dynamic
toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

visceral
in a sentence
grouped by contextual meaning

visceral as in:  a visceral reaction

show 10 more with this conextual meaning
  • His stories are vivid and visceral.
    visceral = felt strongly (creating a gut-reaction)
  • My opposition was beyond rational, it was visceral.   (source)
    visceral = arising from instinct (felt in the gut)
  • Uncle Jimmy reacts viscerally to the idea that any of the blame for Mom's choices can be laid at Papaw's feet.†   (source)
  • Because of this, there had been a point where she had viscerally hated Josie in a way that even Peter never seemed to, for being cruel enough to leave her son behind.†   (source)
  • The sight of it printed in capital letters on the crinkly page upsets him viscerally.†   (source)
  • She told us she could see the great respect between us, and she was often viscerally moved by our commitment to getting our final time together right.†   (source)
  • You hear stories about ancillaries, and it seems like the most awful thing, the most viscerally appalling thing the Radchaai have done.†   (source)
  • When he first saw them trudging up and down these hills, which they themselves compared to the surface of the moon, even Farmer, with all his firsthand knowledge of Latin American poverty, felt viscerally puzzled.†   (source)
  • And the smell brought him hack so viscerally, to a time when she loved him—or he at least felt like she did—that his gut ached anew.†   (source)
  • During speeches to the Corps, the indisputable power of his own rhetoric would affect him so viscerally that he would dance along a thin, precarious edge of control in constant danger of plunging headlong into much darker and more radical passions.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)
show 3 more with this conextual meaning
  • And I understood exactly why, now, Renata Ledoux might viscerally hate Shay.†   (source)
  • They never spoke of what they'd said to each other, and Lacy had vowed to herself that no matter how frustrating it got, being the parent of a teenage boy, no matter how selfish and self-centered Peter became, she would never again let herself reach a point where she truly, viscerally hated her own son.†   (source)
  • yet viscerally seductive in the manner of Southern women, that taloned species who speak with restrained and self-effacing drawls, fill a room with elegance and vulnerability, move with the grace of wind-tilted cane, and rule their families with a secret pact of steel.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)

visceral as in:  visceral muscles

show 10 more with this conextual meaning
  • Shapes of dried blood in the stubble grass and gray coils of viscera where the slain had been field-dressed and hauled away.   (source)
    viscera = internal organs
  • Now the objects in the sky no longer reminded people of building blocks, but of a giant's dismembered limbs and disemboweled viscera.†   (source)
  • It started pulling out coils of intestines and other viscera.†   (source)
  • Seven men in the platoon had died on that occasion, and Kent had lowered himself into a foxhole and watched a Private Wiesner toss a grenade unsuccessfully toward a pillbox while at the same moment a stream of machine-gun fire caught Wiesner at the waist and forced his viscera out.†   (source)
  • It tried to twist away from the agony, a shower of blood and viscera poured down over Tyrion's face, and the horse fell like an avalanche.†   (source)
  • So skillful was she that it seemed Nacha herself was in Tita's body doing all those things: dry-plucking the birds, removing the viscera, getting them ready for frying.†   (source)
  • Low, throaty female laughter, the kind that seems to vibrate in a fairy ring around the viscera and the genitals.†   (source)
  • This is not always advantageous, as the extremities can stand a more drastic temperature loss than the viscera can.†   (source)
  • On a once living person, rather, for when the blood stopped flying and the body ceased spasming, Sira's limbs relaxed in death, legs opening again in an echo of the obscene display of viscera above.†   (source)
  • They paid cash, no questions asked, and preserved particularly interesting bits of diseased viscera in large clear bottles.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)
show 20 more with this conextual meaning
  • With practiced movements, he drew his old hunting knife, skinned and gutted the rabbits, and then-putting aside the hearts, lungs, kidneys, and livers-buried the viscera so that the scent would not attract scavengers.†   (source)
  • She stayed until Dr. Cuevas rinsed his hands in the sink and dried his tears, while the other one cleaned up the blood and the viscera.†   (source)
  • The offal from the adjoining slaughterhouse was also thrown away there—severed heads, rotting viscera, animal refuse that floated, in sunshine and starshine, in a swamp of blood.†   (source)
  • Enter unannounced, gain his confidence, wait for an unguarded moment, take out the Zumwalt, shoot him three times in the viscera for maximum slowness of agony, put the gun in his hand to suggest a lonely man's suicide, write semi-coherent things on the mirror, leave Stover's car in Treadwell's garage.†   (source)
