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precocious
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  • 'Listen to him,' said the Healer, taking Lockhart's arm and beaming fondly at him as though he were a precocious two-year-old.†   (source)
  • Applicants for the position were given a subscription to The Grave; the snide, sneering precocity of the student body was well represented in its pages—and best represented by the capitals that commanded one's gaze to Owen Meany.†   (source)
  • But how to protect her against failure, against that Lola, the incarnation of Emily's youngest sister who had been just as precocious and scheming at that age, and who had recently plotted her way out of a marriage, into what she wanted everyone to call a nervous breakdown.†   (source)
  • How had they produced such a child—so smart and self-possessed, so dutiful, helpful, and precocious?†   (source)
  • The twins were precocious with their reading.†   (source)
  • As a child Bill was precocious and easily bored by his studies.†   (source)
  • How do you throw a party for a fictional character who started life as a precocious moppet of six and is now a thirty-year-old bride-to-be who still speaks like a child?†   (source)
  • The masses of commuters standing mesmerized under the departure boards, watching for their trains, reminded me of a mob in a zombie movie—which, granted, I shouldn't have watched as a young child, but I was always rather precocious.†   (source)
  • Elinor cleared her throat and gave Mo a reproachful glance, as if it could only be his fault that his daughter was precocious enough to know such things.†   (source)
  • By the time she and her sister were eleven, Parwana had developed a precocious understanding of the strange behavior of boys around girls they privately liked.†   (source)
  • You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world.†   (source)
  • Clara was extremely precocious and had inherited the runaway imagination of all the women in her family on her mother's side.†   (source)
  • Weren't only children supposed to be precocious and resourceful?†   (source)
  • Up until then she was...I don't know how to explain it: extremely gifted and precocious, but on the whole a rather ordinary teenager.†   (source)
  • A girl with (and how could they not notice?) a precocious bosom.†   (source)
  • As scathing as any eyewitness description was that provided by a precocious young New Englander of Loyalist inclinations named Benjamin Thompson, who, after being refused a commission by Washington, served in the British army, later settled in Europe, renamed himself Count Rumford, and ultimately became one of the era's prominent men of science.†   (source)
  • The twelve-year-old girl looked to Nately like a plucked chicken or like a twig with the bark peeled off her sapling body embarrassed everyone in her precocious attempts to imitate her elders, and she was always being chased away to put clothes on and ordered out into the street to play in the fresh air with the other children.†   (source)
  • Precocious.†   (source)
  • Under Paolo's precocious leadership, innumerable games and contests were hatched.†   (source)
  • Judging from the number of scratches on the stock, the precocious Dallas teenager suspects that the weapon is army surplus.†   (source)
  • At her feet was a purse-not the white purse she had clutched in her hands ten minutes earlier, but a fashionable Yves St. Laurent, the precocious initials stamped on the fabric, an escutcheon of the haute couture.†   (source)
  • It was terribly precocious of his player, but: for some reason Cesar retreated and allowed the two to huddle alone.†   (source)
  • Fitzsimmons's barn, consisting of horses owned by the Wheatley and Belair Stables, was teeming with precocious youngsters and proven, high-class older horses.†   (source)
  • The soldiers folded their blankets and jumped down from the boxcar to walk in the sodden fields and breathe the fresh air, as a winter afternoon precociously imitated evening.†   (source)
  • She was a precocious little girl, and read about Alice's adventures in Through the Looking-Glass when she was only four.†   (source)
  • He knelt and held out a finger, and the girl wrapped a hand around it and tugged with precocious strength.†   (source)
  • Paranormal talents are anticipated, but researchers are surprised by 89-58's great breadth of more ordinary genius—which includes the ability to play any piece of piano music after hearing it once—and by his physical precocity, for which no genetic selection has been made.†   (source)
  • She is a precocious ten-year-old.†   (source)
  • Callie, precocious master of the helpful disturbance, knocked her chopsticks to the floor.†   (source)
  • Mary would comment again how talented and skilled Sunny was, how dexterous and precocious, and I never thought to correct her appraisals, even though the performances were in fact maudlin and probably insulting to her, as they certainly were to me.†   (source)
  • They were surprised that Carla could have reared a precocious child, but maybe that was thanks to Denny.†   (source)
