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desiccate
in a sentence

show 72 more with this conextual meaning
  • He'd stumbled upon more than one desiccated corpse that had clearly been someone's dinner.†   (source)
  • IN THE EARLY evening, high-altitude clouds in the western sky formed a thin yellow wash which became richer over the hour, and then thickened until a filtered orange glow hung above the giant crests of parkland trees; the leaves became nutty brown, the branches glimpsed among the foliage oily black, and the desiccated grasses took on the colors of the sky.†   (source)
  • At the start of the intervening school years, he had merely skimmed off the topmost three quarters of the contents and replaced or updated them, leaving a layer of general debris at the bottom — old quills, desiccated beetle eyes, single socks that no longer fit.†   (source)
  • She takes her food upstairs, leaving a desiccated chicken leg or a bowl of cold brisket in a chunk of brown gelatinous fat on the counter, with strict instructions that I wash my dish when I'm done.†   (source)
  • Daylight streamed through the hole onto a mound of splintered floorboards and broken glass from which rose coils of silty dust, pieces of torn carpet plastered here and there like scraps of desiccated meat.†   (source)
  • What could be torn by the small scavengers was torn; the maggots had done their work on the organs, now it was a desiccated mummy, hollowed-out, teeth in a rigid grin, eyes empty, fingers curled.†   (source)
  • "Let Vitya handle it," he said, poking his shoe at a desiccated furball on the floor —dead mouse?†   (source)
  • They tried to migrate in the end, but the North Reaches were far too dry and when I visited the region decades later, when Garden entered the Web, the desiccated remains of the centaurs still littered some of the distant Reaches like the husks of exotic plants from some more colorful era.†   (source)
  • In the wedding registry of Alton, New Hampshire, they remained married, their contract a legal if desiccated thing.†   (source)
  • The woman looked as wrinkled and desiccated as any member of the mob that had greeted them along the way from the landing field that morning.†   (source)
  • Walk into any of a hundred thousand classrooms today and hear the teachers divide and subdivide and interrelate and establish "principles" and study "methods" and what you will hear is the ghost of Aristotle speaking down through the centuries…the desiccating lifeless voice of dualistic reason.†   (source)
  • Sometimes these trails faded at mud bluffs overlooking the sea; other times they wandered down onto beaches where thick cedars, sapling alders, and vine maples, toppled by winter tides, lay with the tips of their desiccated branches buried in sand and gravel.†   (source)
  • Nadia's lemon tree did not recover, despite repeated watering, and it sat lifeless on their balcony, clung to by a few desiccated leaves.†   (source)
  • Scattered around her were old pieces of lumber—some cracked and desiccated, others broken into kindling.†   (source)
  • I could have sworn that just a few seconds ago I was twenty-three, and now here I am in this wretched, desiccated body.†   (source)
  • At least it would be something hot and wet in my desiccated mouth.†   (source)
  • Then the surface of the man's desiccated body blurred as it dissolved into a fine gray dust, which sifted downward in gauzy curtains and lay floating atop the water below, like ashes from a forest fire.†   (source)
  • The desiccation practices of jockeys were lampooned by turf writer Joe H. Palmer in a column written on jockey Abelardo DeLara: "DeLara has to sweat off about two pounds a day to make weight.†   (source)
  • Junk-food wrappers and diapers lie in the desiccated weeds on the side of the road.†   (source)
  • Back in the ward, he found his wife lying vanquished beneath the blankets like a desiccated old vegetable, wrinkled, dry and white, her enfeebled tissues absolutely still.†   (source)
  • I washed her soiled and desiccated body in warm water scented with sandalwood.†   (source)
  • The first-aid box in the galley held a desiccated cockroach—its contents had been pawned by one of the crew at the last port.†   (source)
  • You won't be needing this anymore," she said, clutching a cream linen suit, which hung better on the wire hanger than on her desiccated frame.†   (source)
  • That his heart was shriveled, his organs desiccated.†   (source)
  • One burrowed through his breeches into the desiccated flesh of his thigh, to emerge again from his shoulder.†   (source)
  • Our quest to find the smallest sand dollar became a competition between us, and as the months passed and Annie Kate grew larger with the child, the brittle, desiccated animals we unearthed from the sand became smaller and smaller.†   (source)
  • I drift down a corridor thick with leaves and desiccated flowers.†   (source)
  • It's like jumping on a bird feather, or the dance of flatulent animals upon a desiccated brook.†   (source)
  • A desiccated violet flattened in waxed paper made him first frown in perplexity and then smile, but without saying why, and he spent some time studying a typewritten list of what must have been New Year's resolutions.†   (source)
  • Sharecropper-white, with pink elbows and chafed knees, I felt wan and desiccated amid these bodies so richly and sleekly dark, so Mediterranean, glistening like dolphins beneath their Coppertone.†   (source)
  • I expected—a desiccated spinster.†   (source)
  • Animal life wears a hard, dry skin or an outer skeleton to defy the desiccation.†   (source)
  • Reluctantly she followed her brother among the desiccated rocks.†   (source)
  • Long before the Egyptian pharos, bodies were naturally mummified as they were desiccated by the desert heat and dry air.
