dynamic
toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

fetid
in a sentence

show 111 more with this conextual meaning
  • A gust of fetid odor rose from the body, and all three men recoiled.†   (source)
  • The acrid stench of smoke and fire mixed with the smells of body odor and fetid, open wounds.†   (source)
  • The fetid stench that had hung over the city for weeks was gone, replaced with brittle, pure air.†   (source)
  • Clustered in their own groups, according to age or marriage or divorce or degree of pregnancy, most of the women were inside the sweltering house, where the ovenlike temperature appeared to have wilted them, like the limp raw vegetables that were plunked in assorted bowls alongside the assorted "dips" that were now in their third day of exposure to this fetid air.†   (source)
  • Langdon and Vittoria hurried into the fetid dimness.†   (source)
  • Then she closed her eyes and several things happened at once: Harry's scar prickled painfully; the Horcrux twitched so that the front of his sweater actually moved; the dark, fetid room dissolved momentarily.†   (source)
  • So we walked behind the store and sat by the stinking, fetid Dumpster.†   (source)
  • The grass died underneath the boulders and when it rained, the insides of the fort were a fetid puddle, but it stayed there, though Buckley went there less and less, and it was Hal who finally begged him to make improvements.†   (source)
  • It was just a slow, sludging green ribbon lawn that ferried fetid garbage to the sea.†   (source)
  • Holly could smell its fetid breath through her filters.†   (source)
  • He suppressed his distaste-they smelled like fetid meat-and turned away.†   (source)
  • Offworld visitors generally confine themselves to the better-preserved bridges on the equator, buy a boy-hair blanket guaranteed hand-spun and handwoven by masters of the craft in the unbearably cold reaches of the world (though these are almost certainly turned out on machines, by the dozen, a few kilometers from the gift shop), choke down a few fetid swallows of fermented milk, and return home to regale their friends and associates with tales of their adventure.†   (source)
  • The resulting volume of garbage overwhelmed its disposal system, which consisted of janitors bumping large barrels of fetid garbage down the same three flights of stairs used by customers.†   (source)
  • And the vampire lunged at me, that strangled cry rising again as the stench of fetid breath rose in my nostrils and the clawlike fingers cut into the very fur of my cape.†   (source)
  • He leads them around to the fetid rump of the Buy 'n' Fly, dark realm of wretched refuse in teeming dumpsters.†   (source)
  • He performed alchemy experiments in the kitchen, filling the house with fetid smoke and ruining pots and pans with solid substances that stuck to their bottoms and were impossible to remove.†   (source)
  • Florentino Ariza was the first to jump on land from the mail sloop, and from that time on he no longer detected the fetid reek of the bay in the city, but was aware only of the personal fragrance of Fermina Daza.†   (source)
  • The door to the tenement building creaked open, sending out puffs of foul, fetid air.†   (source)
  • Last night I barely slept on the cold porch of the school, and before that I was on a soiled mattress in a fetid room with three other children.†   (source)
  • During the night, our fetid exhalations had condensed on the tent fabric to form a fragile, interior sheath of hoarfrost; as I sat up and began rooting around in the dark for my clothing, it was impossible not to brush against the low nylon walls, and every time I did so it instigated a blizzard inside the tent, covering everything with ice crystals.†   (source)
  • It battered and streamed against the windows of the fetid, poor-man's bar Jane had brought them to, a bar where they knew no one.†   (source)
  • Usha Narayane in her slum neighborhood in India (Naka Nathaniel) The fetid ditches of Kasturba Nagar ooze sewage, stink, and hopelessness.†   (source)
  • He wondered at her; born amid these wide, cool spaces, how had she endured for a week the fetid atmosphere of the factory rooms?†   (source)
  • He designed a sewage system for Berlin that transformed it from a fetid sty into one of Europe's healthiest cities.†   (source)
  • The engines were howling again as though in pain, and the air inside the plane was acrid with the smell of machinery and fetid with the stench of gasoline.†   (source)
  • Smoke belched up in fetid clouds as it roared its outrage.†   (source)
  • I can smell the moisture in the air, a fetid, living thing.†   (source)
  • The stench was unbearable—a fetid reek of human waste.†   (source)
  • "Good old Kehaar!" said Hazel, gazing with satisfaction round the fetid solitude.†   (source)
  • After slogging through fetid jungles and fighting across coral outcroppings, the survivors of battle had only memories of their fallen buddies as they gazed out at the sea from the transports returning them to their base for more training.†   (source)
  • The smells of grass and snow cut through the fetid breath of the tunnel.†   (source)
  • But Emma could neither speak nor stand, and we were alone in the underground station but for two women in raincoats who were backing away, holding their noses against the hollow's fetid stench.†   (source)
  • She had not begun her cleaning and the place was as fetid as a wet dog.†   (source)
  • Her own voice is mute to her, far away, and the chandelier wavers in the fetid air.†   (source)
  • Through the hissing snow came an invisible voice from a fetid canvas stall.†   (source)