  • She turned slowly, jerking sporadically with her arms and legs as if she only heard the music in snatches, and all the time she looked at them with the precocious interest of a child in adult company.†   (source)
  • Adults were impressed with what seemed to them a precocious maturity, and they were a little frightened at it too.†   (source)
  • She was clad in pale blue rayon panties; her precocious eleven-year-old breasts bulged in a bra of the same washed-out shade.†   (source)
  • I mean in children it just seems a little—precocious, can I use that word?†   (source)
  • The more precocious ones had even been talking about the interview expenses various companies paid.†   (source)
  • Children are precocious these days, aren't they?†   (source)
  • Such children were precocious.†   (source)
  • And yet it is habitual to summer nights, and is of the great order of noises, like the noises of the sea and of the blood her precocious grandchild, which you realize you are hearing only when you catch yourself listening.†   (source)
  • The worst of it is that the youngest are the most precocious, geniuses or near-geniuses.†   (source)
  • His early feelings of inadequacy, as well as his precocious mind, were evidenced by the letter he wrote his father at age nine: Dear Sir: I love to receive letters very well; much better than I love to write them.†   (source)
  • He's precocious, brilliant...I met him at Powell's last Sunday.†   (source)
  • ...the most independent, precocious, rebellious teens are hardly likely to be the most susceptible to rational health advice.   (source)
    precocious = behaving in a manner considered more appropriate for someone who is older
  • precocious flowers appear before the leaves as in some species of magnolias
  • She wept with pride at his precocious fluency.†   (source)
  • It was amusing and amazingly precocious.†   (source)
  • Educated at Durmstrang, a school famous even then for its unfortunate tolerance of the Dark Arts, Grindelwald showed himself quite as precociously brilliant as Dumbledore.†   (source)
  • They are more sexually precocious; they have a greater "need" for sex, and greater attraction to the opposite sex.†   (source)
  • If you bundle all of these extroverts' traits together — defiance, sexual precocity, honesty, impulsiveness, indifference to the opinion of others, sensation seeking — you come up with an almost perfect definition of the kind of person many adolescents are drawn to.†   (source)
  • The very same character traits of rebelliousness and impulsivity and risk-taking and indifference to the opinion of others and precocity that made them so compelling to their adolescent peers also make it almost inevitable that they would also be drawn to the ultimate expression of adolescent rebellion, risk-taking, impulsivity, indifference to others, and precocity: the cigarette.†   (source)
  • Thanks to Madame Lafayette, they were seated in a gallery overlooking the choir, "as good a place as any in the church," thought John Quincy, who in a long description of the spectacle in his diary demonstrated that besides being precociously erudite, he had learned, as his father urged, to observe the world around him and was well started on becoming an accomplished writer.†   (source)
  • Entrusted to assistant trainer James Fitzsimmons, Jr., while Sunny Jim manned the helm on the more precocious horses, Seabiscuit began a regimen of incredibly rigorous campaigning.†   (source)
  • The main purpose of the five tests, one gathered, was to isolate and study, if possible, the source of Zooey's precocious wit and fancy.†   (source)
  • There are ideological anarchists, poor people with no political affiliation, and high-school boys expelled for precocious skirt chasing.†   (source)
  • In the poems with long lines, his ambition did not extend beyond the town of Arzamas; he wanted to keep up with the grownups, impress his uncle with mythologism, bombast, faked epicureanism and sophistication, and affected a precocious worldly wisdom.†   (source)
  • He was not precocious; but won prizes now and then, yet failed to win a scholarship at Eton.†   (source)
  • The infancies abound in anecdotes of precocious strength, cleverness, and wisdom.†   (source)
  • He was tolerant; not critical; not precocious; biding his time, and serenely taking his place.†   (source)
  • It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.†   (source)
  • It seemed likely that nothing but the fact of being three celibate Englishmen in a foreign capital could have brought us together, and I had already reached the conclusion that the slight touch of priggishness which I remembered in Wyland Tertius had not diminished with years and an M.V.O. Rutherford I liked more; he had ripened well out of the skinny, precocious infant whom I had once alternately bullied and patronized.†   (source)
  • The play was a biblical one, founded on the story of Saul and Jonathan, and he whispered to Gant from scene to scene the trend of coming events—a precocity which pleased his father mightily, and to which he referred for months.†   (source)
