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vocabulary
1000+ books

sibilant
in a sentence

show 55 more with this conextual meaning
  • He prowled across Carvahall, avoiding everyone until he heard a sibilant voice from around a house.†   (source)
  • Plump, translucent lizards lived behind old pictures, and waxy, crumbling ancestors with tough toe-nails and breath that smelled of yellow maps gossiped in sibilant, papery whispers.†   (source)
  • Hekate spoke in a deep, almost masculine voice, touched with an accent that had all the hissing sibilants of Greece and the liquid consonants of Persia.†   (source)
  • A terrible, shameful image comes to me: Kamal with his delicate hands, his reassuring manner, his sibilant speech, contrasted with Scott, huge and powerful, wild, desperate.†   (source)
  • The camp was desolate at this hour, but there were birds out and about, a great many birds, flying or perched upon the pavilions and the perimeter fence, and Nadia and Saeed looked at these birds who had lost or would soon lose their trees to construction, and Saeed sometimes called out to them with a faint, sibilant, unpuckered whistle, like a balloon slowly deflating.†   (source)
  • She hadn't been able to understand Artkin's words, but the sibilant whispers left no doubt in her mind about what Artkin was saying.†   (source)
  • Sibilants echo wetly off Grade's teeth.†   (source)
  • In the hush, a sibilant sound attended the finish photo as it slid down to the stewards.†   (source)
  • The wheels were sibilant on the whizzing blacktop surface.†   (source)
  • He thought about that as he listened to the two lovers talking in sibilant whispers as they strolled near University Lake.†   (source)
  • I swear I hear the words return: "T …. h …. e d …. o …. w …. e …. r." Though these words make no sense to me, I am grateful for any sibilance, any sustenance to what previously was discerned as only wind.†   (source)
  • He tapped his scepter on his knee, his voice soft and sibilant.†   (source)
  • The sibilant s, followed by a flat vowel and hard consonants.†   (source)
  • This man had become so intimate with gophers that he could charm them with sibilant whistles until they would emerge from their underground retreats and passively allow him to examine the hair on their backs.†   (source)
  • I also got used to hearing short bursts of foreign languages as the dial hand swept round from BBC to Radio Eireann, from the intonations of London to those of Dublin, and even though I did not understand what was being said in those first encounters with the gutturals and sibilants of European speech, I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world beyond.†   (source)
  • She made a sibilant sound, almost inaudible, and right there on Constitution Avenue, moved toward me in a rush and pressed herself into my arms.†   (source)
  • I heard the breathing of fifty men like muted sibilance of surf, broken only by necessary orders in the fewest possible words.†   (source)
  • Hyesss, Hannah said softly, sharply inhaling the first of the word, and trailing the sibilant to a hair.†   (source)
  • Rendezvous, it says, terraces; the sibilants run up my spine, a shiver as if in fever.†   (source)
  • A sibilant hiss came from the smaller Ra'zac.†   (source)
  • He prowled across Carvahall, avoiding everyone until he heard a sibilant voice from around a house.†   (source)
  • "Renault …. zero," Brother Leon said, his voice a sibilant whisper.†   (source)
  • Orr snickered with a slight, mucid sibilance and turned back to his work, squatting.†   (source)
  • Its familiar tones were soft and sibilant and eternally playful.†   (source)
  • I read on in a voice of increasing anxiety, through suave M and N, through quirky Q and hard R and the sibilant menaces of S. My father stares into the flames, watching the fields and woods and houses and towns and men and brothers go up in smoke, his bad leg moving by itself like a dog's running in dreams.†   (source)
  • The news spread through the vast audience like a tremor whose aftershocks were a sibilant hiss of disapproval.†   (source)
  • "S-s-s-si-ide," said the creature, repeating the word and stretching out its syllable in a sibilant hiss as though rediscovering it had the power of speech.†   (source)
  • Dictating his thoughts deliberately and slowly to Sophie in a somewhat harsh, fiat, sibilant accent which she had earlier recognized as the voice of a North German from the Baltic region, he paused only to light cigarettes (he was a chain-smoker, and she noticed that the fingers of his right hand, small and even pudgy for such a rather gaunt person, were stained the hue of chestnut) and to brood thoughtfully for many, seconds with his hand pressed lightly to his brow.†   (source)
  • All the air of the fourteenth floor was sibilant with the categorical imperative.†   (source)
  • The brief, intermittent sibilance of a machine-saw came from a near-by workshop.†   (source)
  • Then she flings herself across Addle Bundren's knees, clutching her, shaking her with the furious strength of the young before sprawling suddenly across the handful of rotten bones that Addie Bundren left, jarring the whole bed into a chattering sibilance of mattress shucks, her arms outflung and the fan in one hand still beating with expiring breath into the quilt.†   (source)
  • The last part of his speech was lost in a faint sibilant buzz that went through the gathering, an angry beelike buzz.†   (source)
  • Theodore Murrell would be lying there, too, breathing with a slightly adenoidal sibilance under his beautiful blond mustache.†   (source)
