Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Shining brilliantly; resplendent. synonym: bright.
- adjective Showing or expressing vitality, love, or joy.
- adjective Splendid; wonderful.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Shining; bright; splendid; diffusing a flood of light.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Diffusing a flood of light; shining; luminous; beaming; bright; splendid.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective
Shining ,resplendent ,radiant .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective radiating or as if radiating light
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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My "Sunday-best" word is "effulgent" - I use it socially by saying to a lady I am meeting for the first time: "You look effulgent tonight!"
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph Hubert van den Bergh 2012
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My inner Spike fangirl is squeeing because David said "effulgent" as if it were a perfectly ordinary word.
Russell and David Interview rabid1st 2009
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So am I the only here who doesn't know what "effulgent" means?
Cleaning Up The Mess 2007
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One can always count on Elkin to take figurative language to comedic excess ( "being's effulgent Maginot Line"), demonstrating both his own mastery of the technique and his inability to employ it with a straight face.
Style in Fiction 2009
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Betting the knight, his money on the armor, the intricate chain mail like wire net or metal scrim, being's effulgent Maginot line, his stake on the weighted mace and plate mittens, on the hinged couters and poleyns, on vambrace and cuisee and greave, banging the breast-plate and all the jewelry of battle for timbre and pitch like a jerk slamming doors and kicking tires in a used car lot.
Style in Fiction 2009
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I catch just one gaze on your effulgent expression, that slight lean of the head, and I see Botticelli's Aphrodite, that same mask of immaculateness beaming like a morning.
To A Christmas Angel, a triptych Michael Parker 2011
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The two younger men found a fishing boat that was lying on the pebbles, and tried to row it out over the effulgent firefly soup of the lake.
Songs of Love & Death George R. R. Martin 2010
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The two younger men found a fishing boat that was lying on the pebbles, and tried to row it out over the effulgent firefly soup of the lake.
Songs of Love & Death George R. R. Martin 2010
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When the time came, Shri Krishna appeared standing and effulgent in his Bhagavan form and told his parents that the Supreme Being had just appeared as their baby son.
Spiritual Teachings of the Avatar Jeffrey Armstrong 2010
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From out of her corpulence, rose an effulgent girl in purple, spinning and spinning with brown hair.
Magic X Nina Alvarez 2010
arby commented on the word effulgent
Male Partygoer (reading William's poetry):
My heart expands
'tis grown a bulge in't
inspired by
your beauty effulgent. Effulgent?
2nd Male Partygoer: And that's actually one of his better compositions.
Female Partygoer: Have you heard? They call him William the Bloody because of his bloody awful poetry!
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Fool for Love"
July 2, 2007
valse commented on the word effulgent
There's a great nod to that in the series finale of Angel, Spike recites it at a poetry slam.
August 16, 2007
arby commented on the word effulgent
Oh yeah, I forgot about that - it was brilliant.
August 17, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word effulgent
"Presently the days grew shorter and at the moment when I entered the room the violet sky seemed branded with the stiff, geometrical, fleeting, effulgent figure of the sun (like the representation of some miraculous sign, of some mystical apparition) lowering over the sea on the edge of the horizon like a sacred picture over a high altar, and while the different parts of the western sky exposed in the glass fronts of the low mahogany bookcases that ran along the walls, which I carried back in my mind to the marvellous painting from which they had been detached, seemed like those different scenes executed long ago for a confraternity by some old master on a reliquary, whose separate panels are now exhibited side by side in a gallery, so that the visitor's imagination alone can restore them to their place on the predella of the reredos."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 522-523 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 26, 2008
sparklya commented on the word effulgent
resplendent, radiant F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, Amory in relation to Clara
May 2, 2008
dailyword commented on the word effulgent
Spike used this word in a Buffy episode when he was human and aspiring to be a poet.
June 5, 2012
rolig commented on the word effulgent
That is hardly surprising, dailyword. This is a word that a lot of aspiring poets use when they are human.
June 5, 2012
ruzuzu commented on the word effulgent
The best part about that episode is that Cecily is played by the same actor who plays Halfrek later on in the series.
June 5, 2012