  • As he was not in the least precocious, he read whatever was written up for our edification without any comment, and thought with that magnificent equanimity (Latin words come naturally) that was to preserve him from so many meannesses and humiliations, that Lucy's flaxen pigtails and pink cheeks were the height of female beauty.†   (source)
  • It was sad the way they were still babies of four and five years of age but so precocious about taking care of themselves.†   (source)
  • (that aged and ancient and timeless absence of youth which consisted of a Cassandra-like listening beyond closed doors, of lurking in dim halls filled with that presbyterian effluvium of lugubrious and vindictive anticipation while she waited for the infancy and childhood with which nature had confounded and betrayed her to overtake the precocity of convinced disapprobation regarding any and every thing which could penetrate the walls of that house through the agency of any man, particularly her father, which the aunt seems to have invested her with at birth along with the swaddling clothes) was passed.†   (source)
  • Mr. Stryver laughed till he shook his precocious paunch.†   (source)
  • But she had the dismal precocity of poverty.†   (source)
  • He stands precociously possessed of centuries of owlish wisdom.†   (source)
  • Precocity "What do you think the doctor will say to him?"†   (source)
  • When quite a child, the little Vampa displayed a most extraordinary precocity.†   (source)
  • The generation who follow us are very precocious.†   (source)
  • "How he DU dam and swear," the servants would cry, delighted at his precocity.†   (source)
  • At the moment when, ordinarily, there was still an hour to be lived through before meal-time sounded, we would all know that in a few seconds we should see the endives make their precocious appearance, followed by the special favour of an omelette, an unmerited steak.†   (source)
  • She was a fearless and familiar little thing, who asked disconcerting questions, made precocious comments, and possessed outlandish arts, such as dancing a Spanish shawl dance and singing Neapolitan love-songs to a guitar.†   (source)
  • Unaware of the practical implications of these events on his life, or perhaps regarding them with childish indifference while trusting that the world would take care of him one way or the other, he betrayed a similarly childish reserve and businesslike attentiveness when viewing coffins, which on this third occasion took on nuances of precociousness, both in his emotional reaction and the look of knowledgeable experience on his face—it being unnecessary likewise to describe his natural reaction of being caught up in the frequent tearful outbursts of others.†   (source)
  • Carol was shuddering with the vicarious shame which sensitive people feel when they listen to an "elocutionist" being humorous, or to a precocious child publicly doing badly what no child should do at all.†   (source)
  • His brain was precocious.†   (source)
  • Accompanied by her sister Bo, a precocious girl of sixteen, Helen had left St. Joseph with a heart saddened by farewells to loved ones at home, yet full of thrilling and vivid anticipations of the strange life in the Far West.†   (source)
  • It was as if his precocity of crookedness (and every vulgar villain is precocious) had for once deceived him, and the man he had sought to entrap as a simpleton had, through his very simplicity, ignominiously baffled him.†   (source)
  • It was extraordinary how my absolute conviction of his secret precocity (or whatever I might call the poison of an influence that I dared but half to phrase) made him, in spite of the faint breath of his inward trouble, appear as accessible as an older person—imposed him almost as an intellectual equal.†   (source)
  • Rosemary knew from Brady that he was a musician who after a brilliant and precocious start had composed nothing for seven years.†   (source)
  • It was as if his precocity of crookedness (and every vulgar villain is precocious) had for once deceived him, and the man he had sought to entrap as a simpleton had, through his very simplicity, ignominiously baffled him.†   (source)
  • Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would sound two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour which I had not heard strike; something which had taken place had not taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest slumber, had stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence.†   (source)
  • As I was even more when, on one of my walks, as I stepped out briskly on account of the weather, which, after several days of a precocious spring, had relapsed into winter (like the weather that we had invariably found awaiting us at Combray, in Holy Week),—seeing upon the boulevards that the chestnut-trees, though plunged in a glacial atmosphere that soaked through them like a stream of water, were none the less beginning, punctual guests, arrayed already for the party, an†   (source)
  • You precocious chick!†   (source)