  • a desiccate romance
  • Their desiccated remains were found in the old lake bed.
  • The country surrounding Davis Gulch is a desiccated expanse of bald rock and brickred sand.†   (source)
  • I wondered, the pricking feeling returning in my desiccated tear ducts.†   (source)
  • He began to speak to me in a fatigued, desiccated voice.†   (source)
  • Like its desiccated cousin, the fresh leaf had larger serrations and a confused map of veins.†   (source)
  • It was as if there were an unspoken agreement on the mountain to pretend that these desiccated remains weren't real-as if none of us dared to acknowled e what was at stake here.†   (source)
  • He turned to look at Paul — a stringy whipcord of a youth, not as desiccated as the Arrakeen natives, but with ribs there to count, and sunken in the flanks so that the ripple and gather of muscles could be followed under the skin.†   (source)
  • Due to the pronounced dehydration that was an inevitable by-product of heavy breathing in such desiccated air, each of us consumed more than a gallon of liquid every day.†   (source)
  • I would be discovered here years later by some intrepid team — fallen in my tracks, one arm outflung as if grasping at straws, my features desiccated, my fingers gnawed by wolves.†   (source)
  • After informing us what worthless piles of desiccated rat feces we are, Reznik opens the floor for questions and concerns.†   (source)
  • They must think of me as a fusty old dragon crouched on an ill-gotten hoard — some gaunt dog-in-the-manger, some desiccated, censorious wardress, a prim-lipped keeper of the keys, guarding the dungeon in which starved Laura is chained to the wall.†   (source)
  • It's got that sweet and spicy scent to it — some kind of cinnamon room spray — and it offers many things: jars of jam with cotton-print fabric tops, heart-shaped pillows stuffed with desiccated herbs that smell like hay, clumsily hinged boxes carved by "traditional craftsmen," quilts purportedly sewn by Mennonites, toilet-cleaning brushes with the heads of smirking ducks.†   (source)
  • On one wall, like coats on a coatrack, hung the desiccated, skeletal remains of two people—an adult and a small child.†   (source)
  • She looked like she'd been stuck in a cool, dark mausoleum for decades, slowly withering into a desiccated husk.†   (source)
  • Gellir's body toppled forward, and our 'roid-raging elf stomped him flat, kicking and scattering the desiccated remains until there was nothing left but the Skofnung Sword.†   (source)
  • In the two seats beside me are two old ladies, old women, each with a knitted cardigan, each with yellowy-white hair and thick-lensed glasses with a chain for around the neck, each with a desiccated mouth lipsticked bright red with bravado.†   (source)
  • Crumbley had become a desiccated cast of himself, so fragile that a strong wind could blow him apart.†   (source)
  • The right side of the woman's face was a nightmare—withered skin, patches of blue ice covering decayed flesh, membrane-thin lips over rotten teeth, a milky white eye, and tufts of desiccated hair like black spiderwebs.†   (source)
  • The platform is littered with corpses, stacked six high in some places, the ones on the bottom wrapped carefully in sheets, the ones closer to the top hastily tossed there, a discordant jumble of arms and legs, a twisted mass of bone and desiccated skin and skeletal fingers grasping uselessly at the empty air.†   (source)
  • Somewhere as the night shut in, the lights went off, went off, went off, the night sucked around, gathering, whistling, simpering, and the crowd, like a shake of leaves from one huge tree, blew off the midway, and Will's father stood facing the glass tides, the waves, the gauntlet of horror he knew waited for him to swim through, stride through to fight the desiccation, the annihilation of one's self that waited there.†   (source)
  • But if she'd realized that nine desiccated zombie nymphs would be waiting for her, she never would've come down here.†   (source)
