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combustion
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  • It contains an extremely combustible substance called antimatter.†   (source)
  • That's copper powder combusting with oxygen!"†   (source)
  • The hydrogen (the only available thing to burn) combined with oxygen (hence combustion) and became water.†   (source)
  • Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust.†   (source)
  • Each person has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live, since the combustion that occurs when one of them is ignited is what nourishes the soul.†   (source)
  • She thought timing belts hadn't been used since internal combustion had become obsolete.†   (source)
  • Trains heading into Mexico City stop first in Lecheraa to leave any cars with combustible contents.†   (source)
  • Spontaneous combustion is a real thing.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Collins read the letter to herself while I secretly wished I would spontaneously combust.†   (source)
  • "Fire" meant gathering up a pile of sticks in a village that had already been gathering firewood for all the years since God was a child, picking its grounds clean of combustibles as efficiently as an animal combing itself for lice.†   (source)
  • I am wearing a highly combustible suit made mostly of natural fibers soaked in oils, some of which are slow burning, some of which are not.†   (source)
  • As dusk fell over the square and city outside the tall windows, the only lights were a few streetlamps of gas or some more primitive combustible.†   (source)
  • Leigh Anne Tuohy was an extreme, and seemingly combustible, mixture of tenderness and willfulness.†   (source)
  • The scent of partially combusted oil suffused the air.†   (source)
  • It seems to me we ought to put some kind of combustible glue in it so it can be shaped.†   (source)
  • Giveme a lot of fear and a small enclosure and I'd combust spontaneously.†   (source)
  • He gripped the mug with both hands, talked about the noise of the conflagration, the air-fed wallop of combustion, like a ramjet thrusting.†   (source)
  • Protecting you from combustion.†   (source)
  • And the mixture of players involved in the discussions seemed combustible, like the nations of Europe before World War I—a stew of World Bank consultants with substantial résumés, some with egos to match, combined with Russian colonels and generals and former apparatchiks and old tb warriors, members of a defeated empire, on the lookout for condescension.†   (source)
  • A more reckless part was tempted to see how close I could get without …. combusting.†   (source)
  • The police came shortly afterward, their own combustible imaginations stiffening their ready civic pride.†   (source)
  • I catch my breath and fight back tears, staring Camel straight in the eyes even as my lungs threaten to combust.†   (source)
  • Lindsay's so outraged she's not even paying attention as we pass Hunan Kitchen: she's too busy glaring at me like she expects me to suddenly turn blue or combust, like I can never be trusted again.†   (source)
  • The shot went off from his gun with a combustion of light and little sound.†   (source)
  • On the day the fire started, over 55 miles of pine-block streets and 600 miles of wooden sidewalks bound the 23,000 acres of the city in a highly combustible knot.†   (source)
  • Ginger Solomon, her best friend who was also Jamaican, was like the yang to Natalie's yin: antic, combustible, and loud.†   (source)
  • In danger of spontaneous combustion.†   (source)
  • Ever since the violent partition that pulled India and Pakistan apart, Kashmir had been combustible.†   (source)
  • The emphasis was on cooperation and ingenuity, and it proved to be a combustible mix.†   (source)
  • Every choice I've made since my life spontaneously combusted has been questioned.†   (source)
  • But combine it with Miles's tendency to arrest the Timsons first and figure the rest out later, and it became a combustible mix.†   (source)
  • An almost white noise, created by the commingling of the sounds of battle from the valley to the east and the never-ending combustion engine of the falls to the remaining west.†   (source)
  • No lightning, no combustion, no storms.†   (source)
  • I just glared at him, hoping he would spontaneously combust before I grabbed my textbooks and notepads off the table.†   (source)
  • So, mother and child occupy the Parlor, the hissing of the logs, the sharp popping of the pine sap combusting the only sounds.†   (source)
  • Yet given all that Jefferson was doing, and the combustible atmosphere of the moment, Adams's rancorous comments were remarkably few and mild.†   (source)
  • The interior of the car was so hot that it seemed on the verge of spontaneous combustion.†   (source)
  • My dear sister does not happen to be a human being, but just an internal combustion engine, so one must not wonder at her success.†   (source)
  • I've seen the way the two of you tiptoe around each other as if you're terrified that if you happened to brush up against each other there'd be spontaneous combustion.†   (source)
  • But all of a sudden, more than you know, he's outside somewhere, sometimes even alone, crossing the streets, scaling rocks, wrestling with dogs, swimming in pits, getting into everything mechanical and combustible and toxic.†   (source)
  • The steady combustion was such that if nature had had a fire-tender, the fire-tender might have been sitting with his feet up, marveling at the flame.†   (source)