  • Made up with curls, wreaths, wings, white bismuth, and carmine, this hopeful young person soared into so pleasing a Cupid as to constitute the chief delight of the maternal part of the spectators; but in private, where his characteristics were a precocious cutaway coat and an extremely gruff voice, he became of the Turf, turfy.†   (source)
  • You, who sent me to a den where sordid cruelty, worthy of yourself, runs wanton, and youthful misery stalks precocious; where the lightness of childhood shrinks into the heaviness of age, and its every promise blights, and withers as it grows.†   (source)
  • To the usual precocity of the girl, she added that early experience of struggle, of conflict between the inward impulse and outward fact, which is the lot of every imaginative and passionate nature; and the years since she hammered the nails into her wooden Fetish among the worm-eaten shelves of the attic had been filled with so eager a life in the triple world of Reality, Books, and Waking Dreams, that Maggie was strangely old for her years in everything except in her entire want of that prudence and self-command which were the qualities that made Tom manly in the midst of his intellectual boyishness.†   (source)
  • I never can quite understand whether my precocious self-dependence confused Mrs. Micawber in reference to my age, or whether she was so full of the subject that she would have talked about it to the very twins if there had been nobody else to communicate with, but this was the strain in which she began, and she went on accordingly all the time I knew her.†   (source)
  • An act of so much precipitancy and presumption would seal the downfall of precocious intellect forever.†   (source)
  • Confronting him, in the room in which he sat, was a boy's portrait, which anybody seeing him would have identified as Master Christopher Casby, aged ten: though disguised with a haymaking rake, for which he had had, at any time, as much taste or use as for a diving-bell; and sitting (on one of his own legs) upon a bank of violets, moved to precocious contemplation by the spire of a village church.†   (source)
  • But now the idea came strongly into Hester's mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable precocity and acuteness, might already have approached the age when she could have been made a friend, and intrusted with as much of her mother's sorrows as could be imparted, without irreverence either to the parent or the child.†   (source)
  • They are not callow like the young of most birds, but more perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens.†   (source)
  • But since their talent for music has brought them precociously into public notice, I must beg for your kind and indulgent patronage and—leave to take them back to the swamp.'†   (source)
  • Therefore, you would scarcely be interested in Kim's experiences as a St Xavier's boy among two or three hundred precocious youths, most of whom had never seen the sea.†   (source)
  • Precocious marriages are rare.†   (source)
  • I was a precocious actress in her eyes; she sincerely looked on me as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity.†   (source)
  • Such a precocious little girl, with such a dowdy bonnet on (that, too, of a gauzy texture), who brought her sandalled shoes in an old threadbare velvet reticule.†   (source)
  • As it is neither possible nor desirable to keep a young woman in perpetual or complete ignorance, they hasten to give her a precocious knowledge on all subjects.†   (source)
  • — unjust!" said my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus into precocious though transitory power: and Resolve, equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression — as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die.†   (source)
  • I flatter myself I'm a 'gentleman growed' as Peggotty said of David, and when you see Amy, you'll find her rather a precocious infant," said Laurie, looking amused at her maternal air.†   (source)
  • He also possessed a philosophic bent, to the great delight of his grandfather, who used to hold Socratic conversations with him, in which the precocious pupil occasionally posed his teacher, to the undisguised satisfaction of the womenfolk.†   (source)
  • Like young Washington, Mr. Bhaer 'couldn't tell a lie', so he gave the somewhat vague reply that he believed they did sometimes, in a tone that made Mr. March put down his clothesbrush, glance at Jo's retiring face, and then sink into his chair, looking as if the 'precocious chick' had put an idea into his head that was both sweet and sour.†   (source)
  • A fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat of Mendes gave precocious signs of infantile debauchery, recalling the cities of the plain, with a dissolute granddam.†   (source)
  • BLOOM: I was precocious.†   (source)
  • That young figure of then is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clanbrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on him bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother's thought.†   (source)
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