toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

unctuous
in a sentence

show 75 more with this conextual meaning
  • I made my voice unctuously polite.†   (source)
  • His voice was as soft and sympathetic as a mortician's but with no unctuousness.†   (source)
  • "Don't worry, Mr. Rearden," said an unctuous voice over a long distance telephone line from Washington, "I just wanted to assure you that you will not have to worry."†   (source)
  • Even the Yankees, most of whom had been rejected by the military academies, spent their years at the Institute perfecting the unctuous skills of Southern gentlemen.†   (source)
  • If we were talking about some thorny issue like welfare reform or affirmative action he would say like a reporter both unctuous and angling, "Mr.†   (source)
  • When I try to put it into words, it comes out one of those unctuous, over-pious platitudes at which Bishops are expected to excel.†   (source)
  • He spoke unctuously, as though he had no idea why she really came down; but all three of us knew he knew and that we knew he knew.†   (source)
  • Awaiting the train would be the bereaved father, the importunate mistress, a hearse, an unctuous mortician, perhaps someone else ….†   (source)
  • MRS. KREBS (Unctuously, to HORNBECK) You're a stranger, aren't you, mister?†   (source)
  • Inside the shop, Borgin remained frozen; his unctuous smile had vanished; he looked worried.†   (source)
  • Mr. Bagman," said Karkaroff, his voice unctuous once more, "you are our — er — objective judges.†   (source)
  • "But not for long, I think," said Varys unctuously.†   (source)
  • That's the huge Chinese who's always polite — unctuous, actually, but rather sincere.†   (source)
  • Varys slithered to his feet, smiling in that unctuous way he had.†   (source)
  • That's wonderful," he replied in an unctuous voice.†   (source)
  • Like you, he has unctuous words, but he's fundamentally stupid.'†   (source)
  • 'I speak English,' he added proudly, if unctuously.†   (source)
  • He made no effort to be civil, or his normal unctuous, ingratiating self.†   (source)
  • He entertained it, his voice unctuous with pleasure and cruelty.†   (source)
  • There was a creak on the stairway outside, again the unctuous female voice.†   (source)
  • "I have, sir," he said, and although his voice was very scared, Harry could still hear the familiar unctuous note in it.†   (source)
  • Karkaroff had a fruity, unctuous voice; when he stepped into the light pouring from the front doors of the castle they saw that he was tall and thin like Dumbledore, but his white hair was short, and his goatee (finishing in a small curl) did not entirely hide his rather weak chin.†   (source)
  • The man proved to be Tyroshi; short and stout and sweaty, with an unctuous smile that reminded her of Varys and a forked beard dyed green and pink.†   (source)
  • But she kept her attention on me, unctuously gesturing, and even as he leaned and bucked into her she held out her open hand to me, as if I should take it when I crept my way inside.†   (source)
  • The chaplain bent his face away with burning shame and allowed himself to be led into the rear of a staff car and seated between the fat colonel with the large, pink face and the skinny, unctuous, despondent major.†   (source)
  • At a signal from Wesley Mouch, his voice boomed suddenly over the prairie, an unctuous, fraudulently solemn voice magnified by the microphone inventor's ingenuity into the sound and power of a giant: "Ladies and gentlemen ….†   (source)
  • As Piedmont drifted among his board members before the start of the meeting, I was mildly impressed by his unctuous, lubricating manner.†   (source)
  • Nathan's stately, unctuous intonations are impeccable, the vapid slogans almost unbearably hilarious; the back of my throat aches from laughter, a film blurs my eyes.†   (source)
  • "It's W. O. Gant, isn't it?" he asked in a drawling unctuous voice.†   (source)
  • His voice, so uncommonly unctuous and placating, sounded strange to David's ears despite his misery.†   (source)
  • They united in only one thing and this was to berate the agent for his ill management of the estates, so that he who had once been oily and unctuous, a man of plenty and of ease, was now become anxious and harried and his flesh gone so that his skin hung upon him like an old garment.†   (source)
  • And then one of the men from the city spoke, a man with one eye blind and sunken in his face, and unctuously he said, "My poor man, we will give you a better price than could be got in these times anywhere for the sake of the boy who is starving.†   (source)
