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vocabulary
1000+ books

veneer
in a sentence

show 107 more with this conextual meaning
  • It's all very well to talk about ten acres of black walnut trees, and then harvesting them for veneer in thirty years at ten thousand dollars a tree, but what about the lost production for that thirty years?†   (source)
  • Because of the sheets of wood veneer her father has tacked over its windows, their apartment is stuffy and hot.†   (source)
  • The veneer splintered.†   (source)
  • To break through the smug veneer of those who use their brains to find amusing ways to kill us.†   (source)
  • Only once, when Marlee tripped over the hem of her dress, did that veneer crack.†   (source)
  • We were still sorting through the veneer: clicking fragments, paper-thin, like counters in some ancient game from China maybe, an eerie lightness in the sound which made you feel lost in some much larger silence.†   (source)
  • One was a deep brown, with scrapes and scratches visible beneath the glossy veneer she kept up with biannual waxing.†   (source)
  • I had decided to line the interior of the nozzle with a veneer of water putty, an inspiration that I hoped would act as an ablative heat sink.†   (source)
  • Pity links us in a perverted way, transcending our veneers, joining us in our vulnerability, and at the same time distancing us from one another.†   (source)
  • She didn't want to know any of this about the adults who'd ruled her life, that beneath their veneer of propriety they might have been concealing a turmoil of emotions too.†   (source)
  • The set had a walnut veneer with silvery hardware.†   (source)
  • The blue stain raced around the tree, coating everything in a thin veneer of glittering ice crystals that reflected the light.†   (source)
  • Its highly polished walnut surface had been marked by spilt liquids, and the veneer was coming away slightly in one place.†   (source)
  • The path in front of him rapidly lost its veneer of snow and ice, as if someone were blow-drying it.†   (source)
  • For example, there is the fragment of memory about a dining-room table whose edge veneer had come loose and which Phaedrus had reglued.†   (source)
  • He had indeed achieved a kind of wisdom—if you wanted to call it that—though at the same time he knew that most elderly people were not wise at all but only wore a thin veneer of cheap wisdom as a sort of armor against the world.†   (source)
  • On a low coffee table, with circular and semicircular stains bitten into the dark veneer, lay a few wilted numbers of Time and Lift.†   (source)
  • Just like its name, the place masked a whole lot of cruelty under a thin veneer of kindness.†   (source)
  • …entrance for ordinary visitors, was separated from the parlor by a sliding door; though Mr. Clutter occasionally shared the office with Gerald Van Vleet, a young man who assisted him with the management of the farm, it was fundamentally his retreat-an orderly sanctuary, paneled in walnut veneer, where, surrounded by weather barometers, rain charts, a pair of binoculars, he sat like a captain in his cabin, a navigator piloting River Valley's sometimes risky passage through the seasons.†   (source)
  • He pressed his thumbprint in the warm wax pooled on the oak veneer.†   (source)
  • The house hadn't been renovated since the 1940s, and it still had cheap wood-veneer paneling and old smelly, worn-out lime-green carpeting.†   (source)
  • Haji Ali wouldn't have approved, but Tara was due in a month, the clean-shaven Gul had a veneer of respectability, and Mortenson didn't have time to be choosy.†   (source)
  • He put on a don't-give-a-damn veneer, coated by his trademark grin and playful sense of humor.†   (source)
  • When Merrill got on, I could tell that some of her cool veneer had cracked.†   (source)
  • I suspected that beneath his gentleman's veneer he was painfully ignorant of the most simple financial matters.†   (source)
  • It's a fake front, a veneer of some kind, maybe of, for example, sophistication.†   (source)
  • Rectangular in shape, it had a huge gold-colored dial with a "tuning-eye," and Padre Esteban admired the craftsmanship in its multigrained wood veneer.†   (source)
  • The veneer of sophistication and the pursuit of security were valued over a smoldering, wandering first-rate mind of unsure direction, especially a mind inside a head of unkempt hair and a body dressed in clothes that were cheap imitations of J. Press and Brooks Brothers, which appeared even worse because his bank account precluded any additional expenses for alterations and few discount stores carried his size.†   (source)
  • In the end she shook her head and ordered an ordinary desk, the Galant, in beech veneer with an angled top and rounded corners, and a large filing cabinet.†   (source)
