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virulent
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  • investigating the mechanism of the attenuation of virulence of microorganisms.   (source)
    virulence = very bad -- perhaps very contagious
  • Acid is eating into the pages, the virulent cover fading like the feathers of a stuffed tropical bird.†   (source)
  • It had been a particularly virulent bacterial strain.†   (source)
  • He is still murmuring, trying to talk himself off some innermost ledge, and she can feel fear pumping off him, virulent, toxic; it reminds her of fumes billowing off the vats of formalin in the Department of Zoology.†   (source)
  • I need to know how to defend myself from virulent antiroyalists like my ex"best friend Lilly.†   (source)
  • But his family labored under a plainness so virulent that the dullness of his wife and children outshone even their proneness to illness, which was remarkable.†   (source)
  • In the decades before the development of the cure, the disease had become so virulent and widespread it was extraordinarily rare for a person to reach adulthood without having contracted a significant case of amor deliria nervosa (please see "Statistics, Pre—Border Era" )...Many historians have argued that pre-cure society was itself a reflection of the disease, characterized by fracture, chaos, and instability....Almost half of all marriages ended in dissolution ....Incidence of drug use skyrocketed, as did alcohol-related deaths.†   (source)
  • The problem is not only that a single bacterium has become more virulent.†   (source)
  • I drew my lips back and showed him my virulent teeth.†   (source)
  • It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.†   (source)
  • Now the atmosphere was sleepier, the message not quite as virulent: Hey, if you die in here, that's cool.†   (source)
  • Besides, he would say, the virulent opposition of President Simon Bolivar was no laughing matter.†   (source)
  • It said that his stool sample had tested positive for Escherichia coli 0157:H7, a virulent and potentially lethal foodborne pathogen.†   (source)
  • The glowing spirits flashed with angry virulence as they whirled around the man, forming an impenetrable wall.†   (source)
  • The two classrooms had been overrun with a virulent toxic killer mold that crawled over textbooks, walls, and furniture and made many people sick.†   (source)
  • Brent had been gone for eight months now, the victim of a virulent strain of testicular cancer.†   (source)
  • That he had allowed "no party virulence or personal reflections" to escape him was also a matter of pride and consolation.†   (source)
  • Svensson's objective was simple: to develop a highly virulent and stable airborne virus with a three— to six-week incubation period that responded immediately to an antivirus he alone controlled.†   (source)
  • Later, a virulent case of acne deepened his pain at being observed.†   (source)
  • The bulk of that oil wealth pouring in from the Gulf is aimed at Pakistan's most virulent incubator of religious extremism—Wahhabi madrassas.†   (source)
  • A terrible anger consumes me, virulent as a sickness.†   (source)
  • A voice rang out virulent and bitter behind me.†   (source)
  • They referred to Urgutha Forka, a vicious demon that had ravaged the planet with a particularly virulent plague in the ancient times when Drizzt's ancestors had walked on the surface.†   (source)
  • Frank's chronic pericarditis, arising from the rheumatoid arthritis, led to a virulent infection of the pericardium, which ultimately led to heart failure.†   (source)
  • Something attacked his nervous system like a virulent toxin.†   (source)
  • When decency, if not my dignity, had been restored, I rounded on those wolves with a virulence which surprised even me.†   (source)
  • Cancer of that kind must be ghastly, those monstrous metastasizing cells so close to the brain—hideous little microscopic boll weevils invading cheek, sinuses, eye socket, jaw, filling the mouth with its fulminating virulence until the tongue, engulfed, rotted and fell dumb.†   (source)
  • The virus of Potomac Fever, which rages everywhere in Washington, breeds nowhere in more virulent form than on the Senate floor.†   (source)
  • The lights were extinguished here too, but the luminescent paintings, glowing under ultra-violet spotlights, filled the gallery with a virulent glow.†   (source)
  • He was virulently anti-American.   (source)
    virulently = in a harsh and hateful manner
  • Take up a harmless bacteria—such as the organism that causes pimples, or sore throats—-and bring it back in a new form, virulent and unexpected.   (source)
    virulent = very bad
  • A virulent form of the infectious disease spread through the country.
  • The increasingly virulent tone of the campaign had all but the most hateful and partisan tuning ignoring the discussion.