  • But not spontaneously combust.†   (source)
  • I told the gaggle I had an internal-combustion headache mixed with PMS.†   (source)
  • Wisps of cigarette smoke hovered above her head, as though she were about to spontaneously combust.†   (source)
  • My jangled nerves together with the sight of these incapacitated angels and the smell of faulty combustion leaking up from the engine—all merged into a phantasm of aching anxiety.†   (source)
  • This resin was dry and wax-like: easily combustible; nature's ready-made firelighter.†   (source)
  • It was not one of your modern internal-combustion hearses, but a beautiful black antique horse-drawn hearse with glass windows on all four sides and elegant wood carvings jutting out hither and yon.†   (source)
  • Know the principles of a internal combustion engine?†   (source)
  • "Drilling troops and giving classes on the internal combustion engine to all the local savants," said Sam.†   (source)
  • All her devotion is combustible and goes up in despair.†   (source)
  • I didn't want to self-combust, so I stuck with mortal first-aid supplies.†   (source)
  • The cylinders bore the letters LH, the number 2, and the universal symbol for combustible.†   (source)
  • Such is the nature of combustion in pure oxygen.†   (source)
  • She felt that if she got any closer to him, all the molecules in her body might combust.†   (source)
  • His hands are in my hair, and my heart is about to combust.†   (source)
  • Sam's dark brown eyes smoldered, right on the edge of combustion.†   (source)
  • It's the greatest revolution in power motors since the internal-combustion enginegreater than that!†   (source)
  • The premise of the movie about us is that we spontaneously combust if we don't talk every six hours.†   (source)
  • Call it spontaneous combustion," Cassie's mother said.†   (source)
  • "This-here is a internal combustion engine," he said.†   (source)
  • They still looked like half-plucked, highly combustible chickens, but they bopped with the proper amount of soul.†   (source)
  • By this period they had invented the clock, the crossbow, and the hand pump, though they had not yet got so far as the internal combustion engine and still used animals for transport.†   (source)
  • I'm going to spontaneously combust one of these days — and you'll have no one but yourself to blame.†   (source)
  • The series of equations we needed to work described the parameters of thrust coefficient, nozzle-throat area, combustion-chamber cross-sectional areas, and velocity of the gases predicted for any particular propellant.†   (source)
  • Like any technology-fire, gunpowder, the combustion engine-in the wrong hands, antimatter could be deadly.†   (source)
  • In under one hundred milliseconds, the massive combustion pressure burst the container, and the resulting explosion ripped the airlock door to shreds.†   (source)
  • You think those fumes are combustible?†   (source)
  • But the original procedure for Sol 31 (which was supposed to be the last day of the surface mission) was to completely shut down the Hab and deflate it, because NASA didn't want a big tent full of combustible oxygen next to the MAV when it launched.†   (source)
  • The fire was doomed, having consumed everything that was combustible; my heart galloped toward its last beat.†   (source)
  • But try not to self-combust.†   (source)
  • Fun with Spontaneous Combustion.†   (source)
  • We ran through smogged-out hollows past houses stilted over raw defiles and we ran into wooded areas that had the look of tinder, a dry white dusty stillness, a sense of combustible edge, but maybe not—I might have been devising my own newsreel. everything quality that creeps into innocuous remarks and becomes the vanguard of estranged feeling.†   (source)
  • His clothes were so hot against his skin, they felt as if they might combust at any second even though they were drenched in sweat.†   (source)
  • They'd found it worked on Nico better than nectar, helping to cleanse the fatigue and darkness from his system with less danger of spontaneous combustion.†   (source)
  • He will combust all at once.†   (source)
  • They circled me like an angry swarm of flaming tennis balls, their heat so intense, I thought they'd combust my new dress.†   (source)
  • When "Toussaint's clause" was passed, Jefferson noted bleakly, "We may expect therefore black crews and …. missionaries" pouring "into the Southern states…… If this combustion can be introduced among us under any veil whatever, we have to fear it."†   (source)
  • To the roar which the simple process of combustion always makes, magnified here to so grand an extent, was added the crash of falling buildings and the constant explosions of stores of oil and other like material.†   (source)
  • His excuse to destroy her, to ignite the violence that filled the air like a thick, combustible mist.†   (source)
  • Hearth was trying to help her extract her toddlers from the stroller, which was now smoking and about to combust.†   (source)
  • Unless you want to spontaneously combust and find yourself trapped forever in the icy darkness of Helheim ….†   (source)
  • And elsewhere in the world there were those who remembered bifocal glasses and toilets that flushed, petroleum chemistry and internal combustion engines, and the day the sun had hidden its face from the justice of Heaven.†   (source)
  • A faint and bitter odor of combustion had seeped into the room, but despite this I opened the window and saw where smoke drifted down the street in fragile bluish veils.†   (source)
