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indeterminate
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  • On my way back to the cash register, I stop for a couple Starbursts, a package of Twinkies, and an indeterminate number of GoFast nutrition bars.†   (source)
  • I found myself blinking up in the late afternoon glare at a very tall, very very tanned, very thin man, of indeterminate age.†   (source)
  • I fuzzily remember Sandy Pittman climbing past as I waited, bound for the summit, followed an indeterminate time later by Charlotte Fox and then Lopsang Jangbu.†   (source)
  • As a son of Poseidon, he could probably breathe underwater, but holding one's breath for an indeterminate amount of time was a different matter altogether.†   (source)
  • The bright and sterile work space glistened with advanced quantitative equipment: paired electro encephalographs, a femtosecond comb, a magneto-optical trap, and quantum-indeterminate electronic noise REGs, more simply known as Random Event Generators.†   (source)
  • I was begging in Merchant's Circle and so far the day had profited me two kicks (one guard, one mercenary), three shoves (two wagoneers, one sailor), one new curse concerning an unlikely anatomical configuration (also from the sailor), and a spray of spittle from a rather unendearing elderly man of indeterminate occupation.†   (source)
  • Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones.†   (source)
  • For an indeterminate time, nothing was demanded of me or of Bailey.†   (source)
  • Mr. Underwood, who in his time had published memorial verses of indeterminate variety, said he still couldn't print this because it was blasphemous and didn't scan.†   (source)
  • Her body, for the most part, was indeterminate.†   (source)
  • She drifted among the heavens for an indeterminate period, queen of the bright, jewel-like world below, but then disquiet entered her soul, and she cried out with her thoughts: Eragon, where are you!†   (source)
  • A trail of indeterminate light showed on the horizon.†   (source)
  • She passed several doors, glimpsing moments of people's lives, the images suspended like photographs: a man staring out a window, his face cast in shadows, his age indeterminate.†   (source)
  • If faced with the Solomonic task of sacrificing the life of one newborn for an indeterminate number of fetuses, what number might you choose?†   (source)
  • She was a scrawny little white woman, missing teeth, with a cloud of hair that was an indeterminate shade somewhere between gray and peroxide.†   (source)
  • Helaine-a wiry bantamweight of an indeterminate age above fifty, just over five feet with a gray moptop, the gaze of a hawk, and quick, precise hands-pulls a thin file marked "C.†   (source)
  • She was in a state for months …." her expression flickered, became indeterminate.†   (source)
  • With his own eyes he had seen creatures in the dark, and an indeterminate terror was always lurking, waiting for him.†   (source)
  • He stared at me dispassionately for an indeterminate amount of time.†   (source)
  • He was a tanned, muscular man of indeterminate age, the sun-drenched skin disguising the years.†   (source)
  • The problem has an indeterminately large number of variables.†   (source)
  • Even a stray unkind remark about the king or his family could result in a sojourn of indeterminate length in the GID's labyrinth of secret detention centers.†   (source)
  • Her age, under any circumstance, was fiercely indeterminate, but never more so than when she was wearing a hairnet.†   (source)
  • Onto the screen bloomed the image of a child of indeterminate sex, its bare legs pressed awkward together, its shoulder-length curls mingling with the shorter hair of a St. Bernard, whose long tongue, as Oedipa watched, began to swipe at the child's rosy cheeks, making the child wrinkle up its nose ap-pealingly and say, "Aw, Murray, come on, now, you're getting me all wet."†   (source)
  • Imagine that you have lived for an indeterminate but longish time with the well-founded suspicion that you are suffering from some fatal disease.†   (source)
  • He is gray, balding, paunchy, an indeterminate sixty-five.†   (source)
  • Walking over to the party, so as not to use his car, making the only sounds in the dark wet street, and only partly aware of the indeterminate shapes of houses with their softshining fanlights marking them off, there with the rain falling mistlike through the trees, he almost forgot what town he was in and which house he was bound for.†   (source)
  • The influence of environment is indeterminate.