  • The time for Daisy's marriage was growing near: she had been sought by a tall middle-aged shaven life-insurance agent, who wore spats, collars of immaculate starchiness five inches in height, who spoke with an unctuous and insane croon, chortling gently in his throat from time to time for no reason at all.†   (source)
  • And he wanted to see them living in palaces of alabaster columns, eating in vast halls upon an immense creamy table from vessels of old silver—eating strange fabulous foods— swelling unctuous paps of a fat pregnant sow, oiled mushrooms, calvered salmon, jugged hare, the beards of barbels dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce, carps' tongues, dormice and camels' heels, with spoons of amber headed with diamond and carbuncle, and cups of agate, studded with emeralds, hyacinths, and…†   (source)
  • Who else, most outspoken prince?" he replied, with an unctuous smile.†   (source)
  • And a most unctuous and oily of bishops!†   (source)
  • Our d'gods, Holger," he said unctuously.†   (source)
  • He who had never been unctuous was profuse and hearty as he urged her, "Been home all day?†   (source)
  • Rippleton Holabird was the most unctuous of the office seekers, and the most hungry.†   (source)
  • 'An old woman,' said Maggy, with an unctuous smack of her lips.†   (source)
  • Martin Poyser's large person shook with his silent unctuous laugh.†   (source)
  • The parson had thee there," Mr. Poyser added, laughing unctuously.†   (source)
  • He at first knit his brows; then smiled with more unctuous benignity than ever.†   (source)
  • A touch of red over the lips of Esther had strayed beyond their outline; the yellow on her dress was spread with such unctuous plumpness as to have acquired a kind of solidity, and stood boldly out from the receding atmosphere; while the green of the trees, which was still bright in Silk and wool among the lower parts of the panel, but had quite 'gone' at the top, separated in a paler scheme, above the dark trunks, the yellowing upper branches, tanned and half-obliterated by the sharp…†   (source)
  • There was something also about the tone of her voice, unctuous, smooth, which somehow appealed to and disturbed him.†   (source)
  • They admire his unctuousness.†   (source)
  • Furiously he snatched up his tube of shaving-cream, furiously he lathered, with a belligerent slapping of the unctuous brush, furiously he raked his plump cheeks with a safety-razor.†   (source)
  • In the parlors he was unctuously received by the pastor and a committee of three, wearing morning clothes and a manner of Christian intellectuality.†   (source)
  • The good neighbor charged into the living-room, waving the most unctuous of black kid gloves and delightedly sputtering: "You may well ask how I am!†   (source)
  • …would be turning on the spit one of those chickens, such as she alone knew how to roast, chickens which had wafted far abroad from Combray the sweet savour of her merits, and which, while she was serving them to us at table, would make the quality of kindness predominate for the moment in my private conception of her character; the aroma of that cooked flesh, which she knew how to make so unctuous and so tender, seeming to me no more than the proper perfume of one of her many virtues.†   (source)
  • Babbitt's scalp itched and he longed to flee, but Dr. Drew had already flopped down beside his desk-chair and his voice had changed from rasping efficiency to an unctuous familiarity with sin and with the Almighty.†   (source)
  • A booming semi-city with parks and clever architects, visited by famous pianists and unctuous lecturers, but irritable from a struggle between union labor and the manufacturers' association, so that in even the gayest of the new houses there was a ceaseless and intimidating heresy-hunt.†   (source)
  • It gave to Americans unable to become Geheimrate or Commendatori such unctuous honorifics as High Worthy Recording Scribe and Grand Hoogow to add to the commonplace distinctions of Colonel, Judge, and Professor.†   (source)
  • As a matter of routine, certainly not as a thing connected with the deaths from what the skipper had called influenza, the crew of the Pendown Castle put rat-shields on the mooring hawsers, but they did not take up the gang-plank at night, and now and then a rat slithered ashore to find among its kin in Blackwater more unctuous fare than hardwood lumber.†   (source)
  • Betty Jay scented the boiling of Squire Cass's hams, but her longing was arrested by the unctuous liquor in which they were boiled; and when the seasons brought round the great merry-makings, they were regarded on all hands as a fine thing for the poor.†   (source)