  • is a internal combustion engine.†   (source)
  • Today's children breathe in the theory, habits, and idiosyncracies of the internal combustion engine in their cradles, but then you started with the blank belief that it would not run at all, and sometimes you were right.†   (source)
  • The doctor's hands trembled, as if his clutched fingers alone were keeping him from combusting.†   (source)
  • "If you'd sat there any longer," Annabeth said, "you would've spontaneously combusted.†   (source)
  • If Leo started spontaneously combusting every time he got excited, they were going to have a tough time taking him anywhere.†   (source)
  • We have radioactive isotope scanners, olfactory filters designed by the American DEA to detect the faintest chemical signatures of combustibles and toxins.†   (source)
  • Soon enough the fire is burning fiercely with the sheaves of papers, as too much goes in at once, the flames nearly dying out from the smothering; but then in a combustive rush they begin leaping up and out, to lick the underside of the marble mantel.†   (source)
  • They combusted in a tidal wave of heat.†   (source)
  • Panty-Combusting Ken comes complete with Piqued Princess Barbie: unachievable measurements, designer purse, and annoyed scowl included!†   (source)
  • That something in him broke, shattered, melted, combusted, disintegrated like the car my mother was driving when an eighteen-wheeler delivering soda drove right over it.†   (source)
  • For this is the country where the age of the internal combustion engine has come into its own.†   (source)
  • A danger of combustion there.†   (source)
  • Those victims who were able to worry at all about what had happened thought of it and discussed it in more primitive, childish terms — gasoline sprinkled from an aeroplane, maybe, or some combustible gas, or a big cluster of incendiaries, or the work of parachutists; but, even if they had known the truth, most of them were too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care that they were the objects of the first great experiment in the use of atomic power, which (as the voices on the…†   (source)
  • He was still a machine and they knew that it was a machine more dangerous than ever: a car running downhill, without combustion or brakes.†   (source)
  • The earth has been heated by combustion on its surface, that is all.†   (source)
  • The light combustible kindled at the flash.†   (source)
  • It's not a case of spontaneous, but it's smouldering combustion it is."†   (source)
  • The combustion, however, was by no means brilliant.†   (source)
  • "William," says Mr. Weevle, adjusting his whiskers, "there's combustion going on there!†   (source)
  • Just now heaps of dead weeds and refuse were burning on many of the plots, the dry weather favouring their combustion.†   (source)
  • Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam.†   (source)
  • Reasonable discontent growing out of practical grievances in the fleet had been ignited into irrational combustion, as by live cinders blown across the Channel from France in flames.†   (source)
  • Martin saw rooms for sterilizing glass and preparing media, for glass-blowing, for the polariscope and the spectroscope, and a steel-and-cement-walled combustion-chamber.†   (source)
  • Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action.†   (source)
  • The straw seats of the car hovered on the edge of combustion; the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while into her white shirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under her fingers, lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry.†   (source)
  • …be able to pass the rest of the day with one of those women, over a cup of tea, in a little house with dark-painted walls (as Mme. Swann's were still in the year after that in which the first part of this story ends) against which would glow the orange flame, the red combustion, the pink and white flickering of her chrysanthemums in the twilight of a November evening, in moments similar to those in which (as we shall see) I had not managed to discover the pleasures for which I longed.†   (source)
  • After I have heard you myself, when the whole of my right side has been benumbed, going on with your master about combustion, and calcination, and calorification, and I may say every kind of ation that could drive a poor invalid distracted, to hear you talking in this absurd way about sparks and ashes!†   (source)
  • An accident on a staircase, spontaneous combustion of a shopkeeper from alcohol, a fire in Peski…. a fire in the Petersburg quarter…. another fire in the Petersburg quarter…. and another fire in the Petersburg quarter….†   (source)
  • When I burn this combustible to produce sodium, the smoke escaping from the mountain's crater gives it the appearance of a still–active volcano."†   (source)
  • All this time, he lay upon his bed, the very core and centre of a blaze of ruddy light, which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the hour; and which, being only light, was more alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant, or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of knowing it.†   (source)
  • Before him rose a grotesque mass of rocks, that resembled nothing so much as a vast fire petrified at the moment of its most fervent combustion.†   (source)
  • All in that region was fire and commotion; the soup and fish were in the last stage of projection, and the cook hung over her crucibles in a frame of mind and body threatening spontaneous combustion.†   (source)