  • He was fond of suffocated guinea pig baked in its own blood and viscera.†   (source)
  • He wanted so badly to have them back that the wanting tore like eagle's claws at his viscera.†   (source)
  • He moved past the toppled barstool where he had been seated a moment earlier, past the upended table splattered with the viscera of Safia Bourihane, and entered the foyer.†   (source)
  • Something came to her viscera, danced briefly, and went.†   (source)
  • Canned jazz blared through the street with a monstrous high-strutting rhythm that pulled at the viscera.†   (source)
  • Blood and viscera stained the king's silk carpets.†   (source)
  • Holmes did not kill face to face, as Jack the Ripper had done, gorging himself on warmth and viscera, but he did like proximity.†   (source)
  • The wolf poked his shaggy head toward the fire, seemingly curious about the writhing flames, then moved over to the scraps of meat and viscera scattered over the ground where Garzhvog had butchered the buck.†   (source)
  • Drive past the scene several times, park some distance from the scene, go back on foot, locate Mr. Gray under his real name or an alias, shoot him three times in the viscera for maximum pain, clear the weapon of prints, place the weapon in the victim's staticky hand, find a crayon or lipstick tube and scrawl a cryptic suicide note on the full-length mirror, take the victim's supply of Dylar tablets, slip back to the car, proceed to the expressway entrance, head east toward Blacksmith, get off at the old river road, park Stover's car in Old Man Treadwell's garage, shut the garage door, walk home in the rain and the fog.†   (source)
  • With some Angelenos, those two emotions were as inextricably entwined as the viscera of inoperable Siamese twins.†   (source)
  • Drive past the scene several times, approach the motel on foot, swivel my head to look peripherally into rooms, locate Mr. Gray under his real name, enter unannounced, gain his confidence, advance gradually, reduce him to trembling, wait for an unguarded moment, take out the .25-caliber Zumwalt automatic, fire three bullets into his viscera for maximum slowness, depth and intensity of pain, wipe the weapon clear of prints, place the weapon in the victim's hand to suggest the trite and predictable suicide of a motel recluse, smear crude words on the walls in the victim's own blood as evidence of his final cult-related frenzy, take his supply of Dylar, slip back to the car, take th†   (source)
  • OK, Oedipa told herself, stalking around the room, her viscera hollow, waiting on something truly terrible, OK.†   (source)
  • His thick black fingers probed carefully into the viscera of a watch.†   (source)
  • I am well pleased to see their pain change its viscera.†   (source)
  • Reverend as you write yourself, be revengeful for once, and pray with me that he may be visited with such a fit of the stone, as if he had all the fragments of poor Robin in that region of his viscera where the disease holds its seat.†   (source)
  • He meant to be a unit who would make a certain amount of difference towards that spreading change which would one day tell appreciably upon the averages, and in the mean time have the pleasure of making an advantageous difference to the viscera of his own patients.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)
show 10 more examples with any meaning
  • Simulations aren't real; they pose no real threat to me, so logically, I shouldn't be afraid of them, but my reaction is visceral.†   (source)
  • The idea of something for nothing is appealing in some visceral way.†   (source)
  • I felt a visceral flutter of fear.†   (source)
  • Walking through the hallways, seeing the tidy rooms, each with a shiny kitchenette, a desk, an overstuffed couch and bed, Mae had to agree that the appeal was visceral.†   (source)
  • They are visceral revelations about her pre-life.†   (source)
  • The cold water, hitting my sore throat, threw me into goosebumps and into a visceral bodily memory from boyhood: painful desert sunlight, painful afternoon hangover, teeth chattering in the air-conditioned chill.†   (source)
  • But sometimes the memories feel so real, so visceral, so personal, that I confuse them with my own.†   (source)
  • The morning e-mail was a ritual for me, a visceral, if inexact, barometer of the impact that day's column had made.†   (source)
  • It was more visceral.†   (source)
  • If you read a scene in which new life was coming into being, the rain outside would almost inevitably lead you (based on your previous reading) to a process of association in which you thought, or felt (since this really works as much at the visceral as at the intellectual level): rain-life-birth-promise-restoration-fertility-continuity.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)
show 68 more examples with any meaning
  • As Tommy spoke, I had a flashback to my childhood visit to Disneyland, and how I had this visceral urge to grow up and create those kinds of rides.†   (source)
  • Finally, the Walsh plan addressed the football coach's visceral fear of an offense based on the passing game.†   (source)
  • Although you can make yourself dizzy going from vase to faces and back again, you can't undermine your sense of reality in quite such a visceral way as you can with the train.†   (source)
