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vocabulary
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dissonance
in a sentence

show 61 more with this conextual meaning
  • They met the Dissonant Toad, which could imitate human speech in a gravelly voice.†   (source)
  • The dissonance woke him.†   (source)
  • It bounced off the ant's forehead with a dissonant twang.†   (source)
  • She had been awakened from her siesta by the thundering artillery that made the earth tremble, by the dissonances of the marching bands, the confusion of funeral hymns over the clamoring bells in all the churches, which had been ringing without pause since the previous day.†   (source)
  • There was a dissonance, faint, every two minutes across the water, and finally even that disappeared.†   (source)
  • And in due time, he found Glumra and informed her of Kvistor's demise, and now he sat listening as she grieved for her slain child, alternating between wordless howls and scraps of Dwarvish sung in a haunting, dissonant key.†   (source)
  • We walk down a flight of narrow stairs where the echo of our footsteps layers over itself, dissonant and hollow.†   (source)
  • On its side in enormous white letters bordered in black was the inscription KAKOFONOUS A. DISCHORD, and below in slightly smaller black letters bordered in white was DOCTOR OF DISSONANCE.†   (source)
  • There is always this dissonance between what you see and hear.†   (source)
  • To Charles Jr. No longer the bubblegum boy of yore but a failed preppy now, slant-bodied and dissonant, with dumdum eyes and a way of hating you from a distance.†   (source)
  • There was the awful dissonance of a lone horse galloping riderless.†   (source)
  • His head was bursting with a thousand dissonant impulses as he prayed for the bombs to drop.†   (source)
  • Since turning fifty, Matron had noticed such dissonances and disconnections between her thought and action; they were becoming common.†   (source)
  • If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance; yes, and avoided the uncertain extremes of the scale.†   (source)
  • Voices call to her in ragged words stitched together from many languages, like dissonant scraps of quilt.†   (source)
  • As the copper chimes subsided like the soft dissonant music in a dream of trolls, Joe hurried toward Lisa, and from the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the open wine bottle where Charlie Delmann had left it on the island counter.†   (source)
  • Perhaps Brandt's as well, though he did what he could to ignore Walter, plugging his ears and humming a dissonant tune.†   (source)
  • They spoke of dissonance, of the demonic realms and dark, fell powers.†   (source)
  • By the end of the 1930s, Bonfiglio says, "New York speech had become dissonant with the notions of heartland American linguistic and ethnic purity."†   (source)
  • Nothing had alarmed me quite so much since I had come to the Institute as the volatile dissonance of that exquisite soundlessness.†   (source)
  • The piece was intensely moving, a rapid patter of notes interrupted by brusque chords and a simmering dissonance.†   (source)
  • The alarm had been tripped, the sound deafening, riding over the dissonance in the street; the gunshot seemed muted by comparison, the eruption of asphalt below not heard.†   (source)
  • Would it not be, like living one's life over again, infinitely painful and dissonant?†   (source)
  • From another came a dissonant piping that made the dragon lash his tail wildly from side to side.†   (source)
  • Choir is the one time of day when he lets down his guard; there is peace in the strict concentration that Faughnan demands of all of them, in the sweet dissonance of voices in chorus.†   (source)
  • He could hear dissonant music from inside and the sound of an occasional yell.†   (source)
  • And suddenly she knew why this was so, why this sonorous and noble statement so filled with peculiar, chilling dissonances should flood her spirit with relief and recognition and joy.†   (source)
  • Strong dissonance.†   (source)
  • It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father's end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas.†   (source)
  • A felt a certain dissonance after arguments with his girlfriend, but he was still convinced he was a loving and supportive man.