  • Adams's desk, a beautiful French escritoire of veneered satinwood and ebony, which he had bought in Paris after the war, was his particular pride and joy.†   (source)
  • An hour later, when the sun had melted black patches on the barn's frost-veneered roof, Tom led out one of the colts he'd started the previous week and swung himself up into the saddle.†   (source)
  • But under the grammatical veneer was a seething disobedience.†   (source)
  • He gave me a look that linked us as spiritual allies, resolute desperadoes in headlong flight from the false and sinister veneer of Charleston.†   (source)
  • But she is already leaving, well before dawn, as if to spend any more time here might chip her thin veneer.†   (source)
  • There was much more of him present in his hands than in the waxy veneer of his face.†   (source)
  • Whenever we first opened its door at the top of the creaky narrow stairs we smelled the fresh veneers of pine oil and bleach and lemon balm.†   (source)
  • The people in the next compartment rapped on the wall, and their muffled command came through the veneer in severe Plattdeutsch, "Laugh not in time of war!"†   (source)
  • He adopted a veneer of unshakable courage from that day forward.†   (source)
  • There was a cheap desk of particle board and walnut veneer, two silver file cabinets.†   (source)
  • It's at a veneer mill where you would have to do whatever they needed done.†   (source)
  • He was completely civil, and in such an authentic way, I felt it was his real nature and not just a veneer to please the customer—the way I had seen it in the stores in New Orleans.†   (source)
  • For McGraw-Hill was, after all, in spite of its earnest literary veneer, a monstrous paradigm of American business.†   (source)
  • They are wonderfully built homes, aluminum skins, double-walled, with insulation, and often paneled with veneer of hardwood.†   (source)
  • In the old days before the First World War, Papa had traded in the walnut veneer business.†   (source)
  • Control asked sharply and for a moment, just for a moment, Leamas thought he had penetrated the veneer of academic detachment.†   (source)
  • A hundred cultured boys and girls slipping back to illiteracy, back to the stone age, the veneer sloughing away …. reverting to savagery.†   (source)
  • John Sawtelle got work at the veneer mill in town and rented out the fields Schultz had cleared.†   (source)
  • The magic veneer had faded, leaving only broken walls and excavation pits.†   (source)
  • But sometimes even Ira's veneer cracked.†   (source)
  • In a similar way, American society was a veneer over two very different realities.†   (source)
  • Every guy at the veneer mill had his own way of testing me to see if I was the agent.†   (source)
  • Lemm's hands were calloused stumps and his forearms as thick as the veneer cores he sawed.†   (source)
  • We ate in a dining alcove paneled in mahogany veneer.†   (source)
  • Tenzing was moving closely behind the other four, stepping exactly where they had stepped, when he broke through a thin veneer of snow spanning a deep crevasse.†   (source)
  • We've been good to 'em, we've bailed 'em out of jail and out of debt since the beginning of time, we've made work for 'em when there was no work, we've encouraged 'em to better themselves, they've gotten civilized, but my dear— that veneer of civilization's so thin that a bunch of uppity Yankee Negroes can shatter a hundred years' progress in five….†   (source)
  • I remember thinking at the time what a good actress she must be to camouflage disappointment and hurt with a veneer of cheerfulness.†   (source)
  • We see UFOs, engage in channeling, spirit contact, out-of-body experiences, mindquests-all these eccentric ideas have a scientific veneer, but they are unashamedly irrational.†   (source)
  • The difference between a civilized man and a barbarous fiend — a madman, say — lies, perhaps, merely in a thin veneer of willed self-restraint.†   (source)
  • It was described and photographed within an inch of its life, and decorated that way too, with strip lighting and plastic laminates and fluted columns and maple burr — costly veneers everywhere.†   (source)
  • He held the veneer in place while the glue set by wrapping a whole ball of string around the table, round and round and round.†   (source)
  • The veneer of civilization?†   (source)
  • Inside, the windows are boarded over with wood veneer, and an airless, pearly light seeps through the knotholes.†   (source)
  • "Well, you see —" he put the veneer up to the clock's apron—"this kind of work, it's the grain of the wood you really have to match.†   (source)
  • In order to remove the last vestige of value from this piece of furniture, Father went over to it and pushed his finger under the loose veneer, which snapped off, leaving a strip of bare wood behind it.†   (source)
  • In time, they heard that Claude had picked up part-time work at the veneer mill and odd jobs on the side.†   (source)
