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enervate
in a sentence

show 68 more with this conextual meaning
  • The heat of it enervated.†   (source)
  • There was of course the threat of an enemy offensive looming about like a pall, but even that, too, seemed to be dissipating, the notion grown more enervating, somehow, than frightful.†   (source)
  • Other nights she could sleep for eighteen drugged hours and wake, enervated, hardly able to stand.†   (source)
  • Enervation.†   (source)
  • I had grown to find those occasions of vice enervating.†   (source)
  • They could have been returning from a volleyball match, thoroughly enervated, sobered by near glory.†   (source)
  • She stokes the fire of her hatred, feeding it tidbits about bigoted idiot Dina and spineless mushmouth Ralph, because she knows that just beyond the rage is a sorrow so enervating it could render her immobile.†   (source)
  • Fermina Daza, bored with the men's enervated discussion concerning the possibility of establishing differential fares, ate without will.†   (source)
  • I did not see Notre Dame, because Richard did not favour churches, or at least not Catholic ones, which he considered enervating Incense in particular he considered stultifying to the brain.†   (source)
  • , in fact he was clearly enervated by the task and was effortfully closing up each small box, fitfully running a tape dispenser across the tops.†   (source)
  • The dream, if I can call it that, would come to me at the end of the working day, in the last hour between six and seven when there were never any more customers or calls from salesmen and I was hungry and enervated and in a state that must be a kind of retail beatitude, a mind of placid emptiness and vulnerability.†   (source)
  • The evening that had excited me had enervated and depressed him; he had become irritable as soon as we had left Yvette's house.†   (source)
  • Even so, the spell of enervated composure which finally came over me on the train would scarcely have been possible had it not been for the first of two telephone calls I was finally able to complete from the station.†   (source)
  • Then suddenly something about the entire situation—Sophie's imminent departure, but also the handbag and the near-empty room with its associations of Nathan and the days of the recent past, the music and the high hilarity and all the glorious times we had had together—filled me with such ruinously enervating gloom that I let out another groan, loud enough that I saw a startled light like a flash of beads come to Sophie's eyes.†   (source)
  • His wit, which was often scathing and which relied on a subtle use of Southern courthouse rhetoric (doubtless derived in part from his father, a distinguished judge), had kept me laughing during the enervating wartime months at Duke, where the Marine Corps, in its resolve to transform us from green cannon fodder into prime cannon fodder, tried to stuff us with two years' education in less than a year, thereby creating a generation of truly half-baked college graduates.†   (source)
  • High in my glassed-in cubbyhole on the twentieth floor of the McGraw-Hill Building—an architecturally impressive but spiritually enervating green tower on West Forty-second Street—I leveled the scorn that could only be mustered by one who had just finished reading Seven Types of Ambiguity upon these sad outpourings piled high on my desk, all of them so freighted with hope and clubfooted syntax.†   (source)
  • The land had grown dry and yellow in the enervation of the summer.†   (source)
  • Its big rooms were heated by a small furnace which sent up, when charged with fire, a hot dry enervation to the rooms of the first floor, and a gaseous but chill radiation to those upstairs.†   (source)
  • Now they must either attack the fort and accept the onus of striking the first blow, or face an indefinite and enervating occupation of Sumter by Anderson's soldiers.†   (source)
  • There's no place like Henderson," said he, with complacent and annoying fidelity, referring to that haven of enervation, red clay, ignorance, slander, and superstition, in whose effluent rays he had been reared.†   (source)
  • But, mindful of paramount obligations I strive against scruples that may tend to enervate decision.†   (source)
  • The air of the place, so fresh in the spring and early summer, was stagnant and enervating now.†   (source)
  • Liza was as soft and enervated as Sappho was smart and abrupt.†   (source)
  • Take away the press; heresy is enervated.†   (source)
  • What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations?†   (source)
  • Morrel hesitated to advance; he dreaded the enervating effect of all that he saw.†   (source)
  • Their prevailing frame of mind then is at once ardent and relaxed, violent and enervated.†   (source)
  • The sailor started up, and took an enervated pace or two down the room.†   (source)
  • It enervates the powers of the mind, and benumbs the activity of man.†   (source)
  • —The enervating friendship which enfolds you Is like an open-laced Italian collar, Floating around your neck in woman's fashion; One is at ease thus,—but less proud the carriage!†   (source)
  • It was the final affront, more subtle and more enervating than the offer to teach chemistry to children.†   (source)
  • One night while the heat, overpowering and enervating, poured into the windows of his room he struggled for several hours in a vague effort to immortalize the poignancy of that time.†   (source)
  • And what is the cause of the enervation and apathy that arise when the rules of life are not abrogated from time to time?†   (source)
  • The three o'clock sun shone full upon him, and the strange enervating conviction that her seducer confronted her, which had been gaining ground in Tess ever since she had heard his words distinctly, was at last established as a fact indeed.†   (source)
  • We listened along with him for a moment in order to observe, for instance, how such a peripatetic passage-at-arms might sound under the shadow of the personality strolling beside the combatants and how his presence might secretly enervate their struggle.†   (source)
  • Or, to put it another way: their life-and-death duel of wits was constantly establishing some sort of subterranean connection to this epitome of stature strolling beside them and was enervated by its magnetism.†   (source)
  • This air, ladies and gentlemen, this day's foehn air so rich in character, so tenderly enervating, suggestive and reminiscent of spring's fragrance—we should not breathe it in merely so that in the form of—I implore you: we should not do it.†   (source)
