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vacuous
in a sentence

show 67 more with this conextual meaning
  • He suddenly opened the medicine cabinet. He stared rather vacuously into it for a few seconds, as though he had forgotten why he opened it,   (source)
    vacuously = without thought
  • Four other monks surrounded him like disciples, all dressed in the same tattered robes, all bald, all smiling Cacciato's vacuous smile.   (source)
    vacuous = lacking intelligent thought
  • ESTRAGON: I've forgotten. (Chews.) ...  Ah yes, now I remember.
    VLADIMIR: Well?
    ESTRAGON: (his mouth full, vacuously). We're not...   (source)
    vacuously = without intelligent thought
  • he would not become a ... vain, vacuous speaker;   (source)
    vacuous = lacking intelligent thought
  • people were doing "stunts" all over the garden, while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky.   (source)
  • He was brought up short by the rope which was wound round the tree—the vacuous brachet meanwhile giving a melancholy yelp— and fell off his horse with a tremendous clang.   (source)
  • In the study of the profession to which he had looked forward all his life he found irritation and vacuity as well as...   (source)
    vacuity = lack of intelligent thought
  • Again a startled look came over the somewhat vacuous face of Miss Mary Sutherland.   (source)
    vacuous = lacking intelligent thought
  • The bewildering feeling of vacuity laid hold upon me.   (source)
    vacuity = lack of intelligent thought
  • They had hardly settled around the nearest table when the bartender jerked his head toward a corner of the tavern, and out of the vacuous dark stepped a girl wearing a homburg hat and a long overcoat not unlike Hatter's.†   (source)
  • And at such moments Belle watched him, too, sympathy struggling to overcome the relentless vacuity in her face.†   (source)
  • 'You pompous, rotund, neighborly, vacuous, complacent…'†   (source)
  • You're imitating other people-probably rich, vacuous customers a young hairdresser heard repeating such phrases years ago in Honolulu.†   (source)
  • He would have been handsome enough to be a waiter—except that his nose was red and misshapen from years of heavy drinking, and he never quite closed his mouth, which gave him a vacuous look.†   (source)
  • The High Septon smiled as he escorted her into the Sept. But was it a threatening smile full of unspoken knowledge, or just some vacuous twitch of an old man's wrinkled lips?†   (source)
  • The song sneers at the vacuous life of a val, a middle-class teenager haunting the Galleria Mall—the latest word in consumer chic—in the Sherman Oaks section of the San Fernando Valley.†   (source)
  • If I held up basic-word cards for them, they stared at the cards with blank, vacuous faces.†   (source)
  • Oh, not for the lesson in it, not for the high-falutin, falling mind organizing itself to swim or fly with ease searching out the dire vacuity: not for that: for thisness: twenty-four geese enroute from swamp to swamp, encountering a dome at twilight, passing and touching an unseen mark; they freeze, fall out of time and into thought, an idiograph in the blood of man and son.†   (source)
  • Yes, dear, she said again, and felt that it was a vacuous reply; but by the time this occurred to her, Andrew was getting into the automobile.†   (source)
  • His eyes seemed wandering, vacuous again.   (source)
    vacuous = lacking intelligent thought
  • "Blood," Henry said, and smiled with a kind of vacuous surprise.   (source)
  • Such sudden alternations from mental vacuity do sometimes occur thus quietly. She could never
    have believed in the morning that her colourless inner world would before night become as animated as water under a microscope,   (source)
    vacuity = lack of interesting thought
  • Hoarse, brutal, yet underpointed with a vacuous sort of humor.†   (source)
  • The veiled, vacuous look passed and Bourne reached for the phone.†   (source)
  • She walked to the gate, opening her purse and smiling vacuously at the receptionist, who was speaking into her phone.†   (source)
  • Now, Colin had seen enough movies to know what happens when dorks go to cool-kid parties: generally, the dorks either get thrown into the poor or they become drunk, vacuous cool kids themselves.†   (source)
  • Her face tear-streaked but quite expressionless, almost vacuous, she picked up her handbag from the floor, opened it, and took out the small pea-green clothbound book.†   (source)
  • Now she sat resting in vacuous indolence, watching the card game with dull curiosity as she gathered her recalcitrant energies for the tedious chore of donning the rest of her clothing and going back to work.†   (source)
  • When a client calls Les Classiques, the telephone is not answered by a vacuous female, but instead by a cultured gentleman who has all our information at his fingertips.†   (source)
  • He cursed with gusto, smiled constantly and vacuously, talked strangely and vaguely and mostly to himself, and lived rather contentedly while playing his role of island lunatic.†   (source)
  • 'It'll be all right,' she said, and her face now had that slack, unplugged look , that look of perplexed vacuity , and before his mind was completely consumed in a forest fire of panic he understood that when this was over, she would have only the vaguest memories of what she had done, as she had only the vaguest memories of killing the children and the old people and the terminal patients and Andrew Pomeroy.†   (source)
  • Then he saw that her face was not stupid, vacuous.†   (source)
  • Katie refused to dance with the feller provided for her, a vacuous vulgar boy given to remarks like: "I thought you musta fallen in," when Katie returned from a trip to the ladies' room.†   (source)
  • Their bickering and their chatter had lost dimension; nothing was left but a grey and vacuous idiocy, a world bewitched and hollow.†   (source)
  • As soon as she saw the Wart, she began wagging her whole body, grinning vacuously, and panting in her efforts to lick his face, in spite of the cord.†   (source)
  • For the benefit of beholders they were respectably vacuous.†   (source)
  • Vacuousness and bad manners and spiteful gossip—that's what I hate."†   (source)