  • The rock group gyrated to its outer limits, frantic dissonance worthy of the scene.†   (source)
  • The dirge was so sad and dissonant my knees wobbled.†   (source)
  • Only the organ continued playing, the dissonant notes dark and haunting.†   (source)
  • Birds flapped above in fear and curiosity; owls hooted in angry dissonance.†   (source)
  • The place doesn't even look open, but Cressida pushes through the front door, setting off a dissonant chiming.†   (source)
  • The brass chimes swayed and clanged, picking notes out of the wind and making chords from the dissonance.†   (source)
  • Grover Underwood and a team of satyrs danced around with their panpipes, playing harmonies so dissonant that the earthen-shelled ghosts cracked apart.†   (source)
  • Strange dissonant notes thrown together, wanting resolution, and somehow they captured America and Science and all that was bold and brash and daring and exciting about America (or at least the way she imagined America to be).†   (source)
  • On Sundays, Charleston, without the dissonance of commerce or traffic, had the serene regularity of a city so magical in its harmony, so purified of stridency or disorder, so certain of its virtues, that it seemed a city separated from its century by an incorruptible cleanliness of spirit and image, a perfect environment for recreation and quiet pleasure.†   (source)
  • Still, the music was enchanting, if only because of accidental harmonies in its collective dissonance.†   (source)
  • "Are you a doctor?" asked Milo, trying to feel as well as possible. am KAKOFONOUS A. DISCHORD, DOCTOR OF DISSONANCE," roared the man, and, as he spoke, several small explosions and a grinding crash were heard.†   (source)
  • Half a decade of dissonance, and philosophers in a never-ending stream mount the platform to keen that the light of the world has been extinguished forever.†   (source)
  • Sitting in the concert hall, she had listened to the fresh new work as in a trance, and let the casements and doors of her mind swing wide to admit the luxuriant, enlaced and fretted harmonies, and those wild dissonances, inexhaustibly inspired.†   (source)
  • What dissonance can quench it?†   (source)
  • Dissonant brass and piano sounds as the rooms dim out to darkness and the outer walls appear in the night light.†   (source)
  • She was a large raw-boned hag, a confirmed drug-eater, who moved by a violent and dissonant jerking of her gaunt limbs, pawing abruptly at the air with a gnarled hand.†   (source)
  • He was startled by the loud and dissonant voice of a man who was apparently dismounting at the door.†   (source)
  • In the name of all dissonance, what can it be?†   (source)
  • The rumble and roar of the city smite the nerves of my face, and I feel the ceaseless tramp of an unseen multitude, and the dissonant tumult frets my spirit.†   (source)
  • Now, as one of the squirearchy, greeted with honorable salutations by the villagers, he marched into his office, and peace and dignity were upon him, and the morning's dissonances all unheard.†   (source)
  • At any rate, the sight of any other youth thus romantically engaged with his girl was sufficient to set dissonantly jangling the repressed and protesting libido of his nature.†   (source)
  • Alexandra's parents had not even begun to talk to their daughters freely upon the subject, when suddenly, as it were, a dissonant chord was struck amid the harmony of the proceedings.†   (source)
  • A baker's cart had already rattled through the street, chasing away the latest vestige of night's sanctity with the jingle-jangle of its dissonant bells.†   (source)
  • There already existed between them all the dissonances of the grave young man and the frivolous old man.†   (source)
  • Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous.†   (source)
  • The smooth manner of the spy, curiously in dissonance with his ostentatiously rough dress, and probably with his usual demeanour, received such a check from the inscrutability of Carton,—who was a mystery to wiser and honester men than he,—that it faltered here and failed him.†   (source)
  • "Send the boys off to the right," exclaimed the resolute wife and mother, in a sharp, dissonant voice; "I warrant me, Asa, or Abner will give some account of the creature!"†   (source)
  • And Isis looked, but saw no change; then while she was smiling, assured that her lord's last invention was sped, suddenly the creature arose, and seemed to listen; and his face brightened, and he clapped his hands for joy, for Sounds were heard the first time on earth—sounds dissonant, sounds harmonious.†   (source)
  • The final echoes of Alice Pyncheon's performance (or Clifford's, if his we must consider it) were driven away by no less vulgar a dissonance than the ringing of the shop-bell.†   (source)
  • The baker's cart, with the harsh music of its bells, had a pleasant effect on Clifford, because, as few things else did, it jingled the very dissonance of yore.†   (source)
  • But drive far off the barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears To rapture, till the savage clamour drowned Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend Her son.†   (source)
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