toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

torpid
in a sentence

show 75 more with this conextual meaning
  • Thunder anxiety was not unusual in dogs, he told us, especially in Florida, where huge boomers rolled across the peninsula nearly every afternoon during the torpid summer months.†   (source)
  • By October San Piedro had slipped off its summer reveler's mask to reveal a torpid, soporific dreamer whose winter bed was made of wet green moss.†   (source)
  • The hares on the down, stupid and torpid with cold, were resigned to sinking further and further into the freezing heart of snow and silence.†   (source)
  • Once the body is fully immersed, there is a torpid peace.†   (source)
  • He wanted to take her to parties, to drive her around by car, and to involve her in the decoration of her new home, but Blanca, heavy, torpid, solitary, and the victim of an unshakable fatigue, took refuge in her knitting and embroidery.†   (source)
  • It was the first really good laugh Captain Black had enjoyed since the day Major Major outsmarted him and was appointed squadron commander, and he rose with torpid enthusiasm and stationed himself behind the front counter in order to wring the most enjoyment from the occasion when the bombardiers arrived for their map kits.†   (source)
  • A thoroughly mysterious coming and going, like the surging of torpid tides.†   (source)
  • "This city, which was formally torpid with indolence and fettered with Quakerism," she reported proudly, "has become one military school, and every morning the sound of the drum and fife lead forth, 'A Band of Brothers Joined.'†   (source)
  • The torpid river itself.†   (source)
  • He could hear no buzzing as the torpid gatherers went about their work.†   (source)
  • Their lighted windows were dimmed by a bluish cast, the outlines of their walls were dissolving, long bands of mist were coiling among them in torpid, unhurried waves.†   (source)
  • The main street was wide enough for traffic, but behind it lay a labyrinth of passages through which a few villagers—veiled women, men in robes and keffiyehs, barefoot children—moved torpidly in the heat.†   (source)
  • If there was something ominous in the newscaster's tones, there was something torpid about our understanding of what was at stake; and if there was something culpable about such political ignorance in that time and place, there was something positive about the security I inhabited as a result of it.†   (source)
  • There was also one or two vagrant, torpid wasps.†   (source)
  • In short, the almost torpid creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.   (source)
    torpid = dormant, lifeless or sluggish
  • It was pleasant in the summer forenoons—when the fervent heat, that almost liquefied the rest of the human family, merely communicated a genial warmth to their half torpid systems—it was pleasant to hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of them all tipped against the wall, as usual; while the frozen witticisms of past generations were thawed out, and came bubbling with laughter from their lips.   (source)
    torpid = dormant or lifeless
  • Two or three of their number, as I was assured, being gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bed-ridden, never dreamed of making their appearance at the Custom-House during a large part of the year; but, after a torpid winter, would creep out into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about what they termed duty, and, at their own leisure and convenience, betake themselves to bed again.   (source)
    torpid = sluggish
  • The sun drew up a torpid moisture from the watery thickets.†   (source)
  • Despite the cool, exciting air of the July evening, he seemed apathetic and torpid.†   (source)
  • After the insufferably long, torpid summer, most of it spent in air-conditioning or hopping from one shade tree to the next in an attempt to dodge the blistering sun, winter was our time to celebrate the gentle side of the subtropics.†   (source)
  • But it was like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the torpid veins of my body.†   (source)
  • Nately was unnerved by her torpid indifference to him, by the same sleepy and inert poise that he remembered so vivdly, so sweetly, and so miserably from the first time she had seen him and ignored him at the packed penny-ante blackjack game in the living room of the enlisted men's apartment.†   (source)
  • The air seemed to grow thick with fine white gnats, filling my eyes, boiling so thickly that the dark trumpeter breathed them in and expelled them through the bell of his golden horn, a live white cloud mixing with the tones upon the torpid air.†   (source)
  • It was no easy matter to rouse the torpid, bewildered does and make them understand what they had to do.†   (source)
  • Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August.†   (source)
  • They scratched a hole in the
    bank,
    They did what they pleased all under the hazel leaves.
    But the beetles died in the frost and my heart is dark;
    And I shall never choose a mate again.
