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svelte

used in a sentence
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Definition showing a high degree of refinement and the assurance that comes from wide social experience;
or: moving and bending with ease;
or: being of delicate or slender build
  • Randy knocked and Missouri, looking almost svelte in a newly acquired waistline, opened the door.
    Pat Frank  --  Alas, Babylon
  • "Can you quiet down, just a little bit!" exhorts a svelte, smartly dressed female school board member from the lectern.
    Ron Suskind  --  A Hope in the Unseen
  • You look like a svelte little shoplifter who just slipped a basketball under her shirt.
    John Grogan  --  Marley & Me
  • Prchal, a svelte woman with blond hair and golden skin, was born and trained in go STEVE LOPEZ Czechoslovakia.
    Steve Lopez  --  The Soloist
  • That may be true, but I'm not young and svelte like you are.
    Nicholas Sparks  --  Message in a Bottle
  • He married a Seattle woman of Illini stock, corn blond, svelte, and somber eyed.
    David Guterson  --  Snow Falling on Cedars
  • Outside, the skyline has changed: the Park Plaza is no longer the tallest building around, but a squat leftover, dwarfed by the svelte glassy towers that rise around it.
    Margaret Atwood  --  Cat's Eye
  • Moving slowly, creakily, with an old person's forward-leaning quality, he pushed open a door into a crowded kitchen with a ceiling skylight and a curvaceous old stove: tomato red, with svelte lines like a 1950s spaceship.
    Donna Tartt  --  The Goldfinch
  • A good half of the station crowd was already staring at them, torn between horrified pity and riotous mirth, and as Phyllis, with her svelte jaw dropping, approached, the pair bent over and emitted a college cheer in loud, far-carrying voices, thoughtfully adding the name "Phyllis" to the end.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald  --  This Side of Paradise
  • For the first year, I ate like more of a pig than I am just to show her I wouldn't get svelte and handsome and popular so she'd have to hate me, but as workouts increased in length and intensity, my eating barrage couldn't stand up to my changing metabolism and I began to get occasional glimpses of my feet.
    Chris Crutcher  --  Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes
  • He could picture, as he walked, the kind of underclothing they wore against their svelte feminine parts, filmy, smooth, clinging garments of deepest black or of opalescent pastel radiance with flowering lace borders fragrant with the tantalizing fumes of pampered flesh and scented bath salts rising in a germinating cloud from their blue-white breasts.
    Joseph Heller  --  Catch-22
  • But when I did know it I was still willing to stay that way so you wouldn't think I'd get all svelte and leave.
    Chris Crutcher  --  Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes
  • Svelte with fine-boned features.
    Jenny Han  --  To All the Boys I've Loved Before
  • The corpulent could swathe themselves in rich brocades, the svelte could come as slave girls or Persian dancers and show off everything but the kitchen sink.
    Margaret Atwood  --  The Blind Assassin
  • Uncle Nematollah's next shortcut to svelteness consisted of a specially constructed exercise outfit, advertised during The Newlywed Game, that promised to help sweat away those pesky pounds.
    Dumas Firoozeh  --  Funny in Farsi
(Editor's note:  The suffix "-ness" converts an adjective to a noun that means the quality of. This is the same pattern you see in words like darkness, kindness, and coolness.)

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