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abysmal
in a sentence

show 54 more with this conextual meaning
  • The grouping on my other shots was abysmal.†   (source)
  • In his report to the German government, he wrote that abysmal social conditions, which the government had fostered and done nothing to relieve, had caused the epidemic.†   (source)
  • Oh, what an abysmal lack of imagination!†   (source)
  • I reviewed over and over the plans that had seemed so straightforward before I arrived in jail, and I swore to myself and every god I knew that if I got out alive, I would never never never take any risks that were so abysmally stupid again.†   (source)
  • But in the San Antonio Today ran so abysmally that his trainer concluded he had no chance in the Santa Anita Handicap.†   (source)
  • If your vocabulary wasn't so abysmal you wouldn't have to carry a dictionary around with you to keep up with me.†   (source)
  • …kicked the chaplain out of the officers' club, and it was exactly the way it almost was two months later after the chaplain had tried to persuade Colonel Cathcart to rescind his order increasing the number of missions to sixty and had failed abysmally in that endeavor too, and the chaplain was ready now to capitulate to despair entirely but was restrained by the memory of his wife, whom he loved and missed so pathetically with such sensual and exalted ardor, and by the lifelong trust…†   (source)
  • Among other things, it crowds out a vision that drove him all but crazy: the look on some MIT professor's face when he sees Cedric's abysmal score of 75 out of a possible 160 on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, or PSAT.†   (source)
  • Yes, the chances of success are abysmal.†   (source)
  • I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility.†   (source)
  • Orfeo strutted forward, his face moving in a hundred independent directions, an abysmal recitation coming from his lips.†   (source)
  • The dealership had approved the sale despite their abysmal credit rating.†   (source)
  • It is my experience that in some areas Charley is more intelligent than I am, but in others he is abysmally ignorant: He can't read, can't drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics.†   (source)
  • But has it not long beenstraying in the night without end of the abysmal depths?†   (source)
  • Although the hill ranch was large it was abysmally poor.†   (source)
  • The truth of it was that Charles was abysmally timid of girls.†   (source)
  • "Which person," she said, her voice shaking, "which abysmally foolish person wrote down this week's passwords and left them lying around?"†   (source)
  • Meager incomes don't guarantee abysmal health statistics, but the two usually go together.†   (source)
  • The general standard of this homework was abysmal.†   (source)
  • I recall him insisting upon the construction of that abysmal front terrace.†   (source)
  • 'Another Remembrall?' said Harry, remembering the marble-like device Neville's grandmother had sent him in an effort to improve his abysmal memory.†   (source)
  • Along with my abysmal school record came drug experimentation—nothing hard, just what alcohol I could get my hands on and a stash of weed that Ken's son and I found.†   (source)
  • Although Slytherin had been narrowly defeated by Hufflepuff in their last match, Gryffindor were not daring to hope for victory, due mainly (though of course nobody said it to him) to Ron's abysmal goal-keeping record.†   (source)
  • When people were not discussing the escaped Death Eaters in the corridors, they were laughing at Gryffindor's abysmal performance in their match against Hufflepuff; the Slytherins were singing Weasley is our King' so loudly and frequently that by sundown Filch had banned it from the corridors out of sheer irritation.†   (source)
  • But during that spring semester, a sort of hush fell over my previously busy creative life— not a writer's block, but a sense that it was time to stop goofing around with a pick and shovel and get behind the controls of one big great God a' mighty steam shovel, a sense that it was time to try and dig something big out of the sand, even if the effort turned out to be an abysmal failure.†   (source)
  • She's heard from Donald that his writing has moved from abysmal to poor and she figures he must have been working furiously on prose since he arrived.†   (source)
  • They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying.†   (source)
  • Abysmal—absolutely horrible.†   (source)
  • Yet this had not been the moment; it was as far back as he could go, but the secret, the turning, the abysmal drop was farther back, in darkness.†   (source)
  • And John tried to see through the morning wall, to stare past the bitter houses, to tear the thousand gray veils of the sky away, and look into the heart? that monstrous heart which beat forever, turning the astounded universe, commanding the stars to flee away before the sun's red sandal, bidding the moon to wax and wane, and disappear, and come again; with a silver net holding back the sea, and, out of mysteries abysmal, re-creating, each day, the earth.†   (source)