  • 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)
  • His chance was poor; though I had no more animosity towards him than a virulent disease has against the victim it lays low.   (source)
  • These two clauses have been the source of much virulent invective and petulant declamation against the proposed Constitution.   (source)
  • Yet on the day when I went out there to stay that summer, it was as though that casual pause at my door had left some seed, some minute virulence in this cellar earth of mine...   (source)
    virulence = bad disease; or something harmful
  • But the virulence hadn't been tested; Biosyn didn't know whether the virus could still cause rabies or not.†   (source)
    virulence = degree to which it causes harm
  • This appears to be a supervirulent splice.†   (source)
  • John and Lou had picked up some kind of virulent intestinal ailment from the unclean surroundings.†   (source)
  • The new strains were virulent, and produced bizarre deaths, often by brain abscess.†   (source)
  • Likely, it was pneumonia, made more virulent by her lack of movement on the couch.†   (source)
  • She knew her sister's character, the haughtiness of her spirit, and she was frightened by the virulence of her anger.†   (source)
  • He was virulently anti-American.†   (source)
  • I wondered if the creatures of the dark shunned him, knowing instinctively the parched, crackling thing there was virulent, or whether they swarmed about him in the reeking water, picking his ancient dried flesh from the bones.†   (source)
  • "Poppa, these young men want to talk to 'Jerrold' about some fire," the son said; he spoke laconically and with a more virulent Boston accent than his father's.†   (source)
  • All over Berlin, such signs were reappearing, and the Nazis' virulently anti-Semitic Der Sturmer, nowhere to be seen during the Games, was back on newsstands.†   (source)
  • It's almost guaranteed that now I'm going to have to start acting like a princess"I mean, really acting like one"but Granmère hasn't even gotten to all the really important stuff yet, the stuff like how to argue knowledgeably with virulent antiroyalists like Lilly.†   (source)
  • Amaranta felt humiliated and told Pietro Crespi with a virulent anger that she was prepared to stop her sister's wedding even if her own dead body had to lie across the door.†   (source)
  • It was widely known, Rifkin pointed out, that HeLa was "an extraordinarily virulent and infectious line of cells" that could contaminate other cultures.†   (source)
  • But being physically infected with a virulent strain of the Asherah virus makes you a whole lot more susceptible.†   (source)
  • Anxious for solitude, bitten by a virulent rancor against the world, one night he left his bed as usual, but he did not go to Pilar Ternera's house, but to mingle is the tumult of the fair.†   (source)
  • Because of the medal, because the story of Owen's heroism was in all the New Hampshire newspapers, that oaf—the Rev. Dudley Wiggin—wanted Owen to have an Episcopalian service; Rector Wiggin, who was a virulent supporter of the Vietnam War, wanted to perform Owen's funeral in Christ Church.†   (source)
  • And then as soon as Sennacherib's soldiers came on the scene, they all dropped dead of what can only be understood as an extremely virulent disease, to which the people of Jerusalem were apparently immune.†   (source)
  • What scientists still haven't figured out is why this produced such monstrously virulent cells both in and out of Henrietta's body, especially since cervical cancer cells are some of the hardest of all cells to culture.†   (source)
  • But she flashed at me a virulency I'd never seen in her face, and as I stood there paralyzed, she gashed his throat, and he let out a sharp, choking cry.†   (source)
  • You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a threering binder-its DNA-xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane.†   (source)
  • He said that Owen Meany was "so virulently antireligious" that he had "desecrated the statue of a saint at a Roman Catholic school"; that he had launched a "deeply anti-Catholic campaign" on the Gravesend campus, under the demand of not wanting a fish-only menu in the school dining hall on Fridays; and that there were "charges against him for being anti-Semitic, too."†   (source)
  • Seeing him work that way, as she had never dreamed him capable of doing, Fernanda thought that his stubbornness was diligence, his greed abnegation, and his thick-headedness perseverance, and her insides tightened with remorse over the virulence with which she had attacked his idleness.†   (source)
  • That a virus, once released into Sumer, would spread rapidly and virulently, until it had infected everyone.†   (source)
  • It was a shock for Deo to realize the depth of the divisions in his country, a shock to think how virulently people must have spat out the term "Tutsi" around cooking fires in some neighbors' huts in Butanza during the years of his childhood.†   (source)
  • News about a highly virulent outbreak of a mutated viral vaccine, dubbed the Raison Strain, on a small island south of Java had hit the wires yesterday morning, and the wires were burning hot.†   (source)
  • Farmer knew that a lot of his audience didn't believe one should treat mdr in an impoverished locale: treatment was too expensive and difficult in such a setting, and treating it was probably unnecessary, because mdr wasn't as contagious or virulent as regular tb and would likely die out in the face of a good dots program.†   (source)
  • The invasion also provided the extremists an ideal basis for a well-orchestrated campaign of virulent anti-Tutsi propaganda.†   (source)
