cotton jogging suits, are not made from corrupt, overly commercial corn and wheat, but from little-known grains with hard-to-pronounce names — archaic, mystical.†   (source)
  • It's an archaic phrase.†   (source)
  • And even though the Witch of Endor was speaking to Scathach, Sophie could hear her voice in her head, talking to her, whispering ancient secrets, murmuring archaic spells, divulging a lifetime of knowledge in the space of heartbeats and breaths.†   (source)
  • "It looks as if they used a hellwhip on this place," said Martin Silenus, using an archaic term for any high-energy laser weapon.†   (source)
  • The superscription "The Handmaid's Tale" was ap300 pended to it by Professor Wade, partly in homage to the great Geoffrey Chaucer; but those of you who know Professor Wade informally, as I do, will understand when I say that I am sure all puns were intentional, particularly that having to do with the archaic vulgar signification of the word tail; that being, to some extent, the bone, as it were, of contention, in that phase of Gileadean society of which our saga treats.†   (source)
  • It struck him that they were wonderfully archaic, like something out of a textbook of the earliest spacecraft.†   (source)
  • Johnny told me, his voice very soft, almost melodic, lapsing sometimes into an English too archaic to be understood but far more beautiful to the ear than the hybrid tongue we speak today.†   (source)
  • The shyness which had been part of Theo Lane's vulnerability was still there, as evidenced by the way he now needlessly adjusted his archaic horn-rimmed glasses-the young diplomat's one affectation.†   (source)
  • What the Cantos lacked in sales it made up for in negative reviews: "Indecipherable… archaic… irrelevant to all current concerns," said the Times Book Section.†   (source)
  • Siri knew all about the early days of the Hegira-at least insofar as they pertained to the Maui-Covenant and the colonists-and she occasionally would come up with delightful bits of archaic trivia or phraseology, but she knew nothing of post-Hegira realities.†   (source)
  • Their society. was archaically and delightfully Prussian, militaristic to a fault, arrogant in their economic pretensions, xenophobic to the point of happily enlisting to wipe out the "Ouster Menace."†   (source)
  • Actually he asks if he can carry my shopping bags, which look heavy and are, and I let him, feeling silly and archaic and looking first to make sure no women I know are watching.†   (source)
  • A tall, diamond-shaped shield was slung across his back, an archaic helm rested in the crook of his left arm, and around his waist was belted his bronze-colored sword, Naegling.†   (source)
  • He calls long distance, his voice on the phone fading in and out like a wartime broadcast, plaintive with defeat, with an archaic sadness that seems, more and more, to be that of men in general.†   (source)
  • He stared into the sun, head raised, unbearable, and though it had been taken when he was young, it was not the face of a young man; only something archaic in the dress indicated that this photograph had been taken long ago.†   (source)
  • Jean looked up from her knitting-an archaic occupation which had recently been revived with much success.†   (source)
  • Every maxim of war was archaic.†   (source)
  • "There's Brideshead who's something archaic, out of a cave that's been sealed for centuries.†   (source)
  • Archaic traits are generally eliminated or subdued.†   (source)
  • A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all.†   (source)
  • Adjectives like EPOCH-MAKING, EPIC, HISTORIC, UNFORGETTABLE, TRIUMPHANT, AGE-OLD, INEVITABLE, INEXORABLE, VERITABLE, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: REALM, THRONE, CHARIOT, MAILED FIST, TRIDENT, SWORD, SHIELD, BUCKLER, BANNER, JACKBOOT, CLARION.†   (source)
  • The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil.†   (source)
  • The motif of the sun as a goddess, instead of as a god, is a rare and precious survival from an archaic, apparently once widely diffused, mythological context.†   (source)
  • The word in the little stony town sounded odd and archaic and local, outdated like the Lopez tomb, belonging only here.†   (source)
  • …in a tongue which not even the girls themselves understand anymore, maybe not even the crone herself, rooted in nothing of economics for her or for any possible progeny since the very fact that we acquiesced, suffered the farce, was her proof and assurance of that which the ceremony itself could never enforce; vesting no new rights in anyone, denying to none the old—a ritual as meaningless as that of college boys in secret rooms at night, even to the same archaic and forgotten symbols?†   (source)
  • There were other illustrations in the book, snapshots of the three brothers on holiday, and in each I traced the same archaic lines; and remembering Lady Marchmain, starry and delicate, I could find no likeness to her in these somber men.†   (source)
