dynamic
toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

diaphanous
in a sentence

show 44 more with this conextual meaning
  • Comforted by yet another victory over old age, he surrendered to the diaphanous and fluid lyricism of the final piece on the program, which he could not identify.†   (source)
  • He tugged on it, and a diaphanous membrane unspooled from within the wall.†   (source)
  • Then my gaze slid over the people to the blaze of green beyond the diaphanous curtains, and I felt as if I were sitting in the window of an enormous department store.†   (source)
  • Clary tugged a little self-consciously at the diaphanous material of the silver dress.†   (source)
  • She leans down long enough to retrieve her diaphanous shawl and disappears, her arm raised so that the shawl trails behind her, a shimmering banner.†   (source)
  • The breeze rustled leaves in a dry and diaphanous distance.†   (source)
  • At the very top of the plume, in the greatest violence and turmoil, the water is beaten and pulverized into a fine mist, and the air that is pushed out of the way by the upward jet of water propels the mist in its own arc until it slowly begins to sink in diaphanous curtains that oscillate in the breeze.†   (source)
  • The mists rose like layers of diaphanous scarves above Victoria Harbour as the huge jet circled for the final approach into Kai Tak Airport.†   (source)
  • On Halloween the trick-or-treaters would have to bat their way through diaphanous veils, the older ones laughing but the younger ones on the edge of panic, particularly if the night was windy and the cheesecloth was lifting and writhing and wrapping itself around them.†   (source)
  • In the angled windowpane she saw the reflection of her pale face beneath the checkered scarf, below this the blue and white stripes of her coarse prisoner's smock; blinking, weeping, gazing straight through her own diaphanous image, she glimpsed the magical white horse again, grazing now, the meadow, the sheep beyond, and further still, as if at the very edge of the world, the rim of the drab gray autumnal woods, transmuted by the music's incandescence into a towering frieze of withering but majestic foliage, implausibly beautiful, aglow with some immanent grace.†   (source)
  • Yet breakfast was not her loneliest meal, not with Anthony ogling and gabbling, the six fat goldfish dancing a dreamy oriental ballet on diaphanous fins, Sir Percy rubbing against her legs under the table, and her cheery friends on the morning show, hired, at great expense, to inform and entertain her.†   (source)
  • Fifty yards ahead, in the center of the church, a ghost appeared ....a diaphanous, glowing outline.†   (source)
  • Layers of pale floral ruffling have sprouted all over her, and wave from her shoulders like diaphanous wings.†   (source)
  • Then there was such a diaphanous silence that despite the disorder of the birds and the syllables of water on stone, one could hear the desolate breath of the sea.†   (source)
  • Behind Father and ME Griffen, walking with Callie Fitzsimmons, was a woman I assumed was Richard Griffen's wife — youngish, thin, stylish, trailing diaphanous orange-tinted muslin like the steam from a watery tomato soup.†   (source)
  • Everything about her was large and intense: her siren's thighs, her slow-burning skin, her astonished breasts, her diaphanous gums with their perfect teeth, her whole body radiating a vapor of good health that was the human odor Fermina Daza had discovered in her husband's clothing.†   (source)
  • Then he knew that they had rounded the cape of good hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm.†   (source)
  • But the silence was diaphanous in the four o'clock heat, and through the bedroom window one could see the outline of the old city with the afternoon sun at its back, its golden domes, its sea in flames all the way to Jamaica.†   (source)
  • Her dress was white and silver too, as diaphanous as a sheet of ice; one could glimpse her body through it, though not clearly.†   (source)
  • She was as beautiful as ever, her dress a diaphanous mixture of silver and gold, her hair like rosy copper as she arranged it gently over one white shoulder.†   (source)
  • The Queen lifted her diaphanous dress in her hands so that she could make her way down the steps that surrounded her divan.†   (source)
  • To me, a barbarous Englishman, has been entrusted the revelation of this diaphanous mystery.†   (source)
  • The ship curved around in a long arc toward Manhattan, her bow sweeping past Brooklyn and the bridges whose cables and pillars superimposed by distance, spanned the East River in diaphanous and rigid waves.†   (source)