  • The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable.†   (source)
  • Or take a table to be independently evaluated and learn that the veneer was of a type not used, or invented, in the 1770s?†   (source)
  • At first —" he deliberated several moments over another piece of veneer, then put it in the maybe pile—"at first he told me I'd have to take a year off—four years, five, however long it took—and earn the rest of my college money the hard way.†   (source)
  • I knew how to draw people's attention to the extraordinary points of a piece, the hand-cut veneer, the fine patination, the honorable scars, drawing a finger down an exquisite cyma curve (which Hogarth himself had called "the line of beauty") in order to lead the eye away from reworked bits in back, where in a strong light they might find the grain didn't precisely match.†   (source)
  • In blameless quiet, he buried himself in his work, steam-bending veneers or hand-threading table legs with a chisel, and his happy absorption floated up from the workshop and diffused through the house with the warmth of a wood-burning stove in winter.†   (source)
  • I learned about veneers and gilding, what a mortise and tenon was, the difference between ebonized wood and true ebony, between Newport and Connecticut and Philadelphia crest rails, how the blocky design and close-cropped top of one Chippendale bureau rendered it inferior to another bracket-foot of the same vintage with its fluted quarter columns and what he liked to call the "exalted" proportions of the drawer ratio.†   (source)
  • The ball was a deep sepia, veneered with dirt and turf and generational sweat—it was old, bunged up, it was bashed and tobacco-juiced and stained by natural processes and by the lives behind it, weather-spattered and charactered as a seafront house.†   (source)
  • But some days-like todayit seems like battery acid leaks out of him, soiling his charming, hip-hop veneer.†   (source)
  • Yes, the baseball that marked him as a regular fellow with a soft streak despite his milled-steel veneer.†   (source)
  • Through the tough veneer, I saw a glimpse of the woman Joanna Wade had been young, needing, confused.†   (source)
  • He talks to his son from time to time, mostly over the phone, and both are attentive to avoid tearing a veneer of respectfulness that is allowing their relationship to evolve slowly.†   (source)
  • They had the mental process of do I want to go out and be in a big crowd, which if something awful happens is the worst place to be, or should I stay home with my family and my brand-new TV, which common sense says yes, in a cabinet with maple veneer.†   (source)
  • Its windows were either broken or missing, and gaps in the plaster showed the cinder blocks behind its veneer.†   (source)
  • …splintering of desire, a little more refined and personalized, and in the back room weren't the magazines cased in acetate folders, maybe these were rare issues or rare labels, or maybe the folders themselves were the fetish items here, dust-veneered, handled, nearly opaque some of them, a dullish sort of plastic with a faint odor and prophylactic feel, like condoms for reading matter, and maybe there's another room where you need to whisper a password and this is the room with folders…†   (source)
  • Then, at 4:30 P.M., I moved inside the main build-ing to unload, or "tail," the veneer drier with Preacher.†   (source)
  • One smokestack rose from the middle of the small veneer mill and out of it puffed clean wood smoke and glowing ashes.†   (source)
  • I had finally earned the respect of all the ol' veneer boys the only way I could: working by their side, ankle-deep in the sawdust.†   (source)
  • Chapter 14 — LEMM AND PREACHER. monday morning had barely shone its wake-up rays into Smokey Hollow when it was time for me to dress and go to work at the veneer mill.†   (source)
  • Although I had been living a hard life working at the veneer mill, my body had grown accustomed to many comforts; the time had come to get ready for the hundreds of walking miles ahead to the Gulf of Mexico.†   (source)
  • Her family which, despite the cool and civilized veneer, according to Leslie, is a waxwork gallery of monsters.†   (source)
  • Since Hal had no interest in going to college, Papa had taught him the walnut veneer trade, and this had been his calling ever since.†   (source)
  • Next evening when Uncle Allen came home from his sales route and my mother from her sewing machine and me from my Saturday Evening Post route, I sat at the kitchen table long after supper listening to Uncle Hal talk about corporate giants with whom he was dealing in New York, and about the skill he would need to keep them from outwitting him in the big walnut-veneer deal.†   (source)
  • There was little pretence now-no formal veneer of conversation.†   (source)