  • …of the fleece, rolls it up, and carries it into the background as three-and-a-half pounds of unadulterated warmth for the winter enjoyment of persons unknown and far away, who will, however, never experience the superlative comfort derivable from the wool as it here exists, new and pure—before the unctuousness of its nature whilst in a living state has dried, stiffened, and been washed out—rendering it just now as superior to anything WOOLLEN as cream is superior to milk-and-water.†   (source)
  • A sweet and unctuous duty!†   (source)
  • The truth was, nevertheless, that it had been planted by Alice Pyncheon,—she was Phoebe's great-great-grand-aunt,—in soil which, reckoning only its cultivation as a garden-plat, was now unctuous with nearly two hundred years of vegetable decay.†   (source)
  • This box contained an unctuous substance partly solid, of which it was impossible to discover the color, owing to the reflection of the polished gold, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, which ornamented the box.†   (source)
  • But glimpses were to be caught of a roast leg of pork bursting into tears of sage and onion in a metal reservoir full of gravy, of an unctuous piece of roast beef and blisterous Yorkshire pudding, bubbling hot in a similar receptacle, of a stuffed fillet of veal in rapid cut, of a ham in a perspiration with the pace it was going at, of a shallow tank of baked potatoes glued together by their own richness, of a truss or two of boiled greens, and other substantial delicacies.†   (source)
  • Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savory withal.†   (source)
  • Owing, however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about the lower region of his face, the look was, perhaps, unctuous rather than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be.†   (source)
  • In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous properties.†   (source)
  • Many of them came out to look after him, and to observe to one another, with great unctuousness, that he was 'pulled down by it.'†   (source)
  • Regarding the Sperm Whale's head as a solid oblong, you may, on an inclined plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,* whereof the lower is the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an unctuous mass wholly free from bones; its broad forward end forming the expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale.†   (source)
  • Yet she had been kissed before, and without any particular squeamishness, by perhaps half a dozen different cousins, younger as well as older than this dark-browned, grisly-bearded, white-neck-clothed, and unctuously-benevolent Judge!†   (source)
  • I impute it, though, to their naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the nature of their vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country where the convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.†   (source)
  • It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light.†   (source)
  • Granting other whales to be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give chase to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too lavish of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small.†   (source)
  • Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness.†   (source)
  • One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale's head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening.†   (source)
  • Queequeg believed strongly in anointing his boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau disappeared, took more than customary pains in that occupation; crawling under its bottom, where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft's bald keel.†   (source)
  • First, from the ground a lofty pile they rear, Of pitch trees, oaks, and pines, and unctuous fir: The fabric's front with cypress twigs they strew, And stick the sides with boughs of baleful yew.†   (source)
  • Hope elevates, and joy Brightens his crest; as when a wandering fire, Compact of unctuous vapour, which the night Condenses, and the cold environs round, Kindled through agitation to a flame, Which oft, they say, some evil Spirit attends, Hovering and blazing with delusive light, Misleads the amazed night-wanderer from his way To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool; There swallowed up and lost, from succour far.†   (source)
  • …moment the sly traitor chose: Then, starting from his ambush, up he rose, And threw, but first to Heav'n address'd his vows: "O patron of Socrates' high abodes, Phoebus, the ruling pow'r among the gods, Whom first we serve, whole woods of unctuous pine Are fell'd for thee, and to thy glory shine; By thee protected with our naked soles, Thro' flames unsing'd we march, and tread the kindled coals Give me, propitious pow'r, to wash away The stains of this dishonorable day: Nor spoils,…†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)