  • …possession," he said, and indeed he seemed to possess the hall and the somber scenes of venery that hung round it, to possess the caryatids on either side of the fireplace, to possess me, as he rose to take my hand and greet me like a host: "This morning," he continued, "we had a lawn meet of the Marchmain Hounds—a deliciously archaic spectacle—and all our young friends are fox-hunting, even Sebastian who, you will not be surprised to hear, looked remarkably elegant in his pink coat.†   (source)
  • Such legends of archaic giants are common to folk traditions everywhere; see, for instance, the myth recounted above (pp.†   (source)
  • With their discovery that the patterns and logic of fairy tale and myth correspond to those of dream, the long discredited chimeras of archaic man have returned dramatically to the foreground of modern consciousness.†   (source)
  • …anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the slope that had never known the print of a boot, there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary, and tourist—only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his heart out among the rum…†   (source)
  • …to see this done" ' There can be no doubt that no matter how unilluminated the stark-naked Australian savages may seem to us, their symbolical ceremonials represent a survival into modern times of an incredibly old system of spiritual instruction, the far-flung evidences of which are to be found not only in all the lands and islands bordering the Indian Ocean, but also among the remains of the archaic centers of what we tend to regard as our own very special brand of civilization.†   (source)
  • Very often, during the analysis and penetration of the secrets of archaic symbol, one can only feel that our generally accepted notion of the history of philosophy is founded on a completely false assumption, namely that abstract and metaphysical thought begins where it first appears in our extant records.†   (source)
  • 65 It is still uncertain by what means and in what eras the mythological and cultural patterns of the various archaic civiliLations may have been disseminated to the farthest corners of the earth; yet it can be stated categorically that few (if any) of the so-called "primitive cultures" studied by our anthropologists represent autochthonous growths.†   (source)
  • "Neither by the Vedas, nor by penances, nor by alms-giving, nor yet by sacrifice, am I to be seen in the form in which you have just now beheld Me," Krsna declared, after he had resumed his familiar shape; "but only by devotion * Jainism i. a heterodox Hindu religion (i. e… rejecting the authority of the Vedas) which in its iconography reveals certain extraordinarily archaic traits.†   (source)
  • He weighed one of the archaic weapons in his hand.†   (source)
  • If you've got a fault in the world, Sandy, it is that you are a shade too archaic.†   (source)
  • He moved his bed so that the sun would wake him at dawn that he might dress and go out to the archaic swing that hung from an apple-tree near the sixth-form house.†   (source)
  • Then I observed the rare, almost archaic phrases which he liked to employ at certain points, where a hidden flow of harmony, a prelude contained and concealed in the work itself would animate and elevate his style; and it was at such points as these, too, that he would begin to speak of the "vain dream of life," of the "inexhaustible torrent of fair forms," of the "sterile, splendid torture of understanding and loving," of the "moving effigies which ennoble for all time the charming…†   (source)
  • He spoke to Philip in correct, rather archaic English, having learned it from a study of the English classics, not from conversation; and it was odd to hear him use words colloquially which Philip had only met in the plays of Shakespeare.†   (source)
  • She glanced at the writing-table heaped with books, opened a volume of the "Contes Drolatiques," made a wry face over the archaic French, and sighed: "What learned things you read!"†   (source)
  • So it would ever be, he saw, simultaneously with the slow archaic tinkle from the phone box as he rang off.†   (source)
  • McKisco knew what ideas were, and as his mind grew he was able to recognize and sort an increasing number of them—but faced by a man whom he considered "dumb," one in whom he found no ideas he could recognize as such, and yet to whom he could not feel personally superior, he jumped at the conclusion that Barban was the end product of an archaic world, and as such, worthless.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Touchett inhabited an historic building in a narrow street whose very name recalled the strife of medieval factions; and found compensation for the darkness of her frontage in the modicity of her rent and the brightness of a garden where nature itself looked as archaic as the rugged architecture of the palace and which cleared and scented the rooms in regular use.†   (source)