    indeterminate = uncertain or unknown
  • There are an indeterminate number of plant species in that jungle.
    indeterminate = unknown
  • At her side, also on skis, were a pair of bundled-up little blond kids of indeterminate sex.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Smeath makes an indeterminate sound.†   (source)
  • Mike then said, "This is an indeterminate problem.†   (source)
  • His style was indeterminate — not a factory worker, but not anything else either, or nothing definite.†   (source)
  • They aren't at one, they aren't at zero, they're in an indeterminate state that has no meaning in terms of ones or zeros.†   (source)
  • I WAS AWAKENED, AT some indeterminate hour, by a bell buzzing loudly at my door which made me leap up as if I'd been scalded.†   (source)
  • In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can't make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally.†   (source)
  • When your answer to a test is indeterminate it means one of two things: that your test procedures aren't doing what you think they are or that your understanding of the context of the question needs to be enlarged.†   (source)
  • BORIS WAS RIGHT ABOUT his dope, how pure it was—pure white, a normal sized bump knocked me cockeyed, so that for an indeterminate interlude I drifted in and out pleasantly on the verge of death.†   (source)
  • Often—amidst the crackle of strewn newspapers —I drifted in and out of sleep, and my dreams for the most part were muddied with the same indeterminate anxiety that bled through into my waking hours: court cases, luggage burst open on the tarmac with my clothes scattered everywhere and endless airport corridors where I ran for planes I knew I'd never make.†   (source)
  • An indeterminate amount of time passed.†   (source)
  • Twenty-five-month-old Colin sat in a high chair, eating a breakfast of indeterminate vegetative origin while his father read the Chicago Tribune across their small kitchen table.†   (source)
  • We had a man-a qualified man, as you agreed-who was willing to go in deep cover for an indeterminate length of time, risking his life every day, severing all ties with his past.†   (source)
  • The delivery had occurred at 11:37 a.m., on the second level of Lot B. A hatted, coated man of indeterminate age and ethnicity had entered the parking garage on foot, an L.L.Bean bag in each hand, and had placed them in the Impala's trunk, which he opened after gaining access to the car's interior through an unlocked door.†   (source)
  • I'm squinting into a window at some Italian silk scarves, wonderful indeterminate colors, gray-blue, sea-green, when I feel a touch on my arm, a chilly jump of the heart.†   (source)
  • Your question is indeterminate, Man.†   (source)
  • The question is indeterminate.†   (source)
  • There were relatively few full-fledged bars in that part of Flatbush (a puzzlement to me until Nathan pointed out that serious tippling does not rank high among Jewish pastimes), but this bar of ours did do a moderately brisk business, numbering among its predominately blue-collar clientele Irish doormen, Scandinavian cabdrivers, German building superintendents and WASPs of indeterminate status like myself who had somehow strayed into the faubourg.†   (source)
  • DRUMMOND Oh You interpret that the first day recorded in the Book of Genesis could be of indeterminate length.†   (source)
  • The book is an indeterminate heap of contradictory drafts.†   (source)
  • Then after an indeterminate dark interval, Prissy was beside her, chattering on in a pleased way.†   (source)
  • A thin weedy young man with a very indeterminate moustache.†   (source)
  • As they came abreast the house, an indeterminate number, passing like shadows, she called to them.†   (source)
  • He was a tall man with grizzled hair and an indeterminate manner.†   (source)
  • The clay had hardened, some time in this indeterminate day which had lasted a thousand years.†   (source)
  • To some the sermon simply brought home the fact that they had been sentenced, for an unknown crime, to an indeterminate period of punishment.†   (source)
  • …years since Ellen died (or was it the four years since Henry vanished or was it the nineteen years since I saw light and breathed) knowing nothing, able to learn nothing save this: a shot heard, faint and far away and even direction and source indeterminate, by two women, two young women alone in a rotting house where no man's footstep had sounded in two years—a shot, then an interval of aghast surmise above the cloth and needles which engaged them, then feet, in the hall and then on…†   (source)
  • All were dressed in indeterminate shades of grey and brown, never even a blue feather pinned to a hat.†   (source)