  • Choking on self-loathing as much as on the fetid air, he walked out of the reeking building into an ocean breeze that didn't refresh, a world as foul as the lavatory behind him.†   (source)
  • The upperclassmen made all the freshmen roll in the vomit of their classmate until nothing was left on the fetid tiles.†   (source)
  • The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from.†   (source)
  • The smell of Formalin swirled about like the fetid breath of an undertaker's back parlor.†   (source)
  • I have spoken several times about Sophie's reticence concerning Auschwitz, her firm and generally unyielding silence about that fetid sinkhole of her past.†   (source)
  • They were shortish, balding, and had something fetid going on on their upper lips.   (source)
    fetid = with a bad odor
  • One wondered about this, as also about the swarms of flies which hung about the scene, literally blackening the air, and the strange, fetid odor which assailed one's nostrils, a ghastly odor, of all the dead things of the universe.   (source)
  • A cigarette glowed amid the tangle of white hair, and the air of the room was fetid with stale tobacco smoke.   (source)
  • An unusual, fetid odor wafted out of the darkness.†   (source)
  • He led her to a fetid lavatory where she was unable to wash because there was no water.†   (source)
  • The fetid wind blows the rags toward us.†   (source)
  • "Shhh," he whispers, and even that echoes in the fetid sewer.†   (source)
  • Then I felt his moist fetid breath on my ear as he said, "I'm gonna kill you, jock.†   (source)
  • Jerking upward, the Ra'zac caught Roran's wrist in midair and chittered with delight, blowing its fetid breath onto his face.†   (source)
  • The monster swung its head in the direction of the clearing and descended toward it with outstretched claws, preceded by its fetid stench.†   (source)
  • They strained for a moment against one another, face to face, the Hassassin's breath fetid in Langdon's nostrils.†   (source)
  • Glass cut his cheek as, pulling Hermione with him, he leapt from bed to broken dressing table and then straight out of the smashed window into nothingness, her scream reverberating through the night as they twisted in midair...And then his scar burst open and he was Voldemort and he was running across the fetid bedroom, his long white hands clutching at the windowsill as he glimpsed the bald man and the little woman twist and vanish, and he screamed with rage, a scream that mingled with the girl's, that echoed across the dark gardens over the church bells ringing in Christmas Day...And his scream was Harry's scream, his pain was Harry's pain...that i†   (source)
  • It was the terrible 'Triumph of Death' by Breughel, painted on such a massive scale that all the multitude of ghastly figures towered over us in the gloom, those ruthless skeletons ferrying the helpless dead in a fetid moat or pulling a cart of human skulls, beheading an outstretched corpse or hanging humans from the gallows.†   (source)
  • Breakfast came from captives who handed out bowls of watery, fetid slop, which each man ate alone in his cell.†   (source)
  • The fabric of the building is tough, but his katana slices a six-foot rent through it with a single gliding motion, and then he's outside, spat out of the hole on a jet of fetid air.†   (source)
  • Nothing had changed, not even the placement of the furniture, but everything struck him as different: the hallways with their worn wood floors, the broken windowpanes patched with scraps of cardboard, the dusty ferns languishing in rusty tin cans and chipped ceramic pots, the fetid smells of urine mixed with food that turned his stomach.†   (source)
  • With the fetid stench and lack of oxygen choking the strength from his body, Langdon realized he only had time for one more effort.†   (source)
  • One would have said that to the daughter of such the close cotton-mill room with its inhuman clamour, its fetid air, its long hours of enforced, monotonous, mechanical toil, would be prison with the torture added.†   (source)
  • The battlefield grows hot and fetid.†   (source)
  • Fetid brown water gurgled below.†   (source)
  • I am so relieved to be getting out of this dark, fetid cabin for the day that I swing Harold around, joke with Gerald Jr., share my rice pudding with Mabel, who has only just started looking me in the eye.†   (source)
  • Clinging to the curving wall, he inhaled a fetid reek and endured the eager scuttle of unseen spiders over his bleeding arm.†   (source)
  • Up ahead, Fang shoved open the last door, the one into the tunnel, and we all poured out after him, moving from cool, fresh air to a hot, fetid dampness that made my nose wrinkle.†   (source)
  • A scheme was worked out whereby sitters and standees regularly alternated positions; this helped, but nothing could help the effect of the stifling body heat of so many squeezed-together human beings, or the sour and fetid odor that persisted during the trip.†   (source)
  • The air was fetid and close with the smell of the birth.†   (source)
  • And so he might have waited for many days, thinking of this and that, had not one early morning, the lad, his eldest son, come home in the dawn with his face hot and red with wine drinking, and his breath was fetid and his feet unsteady.†   (source)
  • And lo and behold, who was on the neighboring bench but my old battlefield companion, the Boer that walks like a man—who, if the British Government had taken my advice, would have been removed from his fetid kraal on the veldt straight to the baboon's cage at the London Zoo, and little children would now be asking their nurses: "Tell me, Nana, is that the Boer General, the one with the blue behind?†   (source)
