Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- Like gossamer; flimsy; unsubstantial.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Like gossamer; flimsy.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Like
gossamer ;flimsy .
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Richard Polwhele's "Unsexed Females," where he asks us to picture an "unsex'd" woman's body: "Scarce by a gossamery film carest,/Sport [s], in full view, the meretricious breast;" he then guides us to undress the woman farther, to "Loose the chaste cincture, where the graces shone,/And languish'd all the Loves, the ambrosial zone."
'Pleasure is now, and ought to be, your business': Stealing Sexuality in Jane Austen's _Juvenilia_
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They climbed past the neighborhood into a nameless gulch, huffing and wheezing through the sagebrush in their weight-tortured Reeboks, wading through prairie star, peppergrass, sunflower, the gossamery spores of plants kicked free and floating.
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They climbed past the neighborhood into a nameless gulch, huffing and wheezing through the sagebrush in their weight-tortured Reeboks, wading through prairie star, peppergrass, sunflower, the gossamery spores of plants kicked free and floating.
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Yes, there it was in the boys, those gossamery boys who thumped the stage.
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They climbed past the neighborhood into a nameless gulch, huffing and wheezing through the sagebrush in their weight-tortured Reeboks, wading through prairie star, peppergrass, sunflower, the gossamery spores of plants kicked free and floating.
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Yes, there it was in the boys, those gossamery boys who thumped the stage.
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And though you could not mark the delicacies of faces, you could have the full effect of costumes, -- rich, majestic, floating, gossamery, impalpable.
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But I must not anticipate -- a beautiful veil of brown tissue, none of your woolleny, gruff fabrics, fit only for penance, but a silken gossamery cloud, soft as a baby's check.
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The Sedleys, Rochesters, and their compeers, had too much actual occupation, good and bad, to be fairly ranked among those gossamery ornaments of mankind; they were idle enough in their hearts for the purpose, but their lives were _not_ shadows, their sole object was _not_ self.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844
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The lifting of the barrage as the infantry went in was signaled to the eye when the canopy of shell-smoke began to grow thin and gossamery for want of fresh bursts and another was forming beyond, as if the master hand at such things had lifted a long trail of cloud from one set of crests to another; only, nature never does things with such mathematical precision.
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