  • Abysmal change widened their souls out in a brooding unconsciousness.†   (source)
  • There only fell on her an abysmal fear, a certain knowledge that God had turned His face from her for her sin.†   (source)
  • In my present form I feel even more anxious to see you, to unite you to myself in an indissoluble embrace, (Signed) TOADPIPE For his Abysmal Sublimity Under Secretary Screwtape, T. E., B. S., etc.†   (source)
  • While he was teasing me with the charming, dangerous thing, he became quite old once more, very, very old, a thousand years old, with hair as white as snow, and his withered graybeard's face laughed a still and soundless laughter that shook him to the depths with abysmal old-man's humor.†   (source)
  • 'After the capricious fires, the abysmal dullness of youth,' said Neville, 'the light falls upon real objects now.†   (source)
  • I know that of all problems, none disturbed him so greatly nor worked upon him so much as the abysmal problem of time.†   (source)
  • What kind of abysmal and purblind innocence could that have been which someone told you to call virginity? what conscience to trade with which would have warranted you in the belief that you could have bought immunity from her for no other coin but justice?†   (source)
  • He was the light-blinded bat-like image of his own torment cast by the fierce demoniac lantern up from beneath the earth's crust and hence in retrograde, reverse; from abysmal and chaotic dark to eternal and abysmal dark completing his descending (do you mark the gradation) ellipsis, clinging, trying to cling with vain unsubstantial hands to what be hoped would hold him, save him, arrest him—Ellen (do you mark them), myself, then last of all that fatherless daughter of Wash Jones' only…†   (source)
  • He no longer dares to tease her by assuming an abysmal inferiority of Freddy's mind to his own.†   (source)
  • In all the world, under the sea, in the abysmal caves, in the vast spaces of the air, there was no such terrible silence as this.†   (source)
  • They went to abysmal Greenwich Village restaurants with candles, artistic waiters, and no food; or to Chinatown dives with food and nothing else.†   (source)
  • But all this belonged—I mean their magnificent little surrender—just to the special array of the facts that were most abysmal.†   (source)
  • And he contemplated her absorbed young face with a thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity.†   (source)
  • The Superintendent trundled steadily forward: he had expected these outbursts of insolence—they are the natural gestures of an inferior race, and he betrayed no hatred of Aziz, merely an abysmal contempt.†   (source)
  • In the meantime, the abysmal brute in Beauty Smith had been rising into his brain and mastering the small bit of sanity that he possessed at best.†   (source)
  • Dorset was sunk in one of the abysmal silences which so commonly followed on what his wife called his "attacks" that it was easy, before the servants, to refer it to this cause; but Bertha herself seemed, perversely enough, little disposed to make use of this obvious means of protection.†   (source)
  • Living, as they did, in what appeared to me impenetrable darkness, their eyes were abnormally large and sensitive, just as are the pupils of the abysmal fishes, and they reflected the light in the same way.†   (source)
  • At home she wondered if the little beast might not be suggesting himself as a rival to Erik, but that abysmal bedragglement she would not consider.†   (source)
  • [Illustration: two page color illustration] Another sigh, deeper, more tremendous still, came from the abysmal depths of a soul.†   (source)
  • Somewhere a boot thumped loudly and at irregular intervals against the wall; and, though it was a mild night on the sea, there was a continual chorus of the creaking timbers and bulkheads and of abysmal noises beneath the flooring.†   (source)
  • The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through, and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied.†   (source)
  • The film was a highly advertised and abysmal thing smacking of simpering hair-dressers, cheap perfume, red-plush suites on the back streets of tenderloins, and complacent fat women chewing gum.†   (source)
  • …and wines, proselytes, and foreigners not proselytes, watchmen and menials from the Temple, thieves, robbers, and the myriad not assignable to any class, but who, on such occasions as this, appeared no one could say whence, hungry and smelling of caves and old tombs—bareheaded wretches with naked arms and legs, hair and beard in uncombed mats, and each with one garment the color of clay; beasts with abysmal mouths, in outcry effective as lions calling each other across desert spaces.†   (source)
  • The explosion had caused a kind of earthquake in this fissured and abysmal region; a great gulf had opened; and the sea, now changed into a torrent, was hurrying us along into it.†   (source)
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