  • A picture rose before him of the red glow of the pyres mirrored on a wine-dark, slumbrous sea, battling torches whirling sparks across the darkness, and thick, fetid smoke rising toward the watchful sky.†   (source)
  • The smell of sweat, of blood, of unwashed bodies, of excrement rose up in waves of blistering heat until the fetid stench almost nauseated her.†   (source)
  • Within, May Corpening stirred nakedly, muttering as if doped and moving her heavy copper legs, in the fetid bed-warmth, with the slow noise of silk.†   (source)
  • The air in the cave was glacial, penetrated to the very bones, and he detected at once a fetid odour, not very strong but highly disagreeable.†   (source)
  • So they looked at the fire, with that same dull and static amaze which they had brought down from the old fetid caves where knowing began, as though, like death, they had never seen fire before.†   (source)
  • Behind them rose the town, tier on tier, and from it came warm, fetid breaths of air that urged them toward the sea.†   (source)
  • He sought these phantoms fruitlessly for weeks, until he discovered that he might find them only on Sunday morning, tossed like heavy sacks across one another, in the fetid dark of a tenement room, a half-dozen young men and women, in a snoring exhaustion of whisky-stupor and sexual depletion.†   (source)
  • Sometimes, when Eliza awoke to find her servants gone, he was sent down into Niggertown to capture a new one: in that city of rickets he searched into their fetid shacks, past the slow stench of little rills of mire and sewage, in fetid cellars, through all the rank labyrinth of the hill-sprawled settlement.†   (source)
  • It was very warm, and the air quickly grew fetid.†   (source)
  • A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of green liquid oozed from his crushed head.†   (source)
  • All right then; limpid, salubrious: no gush of bilge water had turned it to fetid puddle.†   (source)
  • The den upon which his eye now rested was abject, dirty, fetid, pestiferous, mean, sordid.†   (source)
  • A gust of fetidness informed him of the place in which he stood.†   (source)
  • One there breathes the enormous fetidness of social catastrophes.†   (source)
  • In the fetid train, huddled close, hands locked, innocently free of the alienation which the pomposity of weddings sometimes casts between lovers, they sighed, "Now what are we going to do—what ARE we going to do?"†   (source)
  • "What a fetid form of humour!" he exclaimed, twisting his mouth into an expression of disgust so violent that he could feel the muscles of his throat stiffen against his collar.†   (source)
  • And so we dreamed and loved and planned by fall and winter, and the full flush of the long Southern spring, till the hot winds rolled from the fetid Gulf, till the roses shivered and the still stern sun quivered its awful light over the hills of Atlanta.†   (source)
  • And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus.†   (source)
  • If in some hideous dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to flow through, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject.†   (source)
  • One wondered about this, as also about the swarms of flies which hung about the scene, literally blackening the air, and the strange, fetid odor which assailed one's nostrils, a ghastly odor, of all the dead things of the universe.†   (source)
  • He found it impossible to study conic sections; something in their calm and tantalizing respectability breathing defiantly through Mr. Rooney's fetid parlors distorted their equations into insoluble anagrams.†   (source)
  • At the same time, while in certain respects she had retained a genuine simplicity (she had, for instance, kept up a friendship with a little dressmaker, now retired from business, up whose steep and dark and fetid staircase she clambered almost every day), she still thirsted to be in the fashion, though her idea of it was not altogether that held by fashionable people.†   (source)
  • A small boy rushed out, sniffed in the damp, fresh air and turned up the collar of his coat; came three or four couples in a great hurry; came a further scattering of people whose eyes as they emerged glanced invariably, first at the wet street, then at the rain-filled air, finally at the dismal sky; last a dense, strolling mass that depressed him with its heavy odor compounded of the tobacco smell of the men and the fetid sensuousness of stale powder on women.†   (source)
  • His instinct perceived the fetidness of poverty, but no longer ferreted out the deeper evils in pride and sensuality.†   (source)
  • The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to surrender at discretion.†   (source)
  • The eyelids, the lips, the nostrils, the flesh of the cheeks, were either gone or reduced to fetid rawness.†   (source)
  • It is no defence of an immoral life to say that the alternative offered by society collectively to poor women is a miserable life, starved, overworked, fetid, ailing, ugly.†   (source)
  • The unhealthy nature of the site; the quantity and quality of the children's food; the brackish, fetid water used in its preparation; the pupils' wretched clothing and accommodations — all these things were discovered, and the discovery produced a result mortifying to Mr. Brocklehurst, but beneficial to the institution.†   (source)
