caustic

in a sentence

grouped by contextual meaning

Be careful. The chemical is caustic.

And they had the caustic knowledge that no one had come between them and tragedy.  (source) Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken, 2010

Sometimes they find tins of motor oil, caustic solvents, plastic bottles of bleach.  (source) Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 2003

In the past when he walked out like that and sat looking over the country lying in just the faintest visible shape where the lost moon tracked the caustic waste he'd sometimes see a light.  (source) Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 2006

But then I remembered the chair at Hemingway's house had been lodged in a manchineel tree and must have been coated with a little bit of the tree's caustic sap.  (source) Jack Gantos, Hole in My Life, 2002

It's more than the reinforced elevator, or the claustrophobia of being so far underground, or the caustic smell of antiseptic.  (source) Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay, 2010

This morning, gasping lungfuls of caustic, snow-filled air, he had apparently frozen his larynx.  (source) Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air, 1997

Some days the halls were suffused with a caustic scent, as of a cleanser applied too liberally, other days with a silvery medicinal odor, as if a dentist were at work somewhere in the building easing a customer into a deep sleep.  (source) Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City, 2003

It's caustic.  (source) Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind, 2007

Matron's by contrast were doughy white, the knuckles large and red as if someone had taken a ruler to them; the knobby excrescencies on the fingers spoke of nothing but age and toil and the caustic soaps and scrubbings which were the first tools of her profession;  (source) Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone, 2009

The stench was caustic, scouring the throat and chest.  (source) Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders, 2001

Evidently the Tilghman brothers owned a giant vat of some caustic solution that stripped everything to the bare wood.  (source) Anne Tayler, A Spool of Blue Thread, 2015

With a passionate haste, she looked around her at the crowd, with eyes as smarting, unseeing, and tearful as if an oculist had put caustic eye-drops into them, and all the people began to move, shuffle, and walk out of the room, leaving her at last alone, behind half-closed doors.  (source) Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, 1958

I always enjoy her remarks, though they can be a bit caustic.

You can do all manner of underhanded nice things when you have a caustic reputation.  (source) Markus Zusak, The Book Thief, 2005

Just as Allied soldiers, like the cultures they came from, often held virulently racist views of the Japanese, Japanese soldiers and civilians, intensely propagandized by their government, usually carried their own caustic prejudices about their enemies, seeing them as brutish, subhuman beasts or fearsome "Anglo-Saxon devils."  (source) Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken, 2010

Further complicating matters, the prelate was deaf in his left ear, partial to Latin epigrams, and prone to stare at décolletage whenever he drank a glass of wine; while the Duchess Obolensky, who was particularly caustic in summer, frowned upon pithy sayings and could not abide discussions of the arts.  (source) Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow, 2016

"Oh," Beatrice said caustically, "the one you went chasing when you shoulda been minding your own business."  (source) Carl Hiassen, Hoot, 2002

...the latter—saturnine, spare and tall, one in whom a discreet causticity went along with a manner less genial than polite, replied, "Your pardon, Mr. Purser."  (source) Herman Melville, Billy Budd, 1924

He gestured with the folded white cloth and gave a short, caustic laugh.  (source) Lois Lowry, Number the Stars, 1989

"You're going to go back and be a cowboy?" she said caustically.  (source) Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer, 1995

Mr. Deane, he considered, was the "knowingest" man of his acquaintance, and he had besides a ready causticity of tongue that made an agreeable supplement to Mr. Tulliver's own tendency that way, which had remained in rather an inarticulate condition.  (source) George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860

She was pretty but not beautiful, smart but caustic, never chic, never ambitious, always intent on teaching elementary school for a few years, then getting married and having two children and living back on a farm, though not necessarily our farm—a horse farm in Kentucky was one of her early ambitions.  (source) Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres, 1991

"That may be," he said caustically.  (source) Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, 1997

And to the students of Gravesend who thus chafed against their bonds, the only accepted tone was caustic—was biting, mordant, bitter, scathing sarcasm, the juicy vocabulary of which Owen Meany had already learned from my grandmother.  (source) John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany, 1989

"Do you?" asks Prim caustically.  (source) Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay, 2010