  • According to Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs.†   (source)
  • However, a hay or a wheat-rick, well put together, will resist combustion for a length of time, if it begins on the outside.†   (source)
  • …clouds of white smoke had been pouring over the summit of the mountain, and had concealed the approach and ravages of the element; but a crackling sound drew the eyes of Miss Temple, as she flew over the ground supported by the young man, toward the outline of smoke where she already perceived the waving flames shooting forward from the vapor, now flaring high in the air, and then bending to the earth, seeming to light into combustion every stick and shrub on which they breathed.†   (source)
  • The subject was a woman, whose husband was ignorantly convicted of having murdered her; but on solemn appeal to a higher court, he was acquitted because it was shown upon the evidence that she had died the death of which this name of spontaneous combustion is given.†   (source)
  • It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper.†   (source)
  • It amazed me much to observe how indefinite was the proportion between the physical mass of any given author and the property of brilliant and long-continued combustion.†   (source)
  • Against the first source of danger Hutter had made ample provision, and the building itself, the bark roof excepted, was not very combustible.†   (source)
  • Why, man, this is worse than the affair in Scotland, where it was said the heat within was so intense that it just burnt a hole through your own precious body, and left a place for all the lassies to peer in at, to see what the combustible material was worth.†   (source)
  • Its surface was composed of a great number of metals, such as potassium and sodium, which have the peculiar property of igniting at the mere contact with air and water; these metals kindled when the atmospheric vapours fell in rain upon the soil; and by and by, when the waters penetrated into the fissures of the crust of the earth, they broke out into fresh combustion with explosions and eruptions.†   (source)
  • The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out.†   (source)
  • I felt particular interest in watching the combustion of American authors, and scrupulously noted by my watch the precise number of moments that changed most of them from shabbily printed books to indistinguishable ashes.†   (source)
  • Come hither to-morrow morning, or whenever the combustible portion of the pile shall be quite burned out, and you will find among the ashes everything really valuable that you have seen cast into the flames.†   (source)
  • Call the death by any name your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only—spontaneous combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.†   (source)
  • The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes (quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters to me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing that spontaneous combustion could not possibly be.†   (source)
  • ,* the recorded opinions and experiences of distinguished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch, in more modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received.†   (source)
  • Good Lord, you don't suppose that I would go spontaneously combusting any person, my dear?"†   (source)
  • Their conversation, the chat of the drawing-room, gossip of the anteroom, is like those chimneys which consume wood rapidly; they need a great amount of combustibles; and their combustibles are furnished by their neighbors.†   (source)
  • As night advanced I placed a variety of combustibles around the cottage, and after having destroyed every vestige of cultivation in the garden, I waited with forced impatience until the moon had sunk to commence my operations.†   (source)
  • CHAPTER III — VERY DECIDED THE indefatigable Mrs. Sparsit, with a violent cold upon her, her voice reduced to a whisper, and her stately frame so racked by continual sneezes that it seemed in danger of dismemberment, gave chase to her patron until she found him in the metropolis; and there, majestically sweeping in upon him at his hotel in St. James's Street, exploded the combustibles with which she was charged, and blew up.†   (source)
  • These general symptoms which presented themselves at the moment when it was thought that the uprising had been rendered local, this fever of wrath, these sparks which flew hither and thither above those deep masses of combustibles which are called the faubourgs of Paris,—all this, taken together, disturbed the military chiefs.†   (source)
  • By the continual addition of dry combustibles, it had now waxed so intense that neither brass nor iron could withstand it.†   (source)
  • "O, some very dry combustibles," replied he, "and extremely suitable to the purpose,--no other, in fact, than yesterday's newspapers, last month's magazines, and last year's withered leaves.†   (source)
  • My dear, merely to know the rights of the fatal accident which has happened to the venerable party who has been—combusted.†   (source)
  • Mal'akh hurried now into the lab and retrieved the Pyrex jug of Bunsen-burner fuel—a viscous, highly flammable, yet noncombustible oil.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "non-" in noncombustible means not and reverses the meaning of combustible. This is the same pattern you see in words like nonfat, nonfiction, and nonprofit.
