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insipid
in a sentence

show 105 more with this conextual meaning
  • She made a yellow jam of the insipid ground-cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon peel;   (source)
    insipid = lacking flavor
  • insipid, or savage   (source)
    insipid = insignificant, feeble, or lacking flavor
  • he had to talk so properly that speech ... become insipid in his mouth;   (source)
    insipid = feeble or lacked flavor
  • The moment and the act he had prefigured for weeks with a thrill of pleasure; yet it was no less than a miserable insipidity to him now that it had come.   (source)
    insipidity = something uninteresting and without impact
  • ...the most insipid food was alone endurable;   (source)
    insipid = dull (lacking flavor)
  • His insipid voice murmured like a running brook; a light shone in his eyes through the glimmering of his spectacles... This man oppressed her horribly.   (source)
    insipid = dull (uninteresting)
  • It will be of no interest to you if I describe the action of this insipid—the word "insipid" here means "dull and foolish"—play by Al Funcoot, because it was a dreadful play and of no real importance to our story.†   (source)
  • How it must have disappointed Owen …. to discover that my father was such an insipid soup of a man.†   (source)
  • He decided she was insipid.†   (source)
  • And it was her idea to remove the sections which she thought would bore the readers-the philosophical passages, the descriptions of my mother, the sections which paid homage to earlier poets, the places where I played with experimental verse, the more personal passages-everything, in fact, except the descriptions of the idyllic final days which, emptied of all heavier freight, came across as sentimental and insipid.†   (source)
  • After much thought he risked a white rose, which he liked less than the others because it was insipid and mute:†   (source)
  • And he sang, he crooned in a rasping voice—he had the phrasing, the timing just right, the lazy line endings, some insipid lyric about a farewell letter, only altered in his gnawed voice to a life's own shape, felt in the deepest skin.†   (source)
  • It's such an insipid comment that I should be shot for it, but I'm dying to know more about these two girls who are going to be in our class.†   (source)
  • My father may be gone, but the song-schmaltzy, stupid, insipid— goes on.†   (source)
  • But he only . smiled at me, and insipid, near apologetic smile.†   (source)
  • By day she embroidered, read, or painted insipid watercolors around the house, under Nana's approving glance, now that she could finally sleep in peace.†   (source)
  • The boy suspected something serious had happened, but his mother muted the drama with mild, insipid words so as not to upset him.†   (source)
  • I have others catching and dissecting flies, accumulating remarkable pebbles, cockleshells, etc., with as ardent curiosity as any virtuoso in the Royal Society…… At one table sits Mr. Insipid foppling and fluttering, spinning his whirligig, or playing with his fingers as gaily and wittily as any Frenchified coxcomb brandishes his cane and rattles his snuff box.†   (source)
  • We both acknowledged how painfully adolescent and insipid we were being with these third-party phone calls--†   (source)
  • They were dolls dressed up, insipid in blue and white, pious and lifeless.†   (source)
  • These last words, spoken by Leslie as she flopped over on her belly, had an effect on my libido which forever after would render insipid the word aphrodisiac.†   (source)
  • I had shown Ferdinand my things as though I had been letting him into the deeper secrets of my existence, the true nature of my life below the insipidity of my days and nights.†   (source)
  • You have to look past their insipid mission statement to appreciate how this company will change the world.
