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vocabulary
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stilted
in a sentence


show 10 more examples with any meaning
  • My teacher said I had a knack for writing but that my language was oddly formal and stilted.†   (source)
  • What followed was a strange and stilted conversation.†   (source)
  • Although the tone of the journal, written in the third person in a stilted, self-consciousness voice, often veers toward melodrama, the available evidence indicates that McCandless did not misrepresent the facts; telling the truth was a credo he took seriously.†   (source)
  • He and Ida had a long, though stilted, acquaintance.†   (source)
  • Our conversations were now stilted and reserved, as if we were both afraid of revealing some key piece of information the other might be able to use.†   (source)
  • Conversation was stilted.†   (source)
  • I descend the stairs to stilted applause, more focused on not tripping.†   (source)
  • I had to read several of the letters he'd received first to pick up the stilted formal style of the day.†   (source)
  • "The normal cells which make up our bodies are tiny objects, five thousand of which would fit on the head of a pin," he said, his voice a bit too loud and stilted.†   (source)
  • Yet despite Francie and Em and our stilted pleasantries in the kitchen, Kitsey's apartment was one of the few places I felt truly safe in New York.†   (source)
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show 61 more examples with any meaning
  • Her legs stilted with fear, she continued down.†   (source)
  • And this time she plows forward, reckless, fast, like a motorized car going through snowdrifts, spinning, peeling out, traveling in circles, going nowhere, her words nearly indecipherable as she flies through the stilted speech in that high-pitched, nervous voice.†   (source)
  • A hooded figure stood in the doorway and for a second the Consul thought it was Het Masteen, but then he realized that this man was much shorter, his voice not accented with the stilted Templar consonants.†   (source)
  • Conversation was stilted.†   (source)
  • Why was I speaking in this stilted fashion?†   (source)
  • Or if we did manage to keep up a conversation, the longer we went on, the more stilted and guarded it became.†   (source)
  • Conversations became stilted, and we began to argue for the first time.†   (source)
  • Tall as a dead tree in winter all skull, all scarecrow-stilted bones, the thin man, the Skeleton, Mr Skull played his xylophone shadow upon hidden things, cold paper rubbish, warm flinching boys, below.†   (source)
  • She slips away, and I grit my teeth as Grandfather coerces me into a stilted discussion with the governor.†   (source)
  • Formal, a little stilted, it was from Rosemarie, and folded in it were two photographs of my grandmother.†   (source)
  • More than anything, he wanted to free her from her torments, but he could not bring himself to ignore Arya's advice, so he stayed where he was and fidgeted and bit his bruised nails and engaged in short, stilted conversations with Saphira.†   (source)
  • I hate awkwardness and those weird stilted conversations and feeling like I can't go somewhere because you're there, or whatever.†   (source)
  • And the prose in the memoranda of other officers was always turgid, stilted, or ambiguous.†   (source)
  • Now we were in her room, where she was changing out of her soccer uniform into regular clothes, while Fang made lame, stilted conversation with Dr. Martinez in the living room.†   (source)
  • Stilted.†   (source)
  • In the stilted phrasing of a young captain from Pennsylvania, Alexander Graydon, "The appearance of things was not much calculated to excite sanguine expectations in the mind of the sober observer."†   (source)
  • He tottered on comical, stilted legs to the sheltering side of the mare, peeping around her rear end at Joe.†   (source)
  • Felicia remembers her son's gangly body, his first stilted dancing steps, and begins to cry.†   (source)
  • The words were awkward, stilted because of her embarrassment, but they seemed sincere.†   (source)
  • I don't doubt that's true, but wouldn't you say that the first few paragraphs are a little … stilted?†   (source)
  • We listen to the earnest attempts of their talk, the bits of their stilted English.†   (source)
  • They descended to the main deck, moving in a strange and stilted gait because they were not used to walking with their boots off.†   (source)
  • The conversation was slow and stilted at first, but before long she was telling me how tormented she'd been, how the drugs seemed to be the only thing that gave her any relief, if only for a short time.†   (source)
  • Although there was no real rapport between us, the stilted conversation which followed revealed that these people formed a part of Ootek's band which had spent the summer farther east and had only just returned to the home camps, where they had been told of the presence of a strange white man at Mike's cabin.†   (source)
  • In each case, the conversation had been stilted; they had tiptoed through the talk as though through the bedroom of a fitfully sleeping child.†   (source)
  • We drove through the darkened streets to his home, talking in a strangely stilted manner.†   (source)
  • In any case, I also noticed that she was becoming a little incoherent; her voice had an intonation that was both stilted and thick, and her lips moved in an odd artificial way as if they had been numbed by Novocaine.†   (source)
  • She set foot in the road then, walking stilted in Miss Myra's shoes and carrying Miss Theo's shoes tied together around her neck, her train in the road behind her.†   (source)
  • Though in print the speech would seem a bit stilted, it was delivered with great force and effect.†   (source)
  • Our dinner conversations, for instance, were stilted by routine.†   (source)
  • Dinner with his mom had been a stilted affair.†   (source)
