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Definition
a combination or blend of diverse thingsMore rarely, amalgam can refer to an alloy of mercury with another metal. At one time dentists commonly filled cavities with amalgam.
- his theory is an amalgam of earlier ideas
- Her features are a mesmerizing amalgam of before and after.Libba Bray -- Sweet Far Thing
- They are coiners on a large scale, and have used the machine to form the amalgam which has taken the place of silver.Arthur Conan Doyle -- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
- Mixed with mercury, it forms an amalgam that takes the place of zinc in Bunsen cells.Jules Verne -- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
- Pretending to read her own book but actually looking at Danny over the top of it, she had seen an odd amalgam of the ways she and Jack expressed anxiety.Stephen King -- The Shining
- Candidates would need a degree of stenographic and typewriting skill, but what he most looked for and was so very adept at sensing was that alluring amalgam of isolation, weakness, and need.Erik Larson -- The Devil in the White City
- The antebellum propaganda war between North and South had created in southern minds an image of the hated Yankees as an amalgam of money-grubbing mudsill Black Republican abolitionist Goths and Vandals.James M. McPherson -- What They Fought For - 1861-1865
- Between the flinty crests of the two outermost escarpments of the Outer Range runs an east-west trough, maybe five miles across, carpeted in a boggy amalgam of muskeg, alder thickets, and veins of scrawny spruce.Jon Krakauer -- Into the Wild
- Later at Gage & Tollner's, as Leslie and I dined beneath gaslight on littleneck clams and crabmeat imperial, I came as near to experiencing a pure amalgam of sensual and spiritual felicities as I ever would in my life.William Styron -- Sophie's Choice
- She knew that Bobby Fischer had all the fillings removed from his teeth when he played Boris Spassky in 1972—it made perfect sense to her—so the KGB could not control him through broadcasts made into the amalgam units packed in his molars.Don DeLillo -- Underworld
- They were a sort of bizarre amalgam of millionaires—people who never had to consider the petty parts of life, like how to shop for food, or use MetroCard machines in the subway—and soldiers, with their rigid self-discipline and constant training.Cassandra Clare -- City of Fallen Angels
- If so, I'm scared stiff that if ever you gain any weight you'll be as victimized as the next young actor into contributing to the reliable Hollywood amalgam of prizefighter and mystic, gunman and underprivileged child, cowhand and Man's Conscience, and the rest.J.D. Salinger -- Franny and Zooey
- Apart from Andy—cryptic, isolated, self-sufficient, incapable of dishonesty and completely lacking in both malice and charisma—the other Barbours, even Todd, all had something slightly uncanny about them, a watchful, sly amalgam of decorum and mischief that made it all too easy to imagine their forebears gathering in the forest by night, casting off their Puritan garb to frolic by the pagan bonfire.Donna Tartt -- The Goldfinch
- Sympathy and concern—an emotional amalgam which suddenly appeared to me rather Southern and old-fashioned—welled up in the old clerk's eyes.William Styron -- Sophie's Choice
- The tune was an odd amalgam of a Radchaai song that played occasionally on broadcast and an Orsian one I already knew.Ann Leckie -- Ancillary Justice
- But the fact remains that I, too, had been a marine like Eddie Farrell, had, like Eddie, burned to be a writer and had sent letters home from the Pacific that were inscribed in my heart's blood, written with the same weird amalgam of passion, humor, despair and exquisite hope that can only be set down by very young men haunted by the imminent appearance of death.William Styron -- Sophie's Choice
- And of the easy* fire, and smart** also, *slow **quick Which that was made? and of the care and woe That we had in our matters subliming, And in amalgaming, and calcining Of quicksilver, called mercury crude?Geoffrey Chaucer -- The Canterbury Tales
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