  • It's like the moon that circles the planets of the outer reach, and the dance of the flatulent animals on the surface of the desiccated brook--_" "Tell me, if scribes value consistency so much," Alessandro interrupted, to stanch the monologue before Orfeo got on to the luminous sap, "then why not get one of those new machines, typewriters, and every letter will be exactly the same?"†   (source)
  • A third of the lawn was desiccated and whitened with deposits of salt and the skeletons of small fish that had come in with the tide through the rocks and escaped the patient investigations of the seabirds patrolling that sector of the island.†   (source)
  • Half rising, Quentin took the letter from him and beneath the dim bug-fouled globe opened it, carefully, as though the sheet, the desiccated square, were not the paper but the intact ash of its former shape and substance: and meanwhile Mr Compson's voice speaking on while Quentin heard it without listening "Now you can see why I said that he loved her.†   (source)
  • And Hightower leans there in the window, in the August heat, oblivious of the odor in which he lives--that smell of people who no longer live in life: that odor of overplump desiccation and stale linen as though a precursor of the tomb--listening to the feet which he seems to hear still long after he knows that he cannot, thinking, 'God bless him, God help him'; thinking To be young.†   (source)
  • This food provision was generally circumvented by putting a property sandwich in the middle of each table, an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese which only the drunkest yokel from the sticks ever regarded as anything but a noisome table decoration.†   (source)
  • There was no immediate answer, for the tea bowls were introduced at that moment, and with their appearance the High Lama rallied a faint and desiccated hospitality.†   (source)
  • Her ambitions had shrunk gradually in the desiccating air of failure.†   (source)
  • The desiccated loaf remained swathed up in the scullery.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Moore continued to murmur "Red ten on a black knave," Miss Quested to assist her, and to intersperse among the intricacies of the play details about the hyena, the engagement, the Maharani of Mudkul, the Bhattacharyas, and the day generally, whose rough desiccated surface acquired as it receded a definite outline, as India itself might, could it be viewed from the moon.†   (source)
  • But in half an hour the gaiety went; she felt like a person who is burning up with an inward flame; desiccating at the soul with thirst; withering up in the vitals.†   (source)
  • But this dried corpse, with its parchment-like skin drawn tightly over the bony frame, the limbs still preserving their shape, sound teeth, abundant hair, and finger and toe nails of frightful length, this desiccated mummy startled us by appearing just as it had lived countless ages ago.†   (source)
  • Sugar is the most desiccating of all salts; it sucks the liquids of the blood through the veins; hence the coagulation, and then the solidification of the blood; hence tubercles in the lungs, hence death.†   (source)
  • He was in a state of irritation natural to a gentleman of fine parts who had been snubbed in a benevolent attempt to confer a distinction upon a young woman of inferior characteristics, and the insinuating sympathy of this somewhat desiccated matron appeared to offer him no practical relief.†   (source)
  • the trees were mulberries and locusts and sycamores--trees that partook also of the foul desiccation which surrounded the houses;   (source)
    desiccation = lack of vitality (removal of moisture/life)
  • Somethingamong dusty shelves of ordered certitudes long divorced from reality, desiccating peacefully, as if abreath of that air which sees injustice done "Two of these, please, ma'am.†   (source)
  • Dosing it with Edwards' desiccated soup.†   (source)
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