    The frost is falling, the frost falls into my body.
    My nostrils, my ears are torpid under the frost.
    The swift will come in the spring, crying "News!†   (source)
  • After these months and the momentary advantage she had been given, it would be more self-defeating to continue to play the torpid tongue-tied slave than to appear presumptuous, even if it involved the serious additional hazard of being thought actually insolent.†   (source)
  • There is little time left to answer the question; my powers flag; I become torpid.†   (source)
  • In Spring like torpid snakes my enemies awaken.†   (source)
  • We lie gorged with food, torpid in the heat.†   (source)
  • The rime melted and dripped; life was quickened from the * Ginnungagap, the void, the abyss of chaos into which all devolves at the end of the cycle ("Twilight of the Gods") and out of which then all appears aga n after a timeless age of reincubation. drippings in the form of a torpid, gigantic, hermaphroditic, horizontal figure named Ymir.†   (source)
  • He entered-thrust of warmth of the gaslit hallway, stagnant air suffused with the dusty, torpid odor of carpets.†   (source)
  • So, with a sigh, because novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand, I settled down with a notebook and a pencil to make what I could of Mary Carmichael's first novel, LIFE'S ADVENTURE.†   (source)
  • A vague, remote pity stirred within his breast like a wreathing, raveling smoke, tenuously dispersed within his being, a kind of torpid heart-break he had felt sometimes in winter awakened deep in the night and hearing that dull tread descend the stairs.†   (source)
  • "If it'll please you I'll come,' said Cronshaw, with his torpid not unpleasant smile.†   (source)
  • The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine phantoms.†   (source)
  • Memory was not so utterly torpid in Silas that it could not be awakened by these words.†   (source)
  • Oh, yes; but my heart was torpid, and therefore quiet.†   (source)
  • His was the overwhelming slumber of the torpid bear and the satiated leech.†   (source)
  • "You must take the lead now, Hepzibah!" murmured he, with a torpid and reluctant utterance.†   (source)
  • Aware that he was looking at a silver two-handled Jacobean mug, and that Hugh Whitbread admired condescendingly with airs of connoisseurship a Spanish necklace which he thought of asking the price of in case Evelyn might like it—still Richard was torpid; could not think or move.†   (source)
  • I always used to fall into a sort of torpid condition after such a series, and lost my memory almost entirely; and though I was not altogether without reason at such times, yet I had no logical power of thought.†   (source)
  • Two persons, who, through delay, had only arrived from the country during this morning, and had now been in this room only five minutes, stood listening to these words and looking at the King, then at the scarecrow, then at the King again, in a sort of torpid bewilderment.†   (source)
  • Jimmy, under generous influences, felt the buried zeal of his father wake to life within him: he aroused the torpid Routh at last.†   (source)
  • …for red blood, as other men have for red wine—the son of the Fiend, as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery took the name of Innocent, and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the lover of Isotta, and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave…†   (source)
  • His soul sickened at the thought of a torpid snaky life feeding itself out of the tender marrow of his life and fattening upon the slime of lust.†   (source)
  • After drinking his beer that evening, Hans Castorp felt more exhausted, chilled, and torpid than on any day thus far; he said good night to his cousin a little before nine, quickly slipped in under his comforter, pulling it up over his chin, and fell dead asleep.†   (source)
  • It took no magician to see he was amazingly angry about something, for all his quiet and even torpid demeanour.†   (source)
  • The chauffeur, a Russian Czar of the period of Ivan the Terrible, was a self-appointed guide, and the resplendent names—Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo—began to glow through their torpid camouflage, whispering of old kings come here to dine or die, of rajahs tossing Buddha's eyes to English ballerinas, of Russian princes turning the weeks into Baltic twilights in the lost caviare days.†   (source)
  • Indeed his torpid demeanour concealed nothing: it had that mysterious, almost miraculous, power of producing striking effects by means impossible of detection which is the last word of the highest art.†   (source)
  • But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race.†   (source)
  • Many are not so stealthy and gradual as we may be apt to imagine in considering the general torpidity of a moor or waste.†   (source)
