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Definition
allowing passage through a barrierThe barrier can be physical or figurative — such as:
- a membrane, asphalt or other material that is full of tiny holes that permit penetration by a fluid or gas
- a border or other barrier that is not effective (for example, permitting illegal crossing)
- an ineffective sports defense
- a law or other rule that is full of loopholes
- the partly porous walls of our digestive system
porous = allowing passage through a barrier
- compacting the soil to make it less porous
- our unfenced and largely unpoliced borders have proven porous
- It's against the rules, but the regulations are porous.
- His father peeled him away gradually, like a porous plaster.O. Henry -- The Ransom of Red Chief
- His skin was as porous as an orange rind and the elements had darkened it to resemble a fine old piece of furniture.Roger Zelazny -- Nine Princes in Amber
- When it came to containing gossip, no walls in the world were as porous as those surrounding Vatican City.Dan Brown -- The Da Vinci Code
- But the frame was the original porous stone used to build the manor.Eoin Colfer -- Artemis Fowl
- The entire island seemed porous with hydrium.Kenneth Oppel -- Airborn
- Their bones are extremely light and porous, filled with tiny air pockets.James Patterson -- Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports
- He could feel the shock wave of the bullets as they sailed beneath him and pulverized the porous travertine behind.Dan Brown -- Angels & Demons
- I feel I even walk like that: crouched over, my spine constricting to a question mark, my bones leached of calcium and porous as limestone.Margaret Atwood -- The Handmaid's Tale
- The captain nodded, and the chaplain gazed at his porous gray pallor of fatigue and malnutrition with a mixture of pity and esteem.Joseph Heller -- Catch-22
- Our bones are made porous.Joy Kogawa -- Obasan
- He moved to the end of the veranda to refill the heavy, porous clay water-jug from the filter.Rudyard Kipling -- Kim
- There was no trail at all, and we picked our way between and over the rumpled slabs of porous black rock.Megan Whalen Turner -- The Thief
- His nose was as porous and dark as volcanic rock.John Gardner -- Grendel
- Carl fingered the blue-green leaves, porous like blotting-paper and shaped like birch leaves, hung on waxen red stems.Willa Cather -- O Pioneers!
- The surface of the snowpack began to thaw, turn porous and slushy.Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain
- Figuratively I could snapshot what I mean by some image; I am a porous vessel afloat on sensation; a sensitive plate exposed to invisible rays; and so on.Virginia Woolf -- A Sketch of the Past
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