  • And since the adjective "stunning" had been used for "splendid" or "excellent" for quite some time now—was totally washed out, enervated, prostituted, and therefore obsolete—she had of late seized upon the word "devastating," and now found everything "devastating," whether in earnest or in jest: the bobsled run, their dessert dumplings, and her own body warmth, which sounded equally repulsive coming from her.†   (source)
  • It was only whispered, for something unutterably mournful no less than distressing in this spectacle of a man showing himself to be so entirely the vane of a passion enervated the feminine instinct for punctilios.†   (source)
  • Marie, whose nervous system had been enervated by a constant course of self-indulgence, had nothing to support the terror of the shock, and, at the time her husband breathed his last, was passing from one fainting fit to another; and he to whom she had been joined in the mysterious tie of marriage passed from her forever, without the possibility of even a parting word.†   (source)
  • There are no revolutions which do not shake existing belief, enervate authority, and throw doubts over commonly received ideas.†   (source)
  • When you are at Madagascar, or at the Cape, or in India, would it be a consolation to have that memento in your possession? or would the sight of it bring recollections calculated to enervate and distress?†   (source)
  • But Mr. Tulliver was determined not to encourage such shuffling people any longer; and a ride along the Basset lanes was not likely to enervate a man's resolution by softening his temper.†   (source)
  • He had once before felt in his own person this overpowering of the fervid by the inanimate; but then it had tended to enervate a passion far sweeter than that which at present pervaded him.†   (source)
  • Sometimes coming out of her fragrant bath all warm and enervated, she would fall to musing on the nothingness of life, the sorrow, the labour, the malice of it….†   (source)
  • If he possesses an unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable.†   (source)
  • There is, in that mode of life, good mingled with evil, for if enervation is baleful, generosity is good and healthful.†   (source)
  • Those beeches and smooth limes—there was something enervating in the very sight of them; but the strong knotted old oaks had no bending languor in them—the sight of them would give a man some energy.†   (source)
  • With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.†   (source)
  • But the air of these climates had so enervating an influence that man, absorbed by present enjoyment, was rendered regardless of the future.†   (source)
  • We made these strangers our bosom friends, our confidential servants; we borrowed their artists and their arts, and despised the honest simplicity and hardihood with which our brave ancestors supported themselves, and we became enervated by Norman arts long ere we fell under Norman arms.†   (source)
  • Henchard's visits here grew so frequent and so regular that it soon became whispered, and then openly discussed in Casterbridge that the masterful, coercive Mayor of the town was raptured and enervated by the genteel widow Mrs. Newson.†   (source)
  • They became exhausted in imitation of them; and they yaw-yawed in their speech like them; and they served out, with an enervated air, the little mouldy rations of political economy, on which they regaled their disciples.†   (source)
  • Enervated, prostrate, and breathless, he became unconscious of outward objects; he seemed to be entering that vague delirium preceding death.†   (source)
  • Such a condition cannot but enervate the soul, relax the springs of the will, and prepare a people for servitude.†   (source)
  • Procedure Of The Federal Courts Natural weakness of the judiciary power in confederations—Legislators ought to strive as much as possible to bring private individuals, and not States, before the Federal Courts—How the Americans have succeeded in this—Direct prosecution of private individuals in the Federal Courts—Indirect prosecution of the States which violate the laws of the Union—The decrees of the Supreme Court enervate but do not destroy the provincial laws.†   (source)
  • By these means, a kind of virtuous materialism may ultimately be established in the world, which would not corrupt, but enervate the soul, and noiselessly unbend its springs of action.†   (source)
  • But I am of opinion that a central administration enervates the nations in which it exists by incessantly diminishing their public spirit.†   (source)
  • This state of things causes lamentable cases of individual hardship, but it does not prevent the body of society from being strong and alert: it does not destroy family ties, or enervate the morals of the nation.†   (source)
  • Let us then look forward to the future with that salutary fear which makes men keep watch and ward for freedom, not with that faint and idle terror which depresses and enervates the heart.†   (source)
  • Whatever, on the other hand, enervates or lowers it, weakens it for all purposes, the chiefest, as well as the least, and threatens to render it almost equally impotent for the one and for the other.†   (source)
  • I think that extreme centralization of government ultimately enervates society, and thus after a length of time weakens the government itself; but I do not deny that a centralized social power may be able to execute great undertakings with facility in a given time and on a particular point.†   (source)
  • Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience, which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions, only exhibits servitude at certain intervals, and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men.†   (source)
  • Rich men who live amidst democratic nations are therefore more intent on providing for their smallest wants than for their extraordinary enjoyments; they gratify a number of petty desires, without indulging in any great irregularities of passion: thus they are more apt to become enervated than debauched.†   (source)
  • The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.†   (source)
  • Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years' voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall be unenervated by any chance display of a father's natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unenervated means not and reverses the meaning of enervated. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
  • None of these men were enervated by wealth or hesitated to resign the pleasures of life; none of them put off the evil day in the hope, natural to poverty, that a man, though poor, may one day become rich.†   (source)
  • An artful cabal in that council would be able to distract and to enervate the whole system of administration.†   (source)
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