Sample Sentences for
high-strung
(editor-reviewed)

Show 3 more sentences
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    The high-strung stallion is eager to start the race.
    high-strung = tense and nervous
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    Boo wasn't crazy, he was high-strung at times.  (source)
    high-strung = tense and easily upset
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    Johnny was high-strung anyway, a nervous wreck from getting belted every time he turned around and from hearing his parents fight all the time.  (source)
    high-strung = typically tense
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Show 10 more with 2 word variations
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    Both father and son were stubborn and high-strung.†  (source)
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    A member of the Non-European Unity Movement, Don had grown up in the diamond-mining area of Kimberley and was a rugged, fearless fellow who was also highly strung.†  (source)
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    I always knew Cassie was rather high-strung, but Little Man!†  (source)
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    "She always was highly strung," pursued Henry, leaning back in the car as it shot past the church.†  (source)
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    She's so high-strung Simon can almost feel her vibrating, like a stretched rope.†  (source)
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    The girl's highly strung imagination, her affectionate and credulous mind, the primitive education which had surrounded her childhood with a circle of legends, the constant brooding over her dead father and, above all, the state of sublime ecstasy into which music threw her from the moment that this art was made manifest to her in certain exceptional conditions, as in the churchyard at Perros; all this seemed to him to constitute a moral ground only too favorable for the malevolent designs of some mysterious and unscrupulous person.†  (source)
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    Then, towards the end of the week, a sketchy note from my dad arrived (postmarked Newark, New Jersey) informing us in a high-strung scrawl that he was heading off to "start a new life" in an undisclosed location.†  (source)
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    She had humor; she had intellect; she could cook to perfection; and her highly strung temperament made her uncertain, incalculable, variable, capricious, cruel, in a word, enchanting.†  (source)
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    But Dina is high-strung by nature.†  (source)
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    She's just a little ...high-strung.†  (source)
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meaning too rare to warrant focus

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Both buildings were enormous and historic-looking and made of brick, but the Newbury library was surrounded by a hillside of dense trees on one side and a strip mall on the other, while Booker Middle School was