Definitions

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

  • adjective Relating to or resembling vapor.
  • adjective Producing vapors; volatile.
  • adjective Full of vapors.
  • adjective Insubstantial, vague, or ethereal.
  • adjective Extravagantly fanciful; high-flown.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In the form or having the nature of vapor.
  • Full of vapors or exhalations.
  • Promotive of exhalation or the flow of effluvia, vapor, gases, or the like; hence, windy; flatulent.
  • Unsubstantial; vainly imaginative; whimsical: extravagant.: soaring.

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

  • adjective Having the form or nature of vapor.
  • adjective Full of vapors or exhalations.
  • adjective Producing vapors; hence, windy; flatulent.
  • adjective Unreal; unsubstantial; vain; whimsical.

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

  • adjective Relating to vapour; misty, foggy, obscure, insubstantial.

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

  • adjective filled with vapor
  • adjective so thin as to transmit light
  • adjective resembling or characteristic of vapor

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

vapour + -ous

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Examples

  • If I had taken mercury and converted it into vapor (as I could easily do), I should have a perfectly colorless vapor; for you must understand this about vapors, that bodies in what we call the vaporous or the gaseous state are always perfectly transparent, never cloudy or smoky; they are, however, often colored, and we can frequently have colored vapors or gases produced by colorless particles themselves mixing together, as in this case [the lecturer here inverted a glass cylinder full of binoxide of nitrogen (2) over a cylinder of oxygen, when the dark red vapor of hyponitrous acid was produced].

    The Forces of Matter, Delivered before a Juvenile Auditory at the Royal Institution of Great Britain during the Christmas Holidays of 1859-60 1909

  • Even far below the critical temperature the molecules have an enormous degree of activity, and tend to fly asunder, maintaining what appears to be a gaseous, but what technically is called a vaporous, condition -- the distinction being that pressure alone suffices to reduce the vapor to the liquid state.

    A History of Science: in Five Volumes. Volume III: Modern development of the physical sciences 1904

  • The critics have distinguished three periods, or manners, in his work: the cold, the hot, and the "vaporous".

    The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 10: Mass Music-Newman 1840-1916 1913

  • Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of our English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness "vaporous," "miasmic," coming from a "fever-cloud generated first in Italy and then blown westward," sucking up on its way "all that was most unwholesome from the soil of France."

    Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti Hall Caine 1892

  • A field guide to vaporous skies, in all their heavenly variety .

    Cirrus Concerns Peter Pesic 2011

  • Bassett, with his own eyes, saw colour and colours transform into sound till the whole visible surface of the vast sphere was a-crawl and titillant and vaporous with what he could not tell was colour or was sound.

    THE RED ONE 2010

  • The new version of Google's Android operating system that will run such upcoming tablet computers as Motorola's Xoom looks less vaporous today.

    Google demonstrates Android's Honeycomb tablet version, brings Android Market to the Web Rob Pegoraro 2011

  • Google TV -- the Web giant's software package for finding and watching TV programming over the Internet and through traditional subscription services -- looks less vaporous now.

    Google airs more details about Google TV Rob Pegoraro 2010

  • Reading her thoughts one finds nothing vaporous or otherworldly; she is among the most practical of people.

    Archive 2009-05-01 Alice Walker Blog Administrator 2009

  • His "Cloud Collector's Handbook" is a portable adjunct to his society's website, addressed to anyone who spends time gazing at the sky, more or less idly, wondering about the names or nature of its vaporous denizens.

    Cirrus Concerns Peter Pesic 2011

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