  • Two young men in brown robes like furniture-covers were gesturing vacuously and droning cryptic sentences full of repetitions.†   (source)
  • As a preliminary to another journey to his bunk, he hooked Wolf Larsen's buttonhole with a greasy forefinger and vacuously proclaimed and reiterated, "I got money, I got money, I tell yer, an' I'm a gentleman's son."†   (source)
  • Now it would be the bearded, monarchical, benevolent head of the Grand Duke; then the sharp-featured, brown, cavalry-moustached feature of the chief of police; then the globular, polished and high-collared vacuousness that represented Monsieur Schontz, the proprietor of the hotel.†   (source)
  • She closed her eyes an instant, and the vacuous routine of the life she had chosen stretched before her like a long white road without dip or turning: it was true she was to roll over it in a carriage instead of trudging it on foot, but sometimes the pedestrian enjoys the diversion of a short cut which is denied to those on wheels.†   (source)
  • For all the preposterous hat and the vacuous face, there was something noble in the simple faith of our visitor which compelled our respect.†   (source)
  • She said vacuously: "Uh—Will, I wonder if that young man in the white flannel trousers, at church this morning, was this Valborg person that they're all talking about?"†   (source)
  • People noticed the vacuity of my face and the aimlessness of my conversation.†   (source)
  • The day was hot and bright, and the cement was hot and gritty under our feet as we stood there in that vacuity which belongs to the period just before parting at a railway station.†   (source)
  • And between the two, what a long stretch of vacuity!†   (source)
  • Two years my life spent inalleshual vacuity.†   (source)
  • The orange light through the drawn blind, the sarcophagus of her figure on the bed, the spot of face, the voice searching the vacuity of her illness and finding only remote abstractions.†   (source)
  • But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subjects to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, I would see before me vacuity, nothing, would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent, or that, perhaps, a malady of the brain was hindering its development.†   (source)
  • The human race must be led out of the primitive stage of fear and long-suffering vacuity and into a phase of purposeful activity.†   (source)
  • The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone.†   (source)
  • Once or twice he tried to sit and look impressive in the office of the Director, but fled from that large clean vacuity and from Miss Robbins's snapping typewriter to his own den that smelled not of forward-looking virtue but only of cigarettes and old papers.†   (source)
  • The tape-like surface of the road diminished in his rear as far as he could see, and as he gazed a moving spot intruded on the white vacuity of its perspective.†   (source)
  • …seeing that Swann was within earshot, assumed that expression in which the two-fold desire to make the speaker be quiet and to preserve, oneself, an appearance of guilelessness in the eyes of the listener, is neutralised in an intense vacuity; in which the unflinching signs of intelligent complicity are overlaid by the smiles of innocence, an expression invariably adopted by anyone who has noticed a blunder, the enormity of which is thereby at once revealed if not to those who…†   (source)
  • It was as though all the weariness of the past months had culminated in the vacuity of that interminable evening.†   (source)
  • Mr. Gryce was touched by her disinterestedness, and, to escape from the threatened vacuity of the afternoon, had taken her advice and departed mournfully, in a dust-hood and goggles: as the motor-car plunged down the avenue she smiled at his resemblance to a baffled beetle.†   (source)
  • What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages.†   (source)
  • It had that typical vagueness which is not vacuity, that blankness which is not simplicity, that look of being committed to nothing in particular, of standing in an attitude of general hospitality to the chances of life, of being very much at one's own disposal so characteristic of many American faces.†   (source)
  • But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.†   (source)
  • As he crossed the threshold he was met by old Lisabetta, who smirked and smiled, and was evidently desirous to attract his attention; vainly, however, as the ebullition of his feelings had momentarily subsided into a cold and dull vacuity.†   (source)
  • In the lull consequent on the departure—in that first vacuity which ensues on every separation, foreshadowing the great separation that is always overhanging all mankind—Arthur stood at his desk, looking dreamily out at a gleam of sun.†   (source)
  • Perhaps some infatuated swain has ere this mistaken insensibility for modesty, dulness for maiden reserve, mere vacuity for sweet bashfulness, and a goose, in a word, for a swan.†   (source)
  • I felt sick inside as I looked at his dull, vacuous smile—the wide, bright eyes of a child, uncertain but eager to please, and I realized what I had recognized in him.   (source)
    vacuous = lacking intelligent thought
  • Photographs (I didn't know they had been taken) were passed around and commented on, and I could see by the nods and smiles that most people there agreed with him that the "dull, vacuous facial expression" had been transformed into an "alert, intelligent appearance."   (source)
  • vacuous the space   (source)
    vacuous = large and empty
  • Meanwhile opinion gilds with varying rays Those painted clouds that beautify our days; Each want of happiness by hope supplied, And each vacuity of sense by pride: These build as fast as knowledge can destroy; In folly's cup still laughs the bubble, joy; One prospect lost, another still we gain; And not a vanity is given in vain; Even mean self-love becomes, by force divine, The scale to measure others' wants by thine.†   (source)
  • At last his sail-broad vans He spread for flight, and, in the surging smoke Uplifted, spurns the ground; thence many a league, As in a cloudy chair, ascending rides Audacious; but, that seat soon failing, meets A vast vacuity.†   (source)
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