  • Hillary and Tenzing climbed Everest a month before I was conceived, so I didn't share in the collective sense of pride and wonder that swept the world-an event that an older friend says was comparable, in its visceral impact, to the first manned landing on the moon.†   (source)
  • He could still feel the visceral shock of muscle and bone giving ....crunching ....pulping under his hammer.†   (source)
  • He was shaken by a visceral shudder that left his mind blank, and he had to drop the garden tools and lean against the cemetery wall so that the first blow of old age would not knock him down.†   (source)
  • But imagine the visceral jolt, seeing your opponent bleeding in the dust.†   (source)
  • The United States and Germany fought against each other twice in the twentieth century, but the enmity between them has often seemed less visceral than other national rivalries.†   (source)
  • Kutuzov defeated Napoleon precisely because he was not swayed by the ephemeral and superficial values of the court, and made his decisions on a visceral understanding of his men and his people.†   (source)
  • Sitting there, in this strange place, it was like I could feel the house pulling me back to it, a visceral tug on my heart, the same way that, in the early days of the fall, I'd hoped it would do to my mom.†   (source)
  • As The Lancet noted: The neglect of women's issues ...does reflect some level of unconscious bias against women at every level, from the community to high-level decisionmakers.... While we may ignore it, maternal health does involve sex and sexuality; it is bloody and messy; and I think many men (not all, of course) have a visceral antipathy for dealing with it.†   (source)
  • Most of the time, he was able to keep the memory locked away, but every now and then, at odd times, it all came back to him with visceral force.†   (source)
  • The idea of being plunged into sightless darkness in this creepy place filled her with a visceral terror.†   (source)
  • That, she said to herself, is visceral pain.†   (source)
  • The visceral impact of her beauty is more powerful than any word or deed.†   (source)
  • He can't step away from it, can't intellectualize it, because it's still too close, too visceral.†   (source)
  • I understood on a visceral level, as he did not, that they really could end a visit and take all my visiting privileges away.†   (source)
  • Something visceral.†   (source)
  • A heated, visceral shock flares through me at the clarity of her dark gold eyes.†   (source)
  • The next one is a woman with eyes I can tell are bloodshot even though the drawing is black and white, and my reaction is almost visceral.†   (source)
  • Visceral wounds are reopened too easily with their presence.†   (source)
  • It was an immediate, visceral reaction that was paralyzing.†   (source)
  • Powerful images and visceral sensations of carrying Marcus along Fifth and L streets flashed before me.†   (source)
  • It was one of the most visceral moments of my life, Erlene and I locked onto each other, laughing uncontrollably.†   (source)
  • The place was subdued, for Mexico, which had struck me as visceral, like a body turned inside out so the blood was on the outside.†   (source)
  • And I was beginning to understand in a visceral inchoate way that every single thing I had been taught or had learned on my own since I was a child contained the elements of a lie.†   (source)
  • But for others their initial idealism, even if intensified by more visceral emotions, persisted to the end.†   (source)
  • I walked the few steps to the window, filled with a disquietude and unhappiness that was like a deep, twisting, visceral pain.†   (source)
  • That's an extremely interesting, even visceral, statement," said the psychiatrist.†   (source)
  • I literally felt like I'd been slapped: my reaction was that visceral, blood rushing to my face.†   (source)
  • That's why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know?†   (source)
  • Nowadays, her sadness felt less visceral than her anger.†   (source)
  • Visceral pain is different from when you bump your knee, for example.†   (source)
  • Their reactions were too immediate, too visceral, too loaded with today, not twenty years ago.†   (source)
  • Close to a death, close to the slam of metal projectiles on flesh, the visceral jolt.†   (source)
  • A visceral urge to flee sweeps through me, so powerful that I slow, stop, pull away from the slaver.†   (source)
  • Visceral pain comes from the inside, from the body's organs.†   (source)
  • Murray had also said , "Imagine the visceral jolt, watching your opponent bleed in the dust.†   (source)
  • The air that wafted up was warm and pungent, laden with an eerie blend of smells ....the sharp bite of chemicals, the smooth calm of incense, the earthy musk of human sweat, and, pervading it all, a distinct aura of visceral, animal fear.†   (source)
  • Every time I could not actually see one or the other of them, I had a visceral conviction that they were together.†   (source)
  • Ty didn't like it, and Jess, too, just for that one moment at the game table, had registered a visceral recoil that frightened me.†   (source)
  • Visceral.†   (source)
