Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Sweltering.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Suffocating with heat; sweltering; oppressive with heat; sultry.
  • Oppressed with heat; sweltering.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective rare Suffocating with heat; oppressively hot; sultry.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Suffocating with heat; oppressively hot; sultry.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective excessively hot and humid or marked by sweating and faintness

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

See swelter, swelt (verb), and compare sultry.

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Examples

  • The day was intensely hot, and at that early hour the fierce fire of the sun had rendered the atmosphere sweltry and oppressive.

    Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 330, April 1843 Various

  • They didn't lose any time about it either, for as soon as I gave the order it was all haul down and furl up; and, getting a good grip of the water, they started pulling like madmen, putting their hearts into every stroke -- although the day was so hot and sweltry that a fellow seemed to melt away into perspiration, even lying still in the stern-sheets of the boat, as I was, without moving a muscle.

    The Penang Pirate and, The Lost Pinnace

  • Marvin returned to a toilet for a newspaper he’d left behind, he was looking vainly for baseball scores in a Warsaw daily, and he was surprised by the heat in the little room, the steamy aura he’d established there, it was heavy and humid, an air mass of sweltry stench—all that radiant energy from a single BM.

    Underworld Don Delillo 2008

  • Up on the second level the Softball field empty and tar-hot, a heavy sweltry indolence, the dark surface flashing with broken glass, two or three men, he sees them now, standing out near the left-field fence, sort of mortally posed like figures in spaghetti westerns, lean, nameless, unshaved—he didn’t think they were acquainted with the language of life expectancy.

    Underworld Don Delillo 2008

  • Marvin returned to a toilet for a newspaper he’d left behind, he was looking vainly for baseball scores in a Warsaw daily, and he was surprised by the heat in the little room, the steamy aura he’d established there, it was heavy and humid, an air mass of sweltry stench—all that radiant energy from a single BM.

    Underworld Don Delillo 2008

  • Up on the second level the Softball field empty and tar-hot, a heavy sweltry indolence, the dark surface flashing with broken glass, two or three men, he sees them now, standing out near the left-field fence, sort of mortally posed like figures in spaghetti westerns, lean, nameless, unshaved—he didn’t think they were acquainted with the language of life expectancy.

    Underworld Don Delillo 2008

  • Marvin returned to a toilet for a newspaper he’d left behind, he was looking vainly for baseball scores in a Warsaw daily, and he was surprised by the heat in the little room, the steamy aura he’d established there, it was heavy and humid, an air mass of sweltry stench—all that radiant energy from a single BM.

    Underworld Don Delillo 2008

  • Up on the second level the Softball field empty and tar-hot, a heavy sweltry indolence, the dark surface flashing with broken glass, two or three men, he sees them now, standing out near the left-field fence, sort of mortally posed like figures in spaghetti westerns, lean, nameless, unshaved—he didn’t think they were acquainted with the language of life expectancy.

    Underworld Don Delillo 2008

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