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recumbent
in a sentence

show 54 more with this conextual meaning
  • Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans.   (source)
    recumbent = lying down
  • As he nodded over his book, he began to sink down into the inevitable mangrove swamp of Miss Lynch, into her air of a recumbent forest glade, his deathbed, and then he could think of nothing except tomorrow's five minutes to five o'clock in the afternoon and her waiting for him in bed with nothing but the mound of her dark bush under her madwoman's skirt from Jamaica: the hellish circle.†   (source)
  • She ran her shaking hands over the machine—recumbent bike—and with every prayer she knew ringing in her head, used its placement in the room to angle toward the door.†   (source)
  • She was startled, and she peered inside: in the back there were rows of chairs screwed to the floor and no place for a recumbent body, quick or dead.†   (source)
  • Somewhere in the recumbent solitudes, the motionless but teeming millions of books, lost in two dozen turns right, three dozen turns left, down aisles, through doors, toward dead ends, locked doors, half-empty shelves, somewhere in the literary soot of Dickens's London, or Dostoevsky's Moscow or the steppes beyond, somewhere in the vellumed dust of atlas or Geographic, sneezes pent but set like traps, the boys crouched, stood, lay sweating a cool and constant brine.†   (source)
  • Because of the size and configuration of their bodies, they suffer impeded breathing and circulation when recumbent, and as prey animals who have trouble getting to their feet quickly, they are instinctively disinclined to stay down.†   (source)
  • And when I was done I felt the enveloping warmth of a fever, its languorous cocoon, though when I gazed at her shoulder and back there was nothing but stillness, her posture unchanged, her skin cool and colorless, and she lay as if she were the sculpture of a recumbent girl and not a real girl at all.†   (source)
  • I was a recumbent six-foot-long erogenous zone.†   (source)
  • He strode to Crabbe's recumbent figure and launched a tremendous kick at the seat of the chair.†   (source)
  • Directly over the recumbent saint, against a backdrop of gilded flame, hovered Bernini's angel.   (source)
  • Troy recumbent in his wife's lap formed now the sole spectacle in the middle of the spacious room.   (source)
  • It glided noiselessly towards the recumbent woman.   (source)
  • "Now isn't this a nice mess," he said, standing beside his recumbent cousin the way one stands beside a nice mess, his hands on his hips, his head lowered.   (source)
  • Dr. Krokowski would enter by way of the balcony at a quarter till four or a little earlier, greet the recumbent patient in his cheerful, manly way, make a few very elementary medical inquiries, bring the conversation around briefly to more personal topics, and make a comradely joke or two.   (source)
  • He wanted to wait until Joachim had finished measuring, and so in the meantime he watched how things were done, examined the fur-lined sleeping bag stored in one corner of the balcony—Joachim used it on cold days—and propping his elbows on the railing, gazed down into the garden, where the common lounging area had now filled up with recumbent patients—reading, writing, chatting.   (source)
  • He is not expected there, for he has been recumbent this quarter of a century in the churchyard of St. Andrews, Holborn, with the waggons and hackneycoaches roaring past him all the day and half the night like one great dragon.   (source)
  • Accordingly, they went down to the drawing-room, where the esteemed lady with no nonsense about her, was recumbent as usual, while Sissy worked beside her.   (source)
  • Oak went to the recumbent form of Matthew Moon, who usually undertook the rough thatching of the home-stead, and shook him.   (source)
  • Here, recumbent on a small sofa, underneath a picture of a race-horse, with her head close to the fire, and her feet pushing the mustard off the dumb-waiter at the other end of the room, was Mrs. Micawber, to whom Mr. Micawber entered first, saying, 'My dear, allow me to introduce to you a pupil of Doctor Strong's.'   (source)
  • And as in the great hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance will sometimes pass on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil; even so, often, with him, who for the first time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea.   (source)
  • Precisely at midnight he went to the kitchen and prepared a thermos of coffee as thick as crude oil, then he took it to his room, put his false teeth into the glass of boric acid solution that he always found ready for him on the night table, and resumed the posture of a recumbent marble statue, with momentary shifts in position when he took a sip of coffee, until the maid came in at six o'clock with a fresh thermos.†   (source)
  • Then Sophie came awake with a jolt, through heavy eyelids perceiving the great heap of a body three feet away, recumbent beneath a moth-eaten woolen blanket.†   (source)
  • Dressed thus, but recumbent and entwined in each other's arms, they appeared from where I stood as peaceful as two lovers who had gaily costumed themselves for an afternoon stroll, but on impulse had decided to lie down and nap, or kiss and make love, or merely whisper to each other of fond matters, and were frozen in this grave and tender embrace forever.†   (source)
  • Let him burble on, telling us stories, while we lie recumbent.†   (source)
  • A guttural snore from the recumbent man caused her to turn and look down at him.†   (source)
  • He always felt most natural in a recumbent position.†   (source)
  • A recumbent figure started up from the grass and came running toward them through the flickering screen of light and shade.†   (source)
  • He stood still looking at these recumbent bodies, a doomed man aware of his fate, surveying the silent company of the dead.†   (source)