  • The eaters of the dinner, like the dinner itself, were lukewarm, insipid, overdone--and all owing to this poor little dull Young Barnacle.   (source)
  • We chatted together a long time, but I found her rather frivolous, and even a little insipid...   (source)
  • It is an insipid fruit at the best; but a good apricot is eatable, which none from my garden are.   (source)
    insipid = dull
  • Mr. Yates, indeed, exclaimed against his tameness and insipidity;   (source)
    insipidity = dullness
  • This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of every thing's being dull and insipid about the house!   (source)
    insipid = uninteresting and without impact
  • If I must give my opinion, I have always thought it the most insipid play in the English language.   (source)
    insipid = dull
  • Everything is so insipid, so uninteresting, that does not relate to the beloved object!   (source)
    insipid = insignificant, feeble, or lacking flavor
  • The insipidity of the meeting was exactly such as Elinor had expected; it produced not one novelty of thought or expression, and nothing could be less interesting than the whole of their discourse both in the dining parlour and drawing room:   (source)
    insipidity = lack of interest or impact
  • He's still in love with the sister, the insipid little dead sixteen-year-old.†   (source)
  • What is that insipid smile you're wearing?†   (source)
  • CHAPTER X. When you were very small, perhaps someone read to you the insipid story—the word "insipid" here means "not worth reading to someone"—of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.†   (source)
  • Such details escape him now, and his descriptions sound to him generic, insipid, like those of an ordinary AP story.†   (source)
  • The reality was that one could not see anything more, or anything more exciting, through the spyglass than one could see on the street, but there were many clients who came every Sunday to wrangle over the telescope for the pure delight of tasting the insipid forbidden fruits of the walled area that was denied them.†   (source)
  • On the nearly deserted dock guarded by barefoot soldiers without uniforms, his sisters and mother were waiting for him, along with his closest friends, whom he found insipid and without expectations despite their sophisticated airs; they spoke about the crisis of the civil war as if it were remote and foreign, but they all had an evasive tremor in their voices and an uncertainty in their eyes that belied their words.†   (source)
  • There would have been no problem in going back to Fernanda's insipid love, because her beauty had become solemn with age, but the rain had spared him from all emergencies of passion and had filled him with the spongy serenity of a lack of appetite.†   (source)
  • The waves were colourless, and the Bournemouth steamer gave a further touch of insipidity, drawn up against the pier and hooting wildly for excursionists.†   (source)
  • The lady had an air of sweet insipidity, and a face of engaging paleness; there was a faded look about her, and about the furniture, and about the house.†   (source)
  • The insipidity, and yet the noise—the nothingness, and yet the self-importance of all those people!†   (source)
  • Her complexion was exquisitely fair, but the noble cast of her head and features prevented the insipidity which sometimes attaches to fair beauties.†   (source)
  • Such and such a formality or action, which, in any other situation would have appeared merely a deference to him, now seemed insipidity, and he nerved himself against it.†   (source)
  • Her complexion was sallow; and her features small, without beauty, and naturally without expression; but a lucky contraction of the brow had rescued her countenance from the disgrace of insipidity, by giving it the strong characters of pride and ill nature.†   (source)
  • Her insipidity was invariable, for even her spirits were always the same; and though she did not oppose the parties arranged by her husband, provided every thing were conducted in style and her two eldest children attended her, she never appeared to receive more enjoyment from them than she might have experienced in sitting at home;— and so little did her presence add to the pleasure of the others, by any share in their conversation, that they were sometimes only reminded of her being…†   (source)
  • There was nothing in any of the party which could recommend them as companions to the Dashwoods; but the cold insipidity of Lady Middleton was so particularly repulsive, that in comparison of it the gravity of Colonel Brandon, and even the boisterous mirth of Sir John and his mother-in-law was interesting.†   (source)
  • "You mustn't blame Sebastian if at times he seems a little insipid….†   (source)
  • In fact, brandy was good almost any time, so much better than insipid wine.†   (source)
  • When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room.†   (source)
  • "So you see we mustn't blame Sebastian if at times he seems a little insipid—but then you don't blame him, do you, Charles?†   (source)
  • Filthy insipid little prude--and yet ready to fall into this booby's arms like any other breeding animal.†   (source)
  • But a day without tobacco—that would be absolutely insipid, a dull, totally wasted day.†   (source)