  • Then I began to grasp the significance of what was going on in that world of reasons high above the desk of Jim Madison, and caught the glint of those diaphanous spirit wings and the fluting whispers of the faint angel voices up there.†   (source)
  • So I didn't tell him that beyond my boss the managing editor there was a great high world of reasons but to a fellow like me down in the ditch it was a world of flickering diaphanous spirit wings and faint angel voices I didn't always savvy and stellar influences.†   (source)
  • A meek shy light appeared in the East, where stretched a diaphanous fleece of white furrowed vapor.†   (source)
  • The gold became a diaphanous, glittering globe.†   (source)
  • The diaphaneity of Babet contrasted with the grossness of Gueulemer.†   (source)
  • It looked particularly bad, for example, on Frau Stohr, whose arms were too spongy—diaphanous clothes were simply not for her.†   (source)
  • It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture.†   (source)
  • And at that moment, from a door in the rear, there emerged a tall, slim and rather pale-faced woman of about thirty-eight or forty—very erect, very executive, very intelligent and graceful-looking—diaphanously and yet modestly garbed, who said, with a rather wan and yet encouraging smile: "Oh, hello, Oscar, it's you, is it?†   (source)
  • The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.†   (source)
  • Yet all the while she beheld the burly cynical Frenchman and the diaphanous dancers as clearly as the child sees its air-born playmates; she relished the Camp Fire Girls not because, in Vida's words, "this Scout training will help so much to make them Good Wives," but because she hoped that the Sioux dances would bring subversive color into their dinginess.†   (source)
  • Prosecutor Paravant went so far as to don a black swallowtail coat with a dotted vest, and the ladies' attire had a diaphanous and festive look.†   (source)
  • She was a thin, somewhat enigmatic blond in diaphanous garments, who always held her hands folded against her left shoulder—not firmly clasped, but with just the fingertips lying loosely interlaced—her eyes either directed heavenward or cast down, hidden under long lashes that stood out at an angle from the lids.†   (source)
  • The hill opposite Bathsheba's dwelling extended, a mile off, into an uncultivated tract of land, dotted at this season with tall thickets of brake fern, plump and diaphanous from recent rapid growth, and radiant in hues of clear and untainted green.†   (source)
  • It was a lovely May sunset, and the birch trees which grew on this margin of the vast Egdon wilderness had put on their new leaves, delicate as butterflies' wings, and diaphanous as amber.†   (source)
  • Germain le Vieux, lengthened in 1458, with a bit of the Rue aux Febves; and then, in places, a square crowded with people; a pillory, erected at the corner of a street; a fine fragment of the pavement of Philip Augustus, a magnificent flagging, grooved for the horses' feet, in the middle of the road, and so badly replaced in the sixteenth century by the miserable cobblestones, called the "pavement of the League;" a deserted back courtyard, with one of those diaphanous staircase turrets, such as were erected in the fifteenth century, one of which is still to be seen in the Rue des Bourdonnais.†   (source)
  • This phantom wore many faces, but it always had golden hair, was enveloped in a diaphanous cloud, and floated airily before his mind's eye in a pleasing chaos of roses, peacocks, white ponies, and blue ribbons.†   (source)
  • The wide expanse that opened out before the heights on which the Russian batteries stood guarding the bridge was at times veiled by a diaphanous curtain of slanting rain, and then, suddenly spread out in the sunlight, far-distant objects could be clearly seen glittering as though freshly varnished.†   (source)
  • What had been leanness in her youth had become transparency in her maturity; and this diaphaneity allowed the angel to be seen.†   (source)
  • But for d'Artagnan all aspects were clothed happily, all ideas wore a smile, all shades were diaphanous.†   (source)
  • The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,
    The air tastes good to my palate.†   (source)
  • The impression made on the organs of Sight, by lucide Bodies, either in one direct line, or in many lines, reflected from Opaque, or refracted in the passage through Diaphanous Bodies, produceth in living Creatures, in whom God hath placed such Organs, an Imagination of the Object, from whence the Impression proceedeth; which Imagination is called Sight; and seemeth not to bee a meer Imagination, but the Body it selfe without us; in the same manner, as when a man violently presseth his eye, there appears to him a ligh†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)