acid

adjective / as-id / acidic / acidly / acidness / nonacid / preacid (Emotions) a way of speaking that causes irritation or discomfort (Seeing) extremely vibrant, possibly irritating, in color (Smelling) violently pungent odor (Tasting) sour in flavor (Touching) leaving a stain As Harry and Ron rounded the clump of trees behind which Harry had first heard the dragons roar, a witch leapt out from behind them. It was Rita Skeeter. She was wearing acid-green robes today; the Quick-Quotes Quill […]

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cynosure

noun / sahy-nuh-shoor / cynosures / cynosural (Seeing) something or someone who draws major attention because of their brilliance or guidance The time capsule is a characteristically twentieth-century invention: a tragicomic time machine. It lacks an engine, goes nowhere, sits and waits. It sends our cultural bits and bobs traveling into the future at snail’s pace. At our pace, that is. They travel through time in parallel with the rest of us, at our standard velocity of one second per […]

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dwindled

verb / dwin-dl / dwindle / dwindling to gradually diminish in size and splendor The fire that we kindled,A beacon by night,When darkness has dwindledGrows pale in the light. George William Russell (Truth)

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fuzzy

adjective / fuhz-ee / fuzzier / fuzziest / fuzziness / fuzzily / (Touching) Covered in short fur or having an unclear surface(Seeing) Blurry and difficult to identify(Patterns & Shapes) Having unclear or blended edges where assumptions are made (Emotions) Warm and sentimental I had a dream about you. I opened your chest like a cabinet, it had doors, and when I opened the doors, I saw all kinds of soft things inside you–teddy bears, tiny fuzzy animals, all these soft, […]

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grotesque

adjectives / groh-tesk / grotesques / grotesquely / grotesqueness fantasically bizarre If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being […]

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heath

noun / heeth / heaths a wasteland of poor soil where only heather grows I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

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hoary

adjective / hohr-ee / hoariness / hoarier / hoariest whitish-grey from aging There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. G.K. Chesterton (What’s Wrong with the World) […]

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lea

noun / lee / leas an open pasture laid fallow for grazing When I was a child I grew up by the River Lea. There was something in the water, now that something’s in me. Oh I can’t go back, but the reeds are growing out of my fingertips. I can’t go back to the river. Adele (River Lea)

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