  • Those heaps of filth at the gate-posts, those tumbrils of mud which jolt through the street by night, those terrible casks of the street department, those fetid drippings of subterranean mire, which the pavements hide from you,—do you know what they are?†   (source)
  • It suffices for him to be there, with his radiance of happiness, with his power of enthusiasm and joy, with his hand-clapping, which resembles a clapping of wings, to confer on that narrow, dark, fetid, sordid, unhealthy, hideous, abominable keel, the name of Paradise.†   (source)
  • Tortuous, cracked, unpaved, full of fissures, intersected by gullies, jolted by eccentric elbows, mounting and descending illogically, fetid, wild, fierce, submerged in obscurity, with cicatrices on its pavements and scars on its walls, terrible,—such was, retrospectively viewed, the antique sewer of Paris.†   (source)
  • Any one who, like ourselves, has wandered about in these solitudes contiguous to our faubourgs, which may be designated as the limbos of Paris, has seen here and there, in the most desert spot, at the most unexpected moment, behind a meagre hedge, or in the corner of a lugubrious wall, children grouped tumultuously, fetid, muddy, dusty, ragged, dishevelled, playing hide-and-seek, and crowned with corn-flowers.†   (source)
  • High wages were necessary to induce a mason to disappear in that fetid mine; the ladder of the cess-pool cleaner hesitated to plunge into it; it was said, in proverbial form: "to descend into the sewer is to enter the grave;" and all sorts of hideous legends, as we have said, covered this colossal sink with terror; a dread sink-hole which bears the traces of the revolutions of the globe as of the revolutions of man, and where are to be found vestiges of all cataclysms from the shells of the Deluge to the rag of Marat.†   (source)
  • The goblin was developed under the fetid covering of the Mouffetard sewer; the corpses of the Marmousets had been cast into the sewer de la Barillerie; Fagon attributed the redoubtable malignant fever of 1685 to the great hiatus of the sewer of the Marais, which remained yawning until 1833 in the Rue Saint-Louis, almost opposite the sign of the Gallant Messenger.†   (source)
  • slow suffocation by filth, a stone box where asphyxia opens its claw in the mire and clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death-rattle; slime instead of the strand, sulfuretted hydrogen in place of the hurricane, dung in place of the ocean!†   (source)
  • Near the mouth of the strange, foetid bazaar a lone, muscular female sat on a low wooden stool, her thick legs parted, skinning snakes and removing their entrails, her dark eyes seemingly obsessed with each thrashing serpent in her hands.†   (source)
    unconventional spelling: This is a British spelling. Americans use fetid.
  • "It is still not too late to abandon this folly," Gerris said, as they made their way down a foetid alley toward the old spice market.†   (source)
  • They ran: THE IMMORTALS Ever reeking from the vales of earth Ascends to us life's fevered surge, Wealth's excess, the rage of dearth, Smoke of death meals on the gallow's verge; Greed without end, imprisoned air; Murderers' hands, usurers' hands, hands of prayer; Exhales in foetid breath the human swarm Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm, Breathing blessedness and savage heats, Eating itself and spewing what it eats, Hatching war and lovely art, Decking out with idiot craze Bawdy houses while they blaze, Through the childish fair-time mart Weltering to its own decay In the glare of pleasure's way, Rising for each newborn and then Sinking for each to dust again.†   (source)
  • How this account of Mr. Swills is entirely corroborated by two intelligent married females residing in the same court and known respectively by the names of Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins, both of whom observed the foetid effluvia and regarded them as being emitted from the premises in the occupation of Krook, the unfortunate deceased.†   (source)
  • I tried to thank him again, as I paused by the makeshift pallet before returning to my fetid sanctuary, but he waved away my appreciation with a gracious hand.†   (source)
  • Randall strode forward and took him by the hair, yanking his head back, shaking it like a drowned animal, so that drops of fetid water spattered the walls.†   (source)
  • Accordingly after a few such preliminaries as brushing, in spite of his having forgotten to take up his rather soapsuddy handkerchief after it had done yeoman service in the shaving line, they both walked together along Beaver street or, more properly, lane as far as the farrier's and the distinctly fetid atmosphere of the livery stables at the corner of Montgomery street where they made tracks to the left from thence debouching into Amiens street round by the corner of Dan Bergin's.†   (source)
  • Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
    Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
    I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
    And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.†   (source)
  • It is allowed, that senates and great councils are often troubled with redundant, ebullient, and other peccant humours; with many diseases of the head, and more of the heart; with strong convulsions, with grievous contractions of the nerves and sinews in both hands, but especially the right; with spleen, flatus, vertigos, and deliriums; with scrofulous tumours, full of fetid purulent matter; with sour frothy ructations: with canine appetites, and crudeness of digestion, besides many others, needless to mention.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)