  • I was so jealous, and so freshly jealous every time I saw them, that I could hardly speak, and I wasn't very nice to Rose, since some visceral part of me simply blamed her for having what I wanted, and for having it so easily (it had taken me three years just to get pregnant—she had gotten pregnant six months after getting married).†   (source)
  • It was an address David made sure to get before he left Virginia, again instinct — visceral distrust.†   (source)
  • He wore protective gloves, he wore overgloves attached to his sleeves, he wore layers of treated clothing equipped with a number of film badges and rad-detectors and he worked with bomb components—the neutron initiator, the detonators, the subcritical pieces, the visceral heat inside the warhead.†   (source)
  • He knew in his mind that they were allies, but his bones and his muscles could not forget the visceral terror that had gripped him during the numerous occasions when he had confronted their kind in battle.†   (source)
  • She said nothing of the visceral shock of despair that had gone through her like an arrow, or the way she had staggered to the window and been sick out of it the moment she'd realized what she was looking at.†   (source)
  • She had never seen Galbatorix in person, only heard descriptions and studied drawings, but the effect the man's speech had on her was so visceral, so powerful, she had no doubt that he indeed was the king.†   (source)
  • He had learned their names and written them down, thinking that one day he might want to know who they were — no reason other than visceral distrust; such men had tried to kill him only months before.†   (source)
  • But even as my mind grappled with this, trying to work the logic, I could feel it, a visceral reaction to what had just happened, her coming closer than anyone to the truth.†   (source)
  • Almost every novitiate now has his or her visceral confirmation of the order of things-this dour man will carry forward the hard business hinted at in their welcome packets.†   (source)
  • But for many Confederate soldiers these abstractions took a concrete, visceral form: the defense of home and hearth against an invading enemy.†   (source)
  • It was a flawed, imperfect picture, but it possessed such intensity and passion that it evoked a visceral response from Eragon.†   (source)
  • Nothing has ever affected me in that same profoundly visceral way as the salutation of the Corps when I broke free from the steamy enclave of the locker room into the blue-hazed, cavernous, light-filtered center of the Armory.†   (source)
  • Jason could not remember from where or when, which was certainly not unusual, but his visceral reaction to the sight of the man was not usual.†   (source)
  • It was the visceral counterpart of retribution for invasion and destruction that increasingly motivated Confederate soldiers.†   (source)
  • Advance gradually, gain his confidence, take out the Zumwalt, fire three bullets at his midsection for maximum visceral agony, clear the weapon of prints, write suicidal cult messages on the mirrors and walls, take his supply of Dylar, slip back to the car, drive to the expressway entrance, head east toward Blacksmith, leave Stover's car in Treadwell's garage, walk home in the rain and the fog.†   (source)
  • The killer in priest's clothing suddenly snapped; visceral bolts of lightning electrified his madness.†   (source)
  • One day, at the bedside of a patient with syphilis, the professor picked on me to demonstrate visceral pain.†   (source)
  • She wanted to say to Adid: When I was a medical student, we had to do this test on patients to check for visceral pain.†   (source)
  • Anyway, as students we had to squeeze the testes to check for intact visceral pain, because diseases like syphilis can cause the loss of visceral pain sensations.†   (source)
  • But it was as if the twins' place in the firmament as well as in the earthly order of things had been secured for them even before they were born; she knew that nothing—not even the familiar scent of eucalyptus, or the sight of its leaves thrust into a nostril, or the drumroll of rain on corrugated tin roof, or the visceral odor of a freshly opened abdomen—could ever be the same again.†   (source)
  • I never saw these diversions draw forth from anyone, even a child, such glee, such rich terror, such uncomplicated visceral bliss.†   (source)
  • But then with a great visceral heave he seemed to regain possession of himself, his gaze became normal or nearly so, and when next he spoke, his words were uttered with their ordinary soldierly steadiness.†   (source)
  • A visceral cough racked the sick man's body and he now was spitting blood.†   (source)
  • You cross the Mojave at night and even at night your breath rasps your gullet as though you were a sword swallower who had got hold of a hack-saw blade by mistake, and in the darkness the hunched rock and towering cactus loom at you with the shapes of a visceral, Freudian nightmare.†   (source)
  • There is the old brute, too, the savage, the hairy man who dabbles his fingers in ropes of entrails; and gobbles and belches; whose speech is guttural, visceral—well, he is here.†   (source)
  • Not that wild hunting-song, Percival's music; but a painful, guttural, visceral, also soaring, lark-like, pealing song to replace these flagging, foolish transcripts—how much too deliberate!†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)