  • But I know you like women to be rather insipid.†   (source)
  • He found the man to his taste, but the girl insipid.†   (source)
  • And that insipid, paltry creature attending her from DUTY and HUMANITY!†   (source)
  • This was not insipid, single-word talk of drummer-boys.†   (source)
  • "In other words she's an insipid little chit.†   (source)
  • "She seems good-natured but insipid," said Mrs. Rowdy; "that Major seems to be particularly epris."†   (source)
  • Your third estate is insipid, colorless, odorless, and shapeless.†   (source)
  • In the second place, and giving my own personal opinion, a child's flesh is not a satisfying diet; it is too insipid, too sweet; and the criminal, in making these experiments, could have satisfied neither his conscience nor his appetite.†   (source)
  • Warm with the fancies of youth, pretty with the insipid prettiness of the formative period, possessed of a figure promising eventual shapeliness and an eye alight with certain native intelligence she was a fair example of the middle American class two generations removed from the emigrant.†   (source)
  • You must admit that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the wildest hominist or feminist farce is insipid after the most commonplace "slice of life."†   (source)
  • Once he dreamt that it had come true and woke up in a cold panic, for in his dream she had been a silly, flaxen Clara, with the gold gone out of her hair and platitudes falling insipidly from her changeling tongue.†   (source)
  • At the counter she found a friend, bent on the same errand, and conversed with her insipidly, wasting much time.†   (source)
  • He reached up among the branches and began to pick the sweet, insipid fruit,—long ivory-colored berries, tipped with faint pink, like white coral, that fall to the ground unheeded all summer through.†   (source)
  • He was presently observed trailing yellowish behind the trees, or against insipid sky, and touching the bodies already at work in the fields.†   (source)
  • And my thoughts are all muddled, and I end up making insipid plays on words that I dare not trust—and not just the basic idea that first occurs to me, but the second one, too, which is a critique of the first, that's where I get into trouble.†   (source)
  • An insipid, symmetrically fashioned operetta melody echoed through the darkness, and Hans Castorp whistled along in a whisper (a whistle can be whispered, you know), while his chilled feet kept time under his feather comforter.†   (source)
  • Her deity returned a consoling reply, but the touch of her hands on her face started prickly heat, and she seemed to swallow and expectorate the same insipid clot of air that had weighed on her lungs all the night.†   (source)
  • On the contrary, this slippery syllable with its lingual and labial consonants and scanty vowel in the middle really began to disgust him after a while, conjuring up for him somehow images of watery milk—something whitish-blue and insipid, particularly when compared with all the robust fodder that Dr. Krokowski was serving up.†   (source)
  • One could use other terms for his kindheartedness—an insipid phrase like "purity of soul," for instance, or a more serious and beautiful word like "modesty," or disparaging words such as "avoidance of the truth" and "hypocrisy," or even a phrase about "the mystic piety of shyness"—and Hans Castorp's reaction to the sounds from the adjoining room combined something of them all and was visible now as a shadow of respectability that darkened his face, as if he should not know and did not…†   (source)
  • …voice, who knew where or when, at some party or charity concert, and that had turned up now in his memory, a gentle bit of nonsense that began: How oft it thrills me just to hear You say some simple word, and he was about to add: That spoken from your lips, my dear, Does leave my heart so stirred! and suddenly he shrugged and said, "Ridiculous!" and cast aside the delicate little song as tasteless and insipidly sentimental—rejecting it, however, with a certain austere melancholy.†   (source)
  • Thou, else, dost well the devil-nature wear: Naught so insipid in the world I find As is a devil in despair.†   (source)
  • The sarcasm that had repelled, the harshness that had startled me once, were only like keen condiments in a choice dish: their presence was pungent, but their absence would be felt as comparatively insipid.†   (source)
  • Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States.†   (source)
  • I had imagined, on the contrary, that on coming in he would at once break into his habitual thin, shrill laugh and fall to making his insipid jokes and witticisms.†   (source)
  • It was very probably this sweet-tasting property of the observed thing in itself that was mainly concerned in Ralph's quickly-stirred interest in the advent of a young lady who was evidently not insipid.†   (source)
  • "She is fade and insipid," and adds some more kind remarks in this strain, which I should never have repeated at all, but that they are in truth prodigiously complimentary to the young lady whom they concern.†   (source)
  • Are you afraid she will turn insipid?†   (source)
  • The eaters of the dinner, like the dinner itself, were lukewarm, insipid, overdone—and all owing to this poor little dull Young Barnacle.†   (source)