  • She musingly turned to withdraw, passing near an altar-tomb, the oldest of them all, on which was a recumbent figure.†   (source)
  • Then he passed Joan, looking down upon her and then upon the recumbent figure of Kells; and if his glance was not baleful and malignant, as it swept over the bandit, Joan believed her imagination must be vividly weird, and running away with her judgment.†   (source)
  • The smallest he-baby stumbled over one of the sepulchral slabs so much admired by Mr. Ruskin, and entangled his feet in the features of a recumbent bishop.†   (source)
  • Behind it, recumbent, were the hills that contained the other caves, isolated each from his neighbour by broad channels of the plain.†   (source)
  • He did not hunger to pass every minute of the time at Nauheirn beside the child's recumbent form; he went out to polo matches; he played auction bridge in the evenings; he was cheerful and bright.†   (source)
  • He moved a few steps in that direction, and now he perceived a recumbent figure almost close at his feet.†   (source)
  • Unwilling to prolong a useless discussion, the young man affected to comply, by posting his back against the logs of the blockhouse, in a half recumbent posture, though resolutely determined, in his own mind, not to close an eye until he had delivered his precious charge into the arms of Munro himself.†   (source)
  • So did the horses with drowsy bells, in long files of carts, creeping slowly towards the interior; so did their recumbent drivers, when they were awake, which rarely happened; so did the exhausted labourers in the fields.†   (source)
  • So saying, he stooped over the bed of the recumbent swineherd, and whispered something in his ear in Saxon.†   (source)
  • From being the best electric-lighted town in the kingdom and the most like a recumbent sun of anything you ever saw, it was become simply a blot—a blot upon darkness—that is to say, it was darker and solider than the rest of the darkness, and so you could see it a little better; it made me feel as if maybe it was symbolical—a sort of sign that the Church was going to keep the upper hand now, and snuff out all my beautiful civilization just like that.†   (source)
  • Arising warily she stepped lightly across the recumbent bodies, and proceeded with the same caution to the utmost limits of the defences of Ishmael.†   (source)
  • More in the background eight or ten warriors lay half recumbent on the ground, or sat with their backs reclining against trees, so many types of indolent repose.†   (source)
  • Storm and Grumble were led up on either side of the recumbent ostrich, and the cords secured to their girths.†   (source)
  • The Palmer, having extinguished his torch, threw himself, without taking off any part of his clothes, on this rude couch, and slept, or at least retained his recumbent posture, till the earliest sunbeams found their way through the little grated window, which served at once to admit both air and light to his uncomfortable cell.†   (source)
  • His vision became more acute as the shades of evening settled on the place; and even after the stars were glimmering above his head, he was able to distinguish the recumbent forms of his companions, as they lay stretched on the grass, and to note the person of Chingachgook, who sat upright and motionless as one of the trees which formed the dark barrier on every side.†   (source)
  • He soon saw that it was a litter, hastily made of a shutter or some such thing; and a recumbent figure upon it, and the scraps of conversation in the crowd, and a muddy bundle carried by one man, and a muddy hat carried by another, informed him that an accident had occurred.†   (source)
  • But, suddenly abandoning his hostile purpose, he snuffed the air a moment, gaped heavily, shook himself, and peaceably resumed his recumbent attitude.†   (source)
  • He stood long hovering above the recumbent and Herculean form of the emigrant, keenly debating in his own mind the chances of his enterprise, and the most effectual means of reaping its richest harvest.†   (source)
  • Meeting with nothing more attractive than the same faint outlines of swell and interval, which every where rose before his drowsy eyes, he changed his position so as completely to turn his back on his dangerous neighbour, and suffered his person to sink sluggishly down into its former recumbent attitude.†   (source)
  • The recumbency and the peace of the dead impress me—warriors at rest under their old banners.†   (source)
  • …and fir-trees, till it fell from them with a shuddering sound; it clothed the rough turnip-field with whiteness, and made the sheep look like dark blotches; the gates were all blocked up with the sloping drifts, and here and there a disregarded four-footed beast stood as if petrified "in unrecumbent sadness"; there was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unrecumbent means not and reverses the meaning of recumbent. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
  • Jamie cocked an eyebrow at the recumbent form of his small nephew.†   (source)
  • There was a faint snort from the recumbent figure on the bed.†   (source)
  • It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars.†   (source)
  • Listener: reclined semilaterally, left, left hand under head, right leg extended in a straight line and resting on left leg, flexed, in the attitude of Gea-Tellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed.†   (source)
  • …magnitude) of exceeding brilliancy dominating by night and day (a new luminous sun generated by the collision and amalgamation in incandescence of two nonluminous exsuns) about the period of the birth of William Shakespeare over delta in the recumbent neversetting constellation of Cassiopeia and of a star (2nd magnitude) of similar origin but of lesser brilliancy which had appeared in and disappeared from the constellation of the Corona Septentrionalis about the period of the birth of…†   (source)
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