  • Adam and I had never been the kind of couple to talk about the future, about where our relationship was going, but with things suddenly so unclear, we avoided talking about anything that was happening more than a few weeks away, and this made our conversations as stilted and awkward as they'd been in those early weeks together before we'd found our groove.†   (source)
  • He wondered if they should have pushed on until they came to water for the dogs, but after so many hours of stilted, cautious movement in the dark, a crashing weariness had come over him.†   (source)
  • Every Friday, they went on a date—another recommendation of the couples counselor—and while it still felt stilted at times, both of them knew it was important.†   (source)
  • We ran through smogged-out hollows past houses stilted over raw defiles and we ran into wooded areas that had the look of tinder, a dry white dusty stillness, a sense of combustible edge, but maybe not—I might have been devising my own newsreel. everything quality that creeps into innocuous remarks and becomes the vanguard of estranged feeling.†   (source)
  • The conversation was stilted, almost uncomfortable at first, because Richard didn't volunteer much more than was asked directly.†   (source)
  • But my mom and I weren't normal, so this—stilted and vague as it might be—was the closest we'd come to each other in ages.†   (source)
  • Their conversations were filled with their usual banter but it was somehow stilted at the same time, for he knew she wanted him to forgive himself.†   (source)
  • Though these people spoke in the stilted self-conscious idiom of the court, with each word intended to be a pearl for the jeweler-emperor, at one or two in the morning, when the music had stopped and the gatherings had broken up, Alessandro heard the real concert of empire-men who spoke like women and women who spoke like men, the click of latches, sighs, grunts, farts, shrieks, sobbing, the sound of small whips, arguments so fierce that they might have been between black jaguars in…†   (source)
  • He was reciting a stilted, oddly worded phrase in an attempt to keep them out of his consciousness; Eragon assumed it was a scrap of scripture from the Book of Tosk.†   (source)
  • Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the quick banter between us gave way to more stilted conversation, punctuated by longer pauses.†   (source)
  • While they still dropped by occasionally for a beer after the girls had gone to bed, their conversations were stilted.†   (source)
  • Nathan's stilted, didactic enunciation might have been, under different circumstances, vaguely comical—a burlesque of itself—but now was edged with such real threat, rage and obdurate conviction that I could not help but give a small shiver and feel at my back the approach, like the thudding of gallows-bound footsteps, of some awful and unnamed doom.†   (source)
  • "You have a sweetheart or a brother, I presume?" she asked in her stilted readerish way.†   (source)
  • A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down river.†   (source)
  • I'm here, father,' the man seemed to take a long breath for his surprising stilted statement, 'on an errand of mercy.†   (source)
  • From time to time, a stilted Cadillac gasped cylindrically up the hill past Dixieland: Eugene said a spell, as it faltered, for its success—Jim Sawyer, a young blood, came for Miss Cutler, the Pittsburgh beauty: he opened a door behind in the fat red belly.†   (source)
  • He was too stilted, too selfopinionated.†   (source)
  • The letters were formal and a little stilted.†   (source)
  • That's just the stilted sort of thing I've tried to avoid.†   (source)
  • Long, high-worded, stilted letters the poor boy wrote and rewrote and copied.†   (source)
  • Without understanding when or how, without a tangible change in the stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was conscious of another time and place.†   (source)
  • He applied to a Chicago teachers' agency, and received a stilted answer promising to look about and inquiring whether he would care to take the position of teacher of physics and chemistry in a suburban high school.†   (source)
  • She wrote until a late hour, and at last composed a letter she knew did not ring true, so stilted and restrained was it in all passages save those concerning news of Glenn's comrade and of her own friends.†   (source)
  • Well, and the little pussycat can meow some very pretty French and a little stilted High German—but write?†   (source)
  • We are speaking of human realities—and thus of matters 'humane,' in the sense of freedom and genius, if you will forgive me the somewhat stilted phraseology.†   (source)
  • Then he wondered whether what she said had any meaning for her: perhaps she knew no other way to express her genuine feelings than the stilted language of The Family Herald.†   (source)
  • Only the Henty books and the Elsie books and the latest optimisms by moral female novelists and virile clergymen were in general demand, and the board themselves were interested only in old, stilted volumes.†   (source)
  • He is not easily astonished, he is still less easily terrified, he makes songs on superstitions, he takes the wind out of exaggerations, he twits mysteries, he thrusts out his tongue at ghosts, he takes the poetry out of stilted things, he introduces caricature into epic extravaganzas.†   (source)
  • And this was the starting-point of a speculative theory, in his mind, that the late marquis had been a very amiable foreigner, with an inclination to take life easily and a sense that it was difficult for the husband of the stilted little lady by the fire to do so.†   (source)
  • His appearance, — I forget what description you gave of his appearance; — a sort of raw curate, half strangled with his white neckcloth, and stilted up on his thick-soled high-lows, eh?†   (source)
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