  • A veneer of jaunty self-confidence thinly concealed his nervousness.†   (source)
  • But Mammy was under no illusions about her and was constantly alert for breaks in the veneer.†   (source)
  • The helm, pauldrons, and vambraces were polished, literally by weeks of polishing, to that veneer or patina of light which is to be found only on things bought newly from the shop before they have been dulled by household cleaning.†   (source)
  • She had the easily stirred passions of her Irish father and nothing except the thinnest veneer of her mother's unselfish and forbearing nature.†   (source)
  • In Japan, face is important even to institutions and long before the Red Cross Hospital was back to par in basic medical equipment, its directors put up a new yellow brick veneer facade, so the hospital became the handsomest building in Hiroshima — from the street.†   (source)
  • The front of thin veneers was cut out to make a pretty pattern and there was old-rose silk behind this fretted wood design.†   (source)
  • And while the chocolate is yet mid-air, the lower lip drops open and beyond the purplish tint of the microscopically scaling veneer of lipstick, one sees the damp, paler red, expectant membranes of the mouth, and the faint glitter of a gold filling in the dark, hot orifice.†   (source)
  • Here you smelled the daily cleaning wax, and everything was in place on a studious plan--veneer shining, doilies spread, dime-store cut-glass, elkhorn, clock set in place--as regular as a convent parlor or any place where the love of God is made ready for on a base of domestic neatness and things kept well separated from the sea-composition of brutal and noisy trouble that heaves over every undefended wall.†   (source)
  • Ellen never fully realized that it was only a veneer, for Scarlett always showed her best face to her mother, concealing her escapades, curbing her temper and appearing as sweet-natured as she could in Ellen's presence, for her mother could shame her to tears with a reproachful glance.†   (source)
  • There was something exciting about this town with its narrow muddy streets, lying among rolling red hills, something raw and crude that appealed to the rawness and crudeness underlying the fine veneer that Ellen and Mammy had given her.†   (source)
  • With the Republicans in the political saddle the town entered into an era of waste and ostentation, with the trappings of refinement thinly veneering the vice and vulgarity beneath.†   (source)
  • The majority of the guests—who were somewhat empty-headed, after all, in spite of their aristocratic bearing—never guessed, in their self-satisfied composure, that much of their superiority was mere veneer, which indeed they had adopted unconsciously and by inheritance.†   (source)
  • Mugridge's face turned white under its sooty veneer, and when Wolf Larsen called for a rope and a couple of men, the miserable Cockney fled wildly out of the galley and dodged and ducked about the deck with the grinning crew in pursuit.†   (source)
  • Lily considered with interest the expression of their faces: the girl's turned toward her companion's like an empty plate held up to be filled, while the man lounging at her side already betrayed the encroaching boredom which would presently crack the thin veneer of his smile.†   (source)
  • They were merely two-room shanties, with a seepage of broken-down chairs, peeling veneered tables, chromos pasted on wooden walls, and inefficient kerosene stoves.†   (source)
  • They had the complexion of wealth—that clear complexion that is heightened by the pallor of porcelain, the shimmer of satin, the veneer of old furniture, and that an ordered regimen of exquisite nurture maintains at its best.†   (source)
  • The operation had covered him over with a veneer of education and culture, but emotionally he was there— watching and waiting.†   (source)
  • …ten and other high personages simply following in the footsteps of the head of the state, he reflected about the errors of notorieties and crowned heads running counter to morality such as the Cornwall case a number of years before under their veneer in a way scarcely intended by nature, a thing good Mrs Grundy, as the law stands, was terribly down on though not for the reason they thought they were probably whatever it was except women chiefly who were always fiddling more or less at…†   (source)
  • …the working-knife of the butcher, the ice-saw, and all the work with ice, The work and tools of the rigger, grappler, sail-maker, block-maker, Goods of gutta-percha, papier-mache, colors, brushes, brush-making, glazier's implements, The veneer and glue-pot, the confectioner's ornaments, the decanter and glasses, the shears and flat-iron, The awl and knee-strap, the pint measure and quart measure, the counter and stool, the writing-pen of quill or metal, the making of all sorts of…†   (source)
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