  • As the drizzle thickened the dull facades of houses grew even drabber, the contents of misty shop-windows indeterminate.†   (source)
  • "Why, what on earth!" she cried as he knew she would, becoming flustered and moving her arms indeterminately.†   (source)
  • Seen from the side, baggy pants of indeterminate somberness swept upward and outward in a soft curve, bracket-wise to the overhanging shirt Slant sun-light on his rear, alternate upon the worn-smooth, almostlacquered cheeks and cylinders of his pants teetered with his teetering limbs and ricocheted.†   (source)
  • Then, immediately following these eccentricities of thought and expression, we come on a detailed description of the streetcar service in the town, the structure of the cars, their indeterminate color, their unvarying dirtiness-and he concludes his observations with a "Very odd," which explains nothing.†   (source)
  • The room was a perfectly conventional drawing-room-oatmeal-coloured paper with a frieze round the top, indeterminate cretonnes, rose-coloured cushions and curtains, a good many china knick-knacks and ornaments.†   (source)
  • In a basket swung from his neck cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.†   (source)
  • He was of indeterminate nationality, but spoke English with a slow Oxford drawl.†   (source)
  • The station, like the scenery, like Helen's letters, struck an indeterminate note.†   (source)
  • He caught a glimpse of a most singular thing, what seemed a handless arm waving towards him, and a face of three huge indeterminate spots on white, very like the face of a pale pansy.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Hatch swam in a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, of aspirations culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion journals, and a gaudy world of sport still more completely beyond her companion's ken.†   (source)
  • —Had been, insofar as his illness and a stay up here of still quite indeterminate length had interfered with his plans; this was a critical time in his life, perhaps even a turning point, one could not know for sure.†   (source)
  • Three were short-haired pointers, one was a Newfoundland, and the other two were mongrels of indeterminate breed.†   (source)
  • The record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings.†   (source)
  • Amory found the slicker a most valuable classification until his junior year in college, when the outline became so blurred and indeterminate that it had to be subdivided many times, and became only a quality.†   (source)
  • And Roberta, suddenly noticing the strangeness of it all—the something of eerie unreason or physical and mental indetermination so strangely and painfully contrasting with this scene, exclaiming: "Why, Clyde!†   (source)
  • He went out indeterminately.†   (source)
  • If Drayton were with us again to write a new edition of his incomparable poem, he would sing the nymphs of Hertfordshire as indeterminate of feature, with hair obfuscated by the London smoke.†   (source)
  • Seated among the Germans and Swiss were bearded, elegant Russians, looking barbarically rich, and Dutchmen with traces of Malayan blood— all intermixed with a sprinkling of indeterminate sorts who spoke French and came from the Balkans or the Levant, a motley set of adventurers for whom Hans Castorp had a certain weakness but whom Joachim spurned as dubious and lacking in character.†   (source)
  • A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period.†   (source)
  • Under these average boyish physiognomies that she seems to turn off by the gross, she conceals some of her most rigid, inflexible purposes, some of her most unmodifiable characters; and the dark-eyed, demonstrative, rebellious girl may after all turn out to be a passive being compared with this pink-and-white bit of masculinity with the indeterminate features.†   (source)
  • Ladislaw had now accepted his bit of work, though it was not that indeterminate loftiest thing which he had once dreamed of as alone worthy of continuous effort.†   (source)
  • He saw neither houses, nor pavements, nor chariots, nor men and women, but a chaos of indeterminate objects whose edges melted into each other.†   (source)
  • The legal form of service was theoretically far different; in practice, task-work or "cropping" was substituted for daily toil in gangs; and the slave gradually became a metayer, or tenant on shares, in name, but a laborer with indeterminate wages in fact.†   (source)
  • I had rather that the language should be made hideous with words imported from the Chinese, the Tartars, or the Hurons, than that the meaning of a word in our own language should become indeterminate.†   (source)