  • There is a little informal talking in the church itself, lowtoned, the ladies constant and a link sibilant with fans, nodding to arriving friends as they pass in the aisle.†   (source)
  • He had long fair hair combed back without a parting and a face that was unnaturally lined for a man of his obvious youth; one of his front teeth was missing, so that his sibilants came sometimes with a lisp, sometimes with a disconcerting whistle, which he covered with a giggle; the teeth he had were stained with tobacco and set far apart.†   (source)
  • They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men —some in their brushed Confederate uniforms—on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical…†   (source)
  • The plethora of sibilants in the sentence still offended his ear, but he saw no way of amending them without using what were, to his mind, inferior synonyms.†   (source)
  • …its impulse and fear, and that all her withholdments and hesitations had not been prompted by some dream of making "love mean something" and making me understand that dream but that they had been prompted by all the fears which the leaning, sibilant, sour-breathed old dough-faces of conventional society had whispered into her ear like fairy godmothers while she lay in her cradle, and that those withholdments and hesitations were no better or worse than the hottest surrender nor better…†   (source)
  • That day he listened while a few of "the older girls who had helped her prepare to leave in that same hushed, secret sibilance in which a half dozen young girls help prepare the seventh one for marriage told, still batebreathed, about the new dress, the new shoes, the carriage which had fetched her away.†   (source)
  • Or he might say nothing in reply, but would look at Tiny in a massive, deep-eyed, detached, calculating way, as though he were measuring him for something, and not say a word, till Tiny's voice would trail off into a silence so absolute you could hear both men's breathing, Tiny's breath sibilant, quick, and shallow for all his bulk, the Boss's steady and deep.†   (source)
  • His nerves overwrought by sleeplessness, the doctor fancied he could hear, on the edge of the silence, that faint eerie sibilance which had haunted his ears ever since the beginning of the epidemic.†   (source)
  • It was a very calm, clear night with scarcely a sibilance from the water on the shingle of the beach, and the bay was bright under the stars.†   (source)
  • "The Boss," he repeated, and on the word his upper lip curled more than customary to expose the teeth, and the sibilance seemed exaggerated, "need not expect to buy me.†   (source)
  • "To find her and buy her and set her free," he said, and felt the grasp on his arm released and then in the dark suddenly felt the rake of her nails down his cheek, and heard her voice in a kind of "wild sibilance" saying, "if you do—if you do—oh, I'll not abide it— I will not!"†   (source)
  • As he stooped to snatch it up he uttered a sibilant hiss.†   (source)
  • Sometimes this gurgle became sibilant, almost a whistle.†   (source)
  • Anne was sitting at her open window, for the time forgetful of the woes of examinations and the cares of the world, as she drank in the beauty of the summer dusk, sweet-scented with flower breaths from the garden below and sibilant and rustling from the stir of poplars.†   (source)
  • It had a slight sibilant sound.†   (source)
  • When anybody entered the room, she uttered a shshshsh so sibilant and ominous, that it frightened the poor old lady in her bed, from which she could not look without seeing Mrs. Bute's beady eyes eagerly fixed on her, as the latter sate steadfast in the arm-chair by the bedside.†   (source)
  • They emerged from the cabins and struggled up the sharing levee to the road—men in staid, hard brown orblack, with gold watch chains and now and then a stick; young men in cheap violentblues or stripes and swaggering hats; women a little stiffly sibilant,and children in garments bought second hand of white people, who looked at Ben with the covertness of nocturnal animals: "I bet you wont go up en tech him."†   (source)
  • …sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar: Bloom's longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter, who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars: Stephen's higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vesical pressure.†   (source)
  • This face is a dog's snout sniffing for garbage, Snakes nest in that mouth, I hear the sibilant threat.†   (source)
  • Flooding with sheeny light the gray beach sand, The sibilant near sea with vistas far and foam, And tawny streaks and shades and spreading blue; O sun of noon refulgent! my special word to thee.†   (source)
  • As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life 1 As I ebb'd with the ocean of life, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk'd where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok, Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant, Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways, I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems, Was seiz'd by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot, The rim, the sediment that stands for…†   (source)
  • Whispers of Heavenly Death Whispers of heavenly death murmur'd I hear, Labial gossip of night, sibilant chorals, Footsteps gently ascending, mystical breezes wafted soft and low, Ripples of unseen rivers, tides of a current flowing, forever flowing, (Or is it the plashing of tears? the measureless waters of human tears?†   (source)
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