  • It has been noted that Homer uses a special, archaic word for anger here, menis.†   (source)
  • This is unusual in archaic literature, and suggests one final aspect of epic poetry that seems fundamental to the work.†   (source)
  • 4 Major studies are: Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, Mass.†   (source)
  • For a subtle reading of The Iliad in these terms, see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore and London, 1979).†   (source)
  • Some translate "wrath" to connote its archaic severity, and Robert Graves carried this logic to the end in titling his translation "The Wrath of Achilles.†   (source)
  • ") Equally Germanic and archaic is the use of occasional compound coinages to suggest archaism, such as "undergloom" for Hades, or "Thetis …. rose and broke like mist from the grey inshore sea face."†   (source)
  • 5 We can also infer that Zeus figured in Indo-European religion as a father-god, for the compound expression "Zeus the father" is found not only in archaic Greek but in Sanskrit ("Dyaus pitar") and Latin ("Ju-piter," i. e., "Zeus pater").†   (source)
  • One of the earliest details preserved about Homer is that he was blind; singing would have been a plausible occupation for a blind man in archaic Greece, but the story could well have been inspired by the portrayal of a respected blind singer in the eighth book of The Odyssey.†   (source)
  • So in Hekabe's lament for Hektor, the old names, at once archaic and somehow familiar, are the main adornment of the verse: "Akhilleus captured other sons of mine / in other years, and sold them overseas / to Samos, Imbros, and the smoky island, / Lemnos.†   (source)
  • Homer's divine machinery functions to magnify fully intelligible human decisions and actions until the actors take on the proportions of "heroes" in its archaic Greek sense, men of a vanished earlier age so much greater than ours that they were privileged to mix with the gods and worthy even to fight beside them.†   (source)
  • I examined him carefully; the archaic medical treatment had been surprisingly effective.†   (source)
  • It was handwritten in a mixture of archaic French, and even more obsolete Latin, but I could make out the title.†   (source)
  • /Ouch/ is not heard in English, save in the sense of a clasp or buckle set with precious stones (=OF /nouche/), and even in that sense it is archaic.†   (source)
  • Certain Irish pronunciations, Gaelic rather than archaic English, got into American during the nineteenth century.†   (source)
  • In music the English cling to an archaic and unintelligible nomenclature, long since abandoned in America.†   (source)
  • A few of them, /e. g./, /to collide/ and /to feaze/, were [Pg078] archaic English terms brought to new birth; a few others, /e. g./, /to holler/[17] and /to muss/, were obviously mere corruptions.†   (source)
  • As for /crew/, it is archaic English surviving in American, and it was formed, perhaps, by analogy with /knew/, which has succumbed in American to /knowed/.†   (source)
  • § 5 /Archaic English Words/—Most of the colonists who lived along the American seaboard in 1750 were the descendants of immigrants who had come in fully a century before; after the first settlements there had been much less fresh immigration than many latter-day writers have assumed.†   (source)
  • [59] He confined his glossary to archaic English words surviving in America, and sought only to prove that they had come down "from our remotest ancestry" and were thus undeserving of the reviling [Pg032] lavished upon them by English critics.†   (source)
  • The English, however, use it in a sense that has become archaic in America, thus preserving an abandoned American meaning in the same way that many abandoned British meanings have been preserved on this side.†   (source)
  • /Fit/ is archaic English.†   (source)
  • …absurdity of all this is apparent when it is remembered that one of his rules would bar out such obvious Americanisms as the use of /sick/ in place of /ill/, of /molasses/ for /treacle/, and of /fall/ for /autumn/, for all of these words, while archaic in England, are by no means wholly extinct; and that another would dispose of that vast category of compounds which includes such unmistakably characteristic Americanisms as /joy-ride/, /rake-off/, /show-down/, /up-lift/, /out-house/,…†   (source)
  • The Rev. Jeremy Belknap, long anticipating Elwyn, White and Lounsbury, tried to obtain a respite from this abuse by pointing out the obvious fact that many of the Americanisms under fire were merely survivors of an English that had become archaic in England, but this effort counted for little, for on the one hand the British purists enjoyed the chase too much to give it up, and on the other hand there began to dawn in America a new spirit of nationality, at first very faint, which…†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)