  • There seemed to be a problem with the gas lines that fed the building, for periodically the scent of uncombusted gas permeated the halls.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in uncombusted means not and reverses the meaning of combusted. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
  • …seemed to have undergone an alteration of their substance from the point at which they were touched by the sun's light, still, at this hour in the morning, almost horizontal, as it would be again, a few hours later, at the moment when, just as dusk began, it would flame up like a lamp, project afar over the leaves a warm and artificial glow, and set ablaze the few topmost boughs of a tree that would itself remain unchanged, a sombre incombustible candelabrum beneath its flaming crest.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "in-" in incombustible means not and reverses the meaning of combustible. This is the same pattern you see in words like invisible, incomplete, and insecure.
  • At the moment when she makes her entrance into this history which we are relating, she was an antique virtue, an incombustible prude, with one of the sharpest noses, and one of the most obtuse minds that it is possible to see.†   (source)
  • He grabbed my arms, and I found the combustion had spread to his hands as well.†   (source)
  • Spontaneous combustion.†   (source)
  • Assuefaction minorates atrocities (as Tully saith of his darling Stoics) and Hamlet his father showeth the prince no blister of combustion.†   (source)
  • Heat (convected), a mode of motion developed by such combustion, was constantly and increasingly conveyed from the source of calorification to the liquid contained in the vessel, being radiated through the uneven unpolished dark surface of the metal iron, in part reflected, in part absorbed, in part transmitted, gradually raising the temperature of the water from normal to boiling point, a rise in temperature expressible as the result of an expenditure of 72 thermal units needed to…†   (source)
  • …his candlestick on the right corner of the mantelpiece, produced from his waistcoat a folded page of prospectus (illustrated) entitled Agendath Netaim, unfolded the same, examined it superficially, rolled it into a thin cylinder, ignited it in the candleflame, applied it when ignited to the apex of the cone till the latter reached the stage of rutilance, placed the cylinder in the basin of the candlestick disposing its unconsumed part in such a manner as to facilitate total combustion.†   (source)
  • Combustible duck.†   (source)
  • Or if the combustible materials that now seem to be collecting should be dissipated without coming to maturity, or if a flame should be kindled without extending to us, what security can we have that our tranquillity will long remain undisturbed from some other cause or from some other quarter?†   (source)
  • Him the Almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms.†   (source)
  • There was a haberdasher's wife of small wit near him, that rail'd upon me till her pink'd porringer fell off her head, for kindling such a combustion in the state.†   (source)
  • The night has been unruly: where we lay, Our chimneys were blown down: and, as they say, Lamentings heard i' the air, strange screams of death; And prophesying, with accents terrible, Of dire combustion and confus'd events, New hatch'd to the woeful time: the obscure bird Clamour'd the live-long night; some say the earth Was feverous, and did shake.†   (source)
  • The better to effectuate my design, I procured a Tartar's sheep-skin robe, a bonnet, with bow and arrows, and every one of us got the like habits, the first night we spent in mixing combustible matter with aqua vitae, gunpowder, &c. having a good quantity of tar in a little pot: next night we came up to the idol about eleven o'clock, the moon being up.†   (source)
  • What wonder? when Millions of fierce encountering Angels fought On either side, the least of whom could wield These elements, and arm him with the force Of all their regions: How much more of power Army against army numberless to raise Dreadful combustion warring, and disturb, Though not destroy, their happy native seat; Had not the Eternal King Omnipotent, From his strong hold of Heaven, high over-ruled And limited their might; though numbered such As each divided legion might have…†   (source)
  • …his flight Aloft, incumbent on the dusky air, That felt unusual weight; till on dry land He lights—if it were land that ever burned With solid, as the lake with liquid fire, And such appeared in hue as when the force Of subterranean wind transports a hill Torn from Pelorus, or the shattered side Of thundering Etna, whose combustible And fuelled entrails, thence conceiving fire, Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds, And leave a singed bottom all involved With stench and smoke.†   (source)
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