  • The news that "Bony" was come back from Egypt was comparatively insipid, and the repulse of the French in Italy was nothing to Mrs. Poyser's repulse of the old squire.†   (source)
  • We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.†   (source)
  • The comfort, the freedom, the gaiety of the room was over, hushed into cold composure, determined silence, or insipid talk, to meet the heartless elegance of her father and sister.†   (source)
  • Queue-en-Brie was a very insipid place to stay at then, a village of farriers, and cow-girls with chapped hands, a long line of poor dwellings and thatched cottages,...†   (source)
  • It is my opinion the fiddler David must have been an insipid sort of fellow; I like black Bothwell better: to my mind a man is nothing without a spice of the devil in him; and history may say what it will of James Hepburn, but I have a notion, he was just the sort of wild, fierce, bandit hero whom I could have consented to gift with my hand.†   (source)
  • A musical phrase which is very insipid and very bald for indifferent listeners, when it is not ornamented with some ~fioriture~; but Claude was not an indifferent listener.†   (source)
  • She was not of so ungovernable a temper as Lydia; and, removed from the influence of Lydia's example, she became, by proper attention and management, less irritable, less ignorant, and less insipid.†   (source)
  • Amongst aristocratic nations, all who live within reach of the first class in society commonly strain to be like it, which gives rise to ridiculous and insipid imitations.†   (source)
  • There were three other Young Barnacles from three other offices, insipid to all the senses, and terribly in want of seasoning, doing the marriage as they would have 'done' the Nile, Old Rome, the new singer, or Jerusalem.†   (source)
  • And thou hast lulled me, meanwhile, with the most insipid dissipations, hast concealed from me her increasing wretchedness, and suffered her to go helplessly to ruin!†   (source)
  • All former delights of turf, mess, hunting-field, and gambling-table; all previous loves and courtships of milliners, opera-dancers, and the like easy triumphs of the clumsy military Adonis, were quite insipid when compared to the lawful matrimonial pleasures which of late he had enjoyed.†   (source)
  • You would have been much at a loss to determine his original clime and country; he had none of the superficial signs that usually render the answer to this question an insipidly easy one.†   (source)
  • I do not fear that the poetry of democratic nations will prove too insipid, or that it will fly too near the ground; I rather apprehend that it will be forever losing itself in the clouds, and that it will range at last to purely imaginary regions.†   (source)
  • She thought him insipid, silly, stupid, useless, foppish, displeasing, impertinent, and extremely ugly.†   (source)
  • Chapter XV: Of The Gravity Of The Americans, And Why It Does Not Prevent Them From Often Committing Inconsiderate Actions Men who live in democratic countries do not value the simple, turbulent, or coarse diversions in which the people indulge in aristocratic communities: such diversions are thought by them to be puerile or insipid.†   (source)
  • I know you very well; you have so much animation, which is exactly what Miss Andrews wants, for I must confess there is something amazingly insipid about her.†   (source)
  • Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust.†   (source)
  • "You decide on his imperfections so much in the mass," replied Elinor, "and so much on the strength of your own imagination, that the commendation I am able to give of him is comparatively cold and insipid.†   (source)
  • There was a kind of cold hearted selfishness on both sides, which mutually attracted them; and they sympathised with each other in an insipid propriety of demeanor, and a general want of understanding.†   (source)
  • Candide was very pleased with an actress who played Queen Elizabeth in a somewhat insipid tragedy   (source)
    insipid = insignificant, feeble, or lacking flavor
  • It was at first a very insipid diet,†   (source)
  • Yet this is the being from whose conversation you think, I suppose, that I have been unfortunately restrained, and without whose blessed society, life, in your opinion, must be tedious and insipid.†   (source)
  • The supper passed at first like most Parisian suppers, in silence, followed by a noise of words which could not be distinguished, then with pleasantries of which most were insipid, with false news, with bad reasoning, a little politics, and much evil speaking; they also discussed new books.†   (source)
  • To which the lady answered, "You cannot conceive anything more insipid and childish than a masquerade to the people of fashion, who in general know one another as well here as when they meet in an assembly or a drawing-room; nor will any woman of condition converse with a person with whom she is not acquainted.†   (source)
  • "I grant," said the Senator, "that the second, fourth, and sixth books of his AEneid are excellent, but as for his pious AEneas, his strong Cloanthus, his friend Achates, his little Ascanius, his silly King Latinus, his bourgeois Amata, his insipid Lavinia, I think there can be nothing more flat and disagreeable.†   (source)
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