  • I have watched the habits of the animal, young man; and can fearlessly pronounce, by evidence that would be thrown away on ordinary observers, that it is of vast dimensions, inactive, possibly torpid, of voracious appetite, and, as it now appears by the direct testimony of this venerable hunter, ferocious and carnivorous!†   (source)
  • The bold and reckless young blood of ten-years back was subjugated and was turned into a torpid, submissive, middle-aged, stout gentleman.†   (source)
  • At about this point, Mr. Gradgrind's eye would fall upon her; and under the influence of that wintry piece of fact, she would become torpid again.†   (source)
  • Hence, it came about, that when necessity constrained him to speak, his tongue was torpid, awkward, and like a door whose hinges have grown rusty.†   (source)
  • Not with such fervor prays the torpid recluse, looking forward to the cold, sunless, stagnant calm of a day that is to be like innumerable yesterdays.†   (source)
  • They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.†   (source)
  • She stayed there all day long, torpid, half dressed, and from time to time burning Turkish pastilles which she had bought at Rouen in an Algerian's shop.†   (source)
  • Their torpidity, under the influence of sunshine and Mother Council, had given way to a sort of spasmodic cheerfulness, as insects in winter revive when laid on the hearth.†   (source)
  • Wedded to Rowena, indeed, her nobler and more generous soul may yet awake the better nature which is torpid within him.†   (source)
  • The large room was emptying; the stove-pipe, in the shape of a palm-tree, spread its gilt leaves over the white ceiling, and near them, outside the window, in the bright sunshine, a little fountain gurgled in a white basin, where; in the midst of watercress and asparagus, three torpid lobsters stretched across to some quails that lay heaped up in a pile on their sides.†   (source)
  • Though, when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body began to grow torpid, when I reached the genial atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my faculties and prolonged my life.†   (source)
  • He said every nerve had been overstrained in some way, and the whole system must sleep torpid a while.†   (source)
  • At one of these moments of less torpid, yet still imperfect animation, Phoebe became convinced of what she had at first rejected as too extravagant and startling an idea.†   (source)
  • One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state.†   (source)
  • Wholly untaught, with faculties quite torpid, they seemed to me hopelessly dull; and, at first sight, all dull alike: but I soon found I was mistaken.†   (source)
  • But the love of children had never been quickened in Hepzibah's heart, and was now torpid, if not extinct; she watched the little people of the neighborhood from her chamber-window, and doubted whether she could tolerate a more intimate acquaintance with them.†   (source)
  • At such moments,—for the effect was seldom more than momentary,—the half-torpid man would be full of harmonious life, just as a long-silent harp is full of sound, when the musician's fingers sweep across it.†   (source)
  • But, so wealthy and eminent as he is,—so powerful in his own strength, and in the support of society on all sides,—what can Judge Pyncheon have to hope or fear from the imbecile, branded, half-torpid Clifford?†   (source)
  • At last, finding no other pretext for deferring the torture that she was to inflict on Clifford,—her reluctance to which was the true cause of her loitering at the window, her search for the artist, and even her abortive prayer,—dreading, also, to hear the stern voice of Judge Pyncheon from below stairs, chiding her delay,—she crept slowly, a pale, grief-stricken figure, a dismal shape of woman, with almost torpid limbs, slowly to her brother's door, and knocked!†   (source)
  • Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me, My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.†   (source)
  • Of That Blithe Throat of Thine Of that blithe throat of thine from arctic bleak and blank, I'll mind the lesson, solitary bird—let me too welcome chilling drifts, E'en the profoundest chill, as now—a torpid pulse, a brain unnerv'd, Old age land-lock'd within its winter bay—(cold, cold, O cold!†   (source)
  • After all not to create only, or found only, But to bring perhaps from afar what is already founded, To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free, To fill the gross the torpid bulk with vital religious fire, Not to repel or destroy so much as accept, fuse, rehabilitate, To obey as well as command, to follow more than to lead, These also are the lessons of our New World; While how little the New after all, how much the Old, Old World!†   (source)
  • I lie awake while thou sleepest, I weep while thou singest, I am faint with fasting while thou art sluggish and torpid from pure repletion.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)