Sample Sentences for
callous
grouped by contextual meaning
(editor-reviewed)

callous as in:  callous indifference

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She displays a callous indifference to others' suffering.
callous = heartless (cruel)
Show 3 more with this contextual meaning
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    "For starters," he said, "I will take each and every one of your books—and I will burn them." It was callous.  (source)
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    Articles had appeared in nearly every major newspaper blasting the government's callous disregard for life.  (source)
    callous = heartless (with a disregard for others)
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    Dennis saw the callous way my aunt treated me, and he saw her love trysts with Mr. Stein, and he never said anything about how she acted with Mr. Stein, but he'd always offer a kind word to me, or just make a joke.  (source)
    callous = heartless (with a cruel lack of concern)
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Show 10 more with 5 word variations
  • •
    …he is brute, and more than brute; he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not;  (source)
    callous = heartlessness (cruel lack of concern for others)
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    Lourdes felt his calloused palm, the metal of his ring clapping her temple.  (source)
    calloused = with thickened skin
  • •
    ...what he was about to say was just an aftereffect of someone else's actions—someone else's callousness.  (source)
    callousness = insensitivity (emotionally)
    standard suffix: The suffix "-ness" converts an adjective to a noun that means the quality of. This is the same pattern you see in words like darkness, kindness, and coolness.
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    Have they been programmed to hate our faces particularly because we have survived and they were so callously murdered?†  (source)
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    These earliest jobs, though, that she chose for us, they weren't generally of the callousing kind.†  (source)
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    Absence cannot have rendered you callous to our joys and griefs; and how shall I inflict pain on my long absent son?  (source)
    callous = unfeeling
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    A calloused hand, a healed cut, the shiny slash of a burn on the deep bronze skin.†  (source)
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    He didn't seem to be sorry at all, and suddenly she was angry at him, not only for his callousness about the horse but because he didn't appreciate anything that was being done for him, by her or anyone else.  (source)
    callousness = insensitivity (emotionally)
  • •
    DANFORTH: Then you tell me that you sat in my court, callously lying, when you knew that people would hang by your evidence?†  (source)
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    From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily torture.  (source)
    callous = insensitive (emotionally hardened)
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callous as in:  a thick callous

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After nearly two hours of pampering—trimming her hair, shaping her nails, and scraping away the callouses on her feet and hands—Celaena grinned at the mirror in the dressing room.  (source)
callouses = thickened skin
Show 3 more with this contextual meaning
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    The calloused pads of his fingers brush against Hassan's eyes.  (source)
    calloused = thickened
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    He explored the long fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of callouses, the smooth flesh under the wrist.  (source)
    callouses = thickened skin
  • •
    One time he showed me the callouses on his hands.  (source)
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Show 10 more with 2 word variations
  • •
    Celia displays her hands, marred by cuts and callouses.  (source)
    callouses = thickened skin
  • •
    My student hand, clean and soft, on his laborer's hand, grubby and calloused.  (source)
    calloused = with thickened skin
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    But Luke's scorn was real, and hurt her, and the callouses he'd carefully grown to wall off his nerves from other people's pain were torn away to the roots by her words; the image he thought he had sealed off—an image now familiar and tiresome, infuriating as a tubercular's cough, yet no less dreadful for his having endured it a thousand times, awake and asleep—the image of fire, leapt up again in his mind or, as it seemed, in the corners of the room: turning quickly, with a sudden bow to prove to himself as much as to them that he was still in command, he had fled.  (source)
    callouses = thickened skin (figuratively to indicate insensitivity)
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    It was small, the skin dry and calloused.  (source)
    calloused = thickened
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    After, say, a month my hands had healed and I was developing large callouses from my scraping activities.  (source)
    callouses = thickened skin
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    I watched the way his sandals pounded the pavement, slapped his black, calloused heels.  (source)
    calloused = with thickened skin
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    A love affair is not made to crouch down and brutalize itself like an English serving-maid who has callouses on her knees from scrubbing.  (source)
    callouses = thickened skin
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    Then I blinked and, for just a moment, the hands holding the spool were the chipped-nailed, calloused hands of a harelipped boy.  (source)
    calloused = with thickened skin
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    Only Sukeena has noticed the splinters and callouses on my hands-and in typical fashion has thought better than to ask me their source.  (source)
    callouses = thickened skin
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    Hassan and I stand ankle-deep in untamed grass, I am tugging on the line, the spool spinning in Hassan's calloused hands, our eyes turned up to the kite in the sky.  (source)
    calloused = with thickened skin
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