  • With so much money and effort going into CBW, one might think that new and more virulent weapons would be continuously perfected.†   (source)
  • The consequence of this is the potential introduction of virulent organisms into the present terrestrial ecologic framework.†   (source)
  • It was known, for instance, that syphilis had been a virulent disease four hundred years before, producing huge festering sores all over the body, often killing in weeks.†   (source)
  • Make sure it's still virulent.†   (source)
  • One occasion, I looked over to find Jasper and Richard sitting nose to nose, glaring virulently at each other, saying nothing, pinching each other's arms.†   (source)
  • Piedmont had told me that his first job as a boss man in an upstate mill had imparted to Aim a virulent distaste for labor problems.†   (source)
  • He shrank away from it as though it were a manifestation of virulent prophecies scribbled like obscene graffiti on the walls of holy places.†   (source)
  • Wasn't it possible, he asked Sophie once—and, he added, speaking as a cellular biologist—that on the level of human behavior the Nazi phenomenon was analogous to a huge and crucial colony of cells going morally berserk, creating the same kind of danger to the body of humanity as does a virulently malignant tumor in a single human body?†   (source)
  • Ted Stone recommended poisons virulent enough to kill a herd of mastodons and it seemed to clear out most of the rat population.†   (source)
  • How is this virulence of kitsch, this irresistible attractiveness, to be explained?†   (source)
  • Gant's sickness had returned on him with increased virulence.†   (source)
  • Disillusion had come so often that it had awakened in him a strain of bitter suspicion, an occasional mockery, virulent, coarse, cruel, and subtle, which was all the more scalding because of his own pain.†   (source)
  • Among the aerial clouds over his head were visable the virulent pouring showers and sparks of ruddy fire which the seething of his savage wrath caused to mount up above him.†   (source)
  • Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.†   (source)
  • But it seemed that plague had settled in for good at its most virulent, and it took its daily toll of deaths with the punctual zeal of a good civil servant.†   (source)
  • Yet never before had the sky been so blue; day after day its icy radiance flooded the town with a brilliant light, and in frost-cleansed air the epidemic seemed to lose its virulence, and in each of three consecutive weeks a big drop in the death-roll was announced.†   (source)
  • Gottlieb, the placidly virulent hater of religious rites, had a religious-seeming custom.†   (source)
  • The ill-will of Miss Knag had lost nothing of its virulence in the interval.†   (source)
  • what a virulent attack!" replied the prince, not in the least disconcerted by this reception.†   (source)
  • She accused him of every mean fault; she said he was stingy, she said he was dull, she said he was vain, selfish; she cast virulent ridicule on everything upon which he was most sensitive.†   (source)
  • Despite the heavy, motionless silence of the hawthorns, these gusts of fragrance came to me like the murmuring of an intense vitality, with which the whole altar was quivering like a roadside hedge explored by living antennae, of which I was reminded by seeing some stamens, almost red in colour, which seemed to have kept the springtime virulence, the irritant power of stinging insects now transmuted into flowers.†   (source)
  • Furthermore, this idea of seeing her again came back to him adorned with a novelty, a seductiveness, armed with a virulence, all of which long habit had enfeebled, but which had acquired new vigour during this privation, not of three days but of a fortnight (for a period of abstinence may be calculated, by anticipation, as having lasted already until the final date assigned to it), and had converted what had been, until then, a pleasure in store, which could easily be sacrificed, into an unlooked-for happiness which he was powerless to resist.†   (source)
  • He was off on a new enthusiasm, the most virulent of his whole life: he was organizing the League of Cultural Agencies.†   (source)
  • With him Martin watched the heroes of yellow fever, Reed, Agramonte, Carroll, and Lazear; with him he landed in a Mexican port stilled with the plague and famished beneath the virulent sun; with him rode up the mountain trails to a hill town rotted with typhus; with him, in crawling August, when babies were parched skeletons, fought an ice trust beneath the gilt and blunted sword of the law.†   (source)
  • The results obtained from this quantitative study permit the statement that the percentage of inactivation, as measured by determining the units of bacteriophage remaining after irradiation by gamma and beta rays of a suspension of fixed virulence, is a function of the two variables, nillicuries and hours.†   (source)
  • Mr Pancks might, or might not, have caught the illness himself from a subject of this class; but in this category he appeared before Clennam, and the infection he threw off was all the more virulent.†   (source)
  • He said, turning first toward Mr. Thesiger, and then looking at Mr. Hawley— "I protest before you, sir, as a Christian minister, against the sanction of proceedings towards me which are dictated by virulent hatred.†   (source)
  • To augment their misery, a contagious disorder of a dangerous nature spread through the land; and, rendered more virulent by the uncleanness, the indifferent food, and the wretched lodging of the lower classes, swept off many whose fate the survivors were tempted to envy, as exempting them from the evils which were to come.†   (source)