  • When the idea of family becomes vague, indeterminate, and uncertain, a man thinks of his present convenience; he provides for the establishment of his succeeding generation, and no more.†   (source)
  • Here, with you, everything is circumscribed, here all is formulated and geometrical, while we have nothing but indeterminate equations!†   (source)
  • Minerva said, she hoped not; they were only ridiculous little creatures, with this odd circumstance, that they had a blur, or indeterminate aspect, seen far or seen near; if you called them bad, they would appear so; if you called them good, they would appear so; and there was no one person or action among them, which would not puzzle her owl,[455] much more all Olympus, to know whether it was fundamentally bad or good.†   (source)
  • He was one of those lads that grow everywhere in England, and at twelve or thirteen years of age look as much alike as goslings,—a lad with light-brown hair, cheeks of cream and roses, full lips, indeterminate nose and eyebrows,—a physiognomy in which it seems impossible to discern anything but the generic character to boyhood; as different as possible from poor Maggie's phiz, which Nature seemed to have moulded and colored with the most decided intention.†   (source)
  • He has been informed that the conditions of society are not equal in our part of the globe, and he observes that among the nations of Europe the traces of rank are not wholly obliterated; that wealth and birth still retain some indeterminate privileges, which force themselves upon his notice whilst they elude definition.†   (source)
  • Scarcely had I dropped my head back into its original position, when there flashed upon my mind what I cannot better describe than as the unformed half of that idea of deliverance to which I have previously alluded, and of which a moiety only floated indeterminately through my brain when I raised food to my burning lips.†   (source)
  • I am x in an indeterminate equation.†   (source)
  • Since religion has lost its empire over the souls of men, the most prominent boundary which divided good from evil is overthrown; the very elements of the moral world are indeterminate; the princes and the peoples of the earth are guided by chance, and none can define the natural limits of despotism and the bounds of license.†   (source)
  • Jamie replied with what I had come to think of as a "Scottish noise," that indeterminate sound made low in the throat that can be interpreted to mean almost anything.†   (source)
  • I discarded jars of dried snails; OIL OF EARTHWORMS—which appeared to be exactly that; VINUM MILLEPEDATUM—millipedes, these crushed to pieces and soaked in wine; POWDER OF EGYPTIANE MUMMIE—an indeterminate-looking dust, whose origin I thought more likely a silty streambank than a pharaoh's tomb; PIGEONS BLOOD, ant eggs, a number of dried toads painstakingly packed in moss, and HUMAN SKULL, POWDERED.†   (source)
  • It originated in Boston at some indeterminate time before 1750, and remained so peculiarly American for more than a century following that most of the English visitors before the Civil War remarked its use.†   (source)
  • …tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her…†   (source)
  • For he that goes about the violation of a Law, wherein no penalty is determined, expecteth an indeterminate, that is to say, an arbitrary Punishment.†   (source)
  • The meaning of the latter is extremely indeterminate, and can be of little importance under any interpretation which it will bear.†   (source)
  • Consequences from the Accidents common to all Bodies Naturall; which are Quantity, and Motion. a. Consequences from Quantity, and Motion Indeterminate; which, being the Principles or first foundation of Philosophy, is called Philosophia Prima PHILOSOPHIA PRIMA b. Consequences from Motion, and Quantity Determined 1) Consequences from Quantity, and Motion Determined a) By Figure, By Number 1] Mathematiques, GEOMETRY ARITHMETIQUE 2) Consequences from the Motion, and Quantity of Bodies in…†   (source)
  • The jurisdiction of her several courts, general and local, of law, of equity, of admiralty, etc., is not less a source of frequent and intricate discussions, sufficiently denoting the indeterminate limits by which they are respectively circumscribed.†   (source)
  • But this is not all: if we advert to the observations already made respecting the courts that subsist in the several States of the Union, and the different powers exercised by them, it will appear that there are no expressions more vague and indeterminate than those which have been employed to characterize THAT species of causes which it is intended shall be entitled to a trial by jury.†   (source)
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