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Definition
the shape of something rotating rapidly — such as a tornadoor: a powerful circular current of water (usually the result of conflicting tides)
- They form a vortex from which no ship has ever been able to escape.Jules Verne -- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
- In the stairwell, the floors and stairs below were a white-water river, a vortex of cascading waves.Ransom Riggs -- Hollow City
- I hired a boat directly, and we put off to her; and getting through the little vortex of confusion of which she was the centre, went on board.Charles Dickens -- David Copperfield
- Surely, thought Jan, it must be a vortex of some kind-a smoke-ring already many kilometres across.Arthur C. Clarke -- Childhood's End
- His voice sounded like a backward recording—as if the words were being sucked into the vortex of his face rather than projected.Rick Riordan -- The House of Hades
- If it was the last word I had to speak, against that vortex with my utmost powers I strove, and out of it I came.Charles Dickens -- Little Dorrit
- Everything was the Blizzard, the Mindbender, Top Gun, the Vortex.Mitch Albom -- The Five People You Meet in Heaven
- It was never the same—a rumble, as if faint, distant thunder—a deep gurgle, as of water drawn into a vortex—a rolling, as of a stone in swift current.Zane Grey -- The Man of the Forest
- He had been caught in a vortex and was being whirled on with a velocity of advance and gyration that made him giddy and sick.Ambrose Bierce -- An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
- It was the heady race and plunge of the vortex.Robert Penn Warren -- All the King's Men
- Adam's irises were light blue with dark radial lines leading into the vortices of his pupils.John Steinbeck -- East of Eden
- Headless trunks were tossed out of the vortex to linger a moment on the surface and sink out of sight.Erik Larson -- The Devil in the White City
- When she looked up and outward, a vortex of light drove through and over the brown waves like a star in the water.Eudora Welty -- The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
- BB screamed against datumplane static that rasped at my bones and we were whirling, tumbling, sucked into the vacuum like insects in an oceanic vortex.Dan Simmons -- Hyperion
- She felt like a vortex had opened up inside her head and was sucking away her thoughts and words.Cassandra Clare -- City of Lost Souls
- Now his imagination spun about the hand as about the edge of a vortex; but still he made no effort to draw nearer.Edith Wharton -- The Age of Innocence
- There is storm-music, and the fisherman drowns, sucked to the bottom of the sea in the vortex of the whirlpool.Arundhati Roy -- The God of Small Things
- She clings to me as tightly as if I were keeping her from being sucked into a vortex.Sara Gruen -- Water for Elephants
- An aching lust to join them tormented both body and soul, and whoever lacked the strength to flee to solitude was drawn into the vortex, beyond all help.Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain
- He relaxed, permitted himself to be drawn down into a vortex of associations and began sorting.Alfred Bester -- The Demolished Man
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