  • But Volumnia the fair, being subject to the prevalent complaint of boredom and finding that disorder attacking her spirits with some virulence, ventures at length to repair to the library for change of scene.†   (source)
  • The members of a powerful aristocracy, collected in a capital or a court, have been known to contest with virulence those frivolous privileges which depend on the caprice of fashion or the will of their master.†   (source)
  • Nothing can be more virulent than the hatred which exists between the Americans of the United States and the English.†   (source)
  • Fortunately, the beasts seemed more bent on stretching their paws, and yawning, and flourishing their tails, than devouring me alive; but they would suffer no resurrection, and I was forced to lie till their malignant masters pleased to deliver me: then, hatless and trembling with wrath, I ordered the miscreants to let me out — on their peril to keep me one minute longer — with several incoherent threats of retaliation that, in their indefinite depth of virulency, smacked of King Lear.†   (source)
  • But, unfortunately, she had likewise to struggle against a bitter emotion of a directly opposite kind: a sentiment of virulence, we mean, towards the idle aristocracy to which it had so recently been her pride to belong.†   (source)
  • One little sip of this antidote would have rendered the most virulent poisons of the Borgias innocuous.†   (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)
  • When the typhus fever had fulfilled its mission of devastation at Lowood, it gradually disappeared from thence; but not till its virulence and the number of its victims had drawn public attention on the school.†   (source)
  • In 1831, when the dispute was raging with the utmost virulence, a private citizen of Massachusetts proposed to all the enemies of the tariff, by means of the public prints, to send delegates to Philadelphia in order to consult together upon the means which were most fitted to promote freedom of trade.†   (source)
  • When the reading of Denisov's virulent reply, which took more than an hour, was over, Rostov said nothing, and he spent the rest of the day in a most dejected state of mind amid Denisov's hospital comrades, who had gathered round him, telling them what he knew and listening to their stories.†   (source)
  • A blessing beyond appreciation would be conferred upon mankind, if the tainted, in whose weakness or wickedness these virulent disorders are bred, could be instantly seized and placed in close confinement (not to say summarily smothered) before the poison is communicable.†   (source)
  • Armfeldt virulently hated Napoleon and was a general full of self-confidence, a quality that always influenced Alexander.†   (source)
  • It is not uncommonly imagined in France that the virulence of the press originates in the uncertain social condition, in the political excitement, and the general sense of consequent evil which prevail in that country; and it is therefore supposed that as soon as society has resumed a certain degree of composure the press will abandon its present vehemence.†   (source)
  • Thirty thousand devils!" the convoy guards began cursing and the French soldiers, with fresh virulence, drove away with their swords the crowd of prisoners who were gazing at the dead man.†   (source)
  • But he could not restrain himself and with the virulence of which only one who loves is capable, evidently suffering himself, he shook his fists at her and screamed: "If only some fool would marry her!"†   (source)
  • Langeron, trying as virulently as possible to sting Weyrother's vanity as author of the military plan, argued that Bonaparte might easily attack instead of being attacked, and so render the whole of this plan perfectly worthless.†   (source)
  • And the lock of hair—that too I had always carried about me in the same pocket-book, which was now searched by Madam with the most ingratiating virulence,—the dear lock—all, every memento was torn from me.†   (source)
  • The vaccine consisted of live rabies virus, genetically modified to be nonvirulent.   (source)
    nonvirulent = not harmful
    standard prefix: The prefix "non-" in nonvirulent means not and reverses the meaning of virulent. This is the same pattern you see in words like nonfat, nonfiction, and nonprofit.
  • At the least, he, will prosecute him at law with the utmost virulence and oppression.   (source)
    virulence = harshness
  • This right-thinker is indistinguishable from the /forward-looker/, whose belief in the continuity and benignity of the evolutionary process takes on the virulence of a religious faith.†   (source)
  • These two clauses have been the source of much virulent invective and petulant declamation against the proposed Constitution.†   (source)
  • No man detests and despises scurrility more than myself; nor hath any man more reason; for none hath ever been treated with more; and what is a very severe fate, I have had some of the abusive writings of those very men fathered upon me, who, in other of their works, have abused me themselves with the utmost virulence.†   (source)
  • —And now, the landlady coming into the room, Mrs Waters fell upon her with the utmost virulence, saying, "She thought herself in a sober inn, and not in a bawdy-house; but that a set of villains had broke into her room, with an intent upon her honour, if not upon her life; and both, she said, were equally dear to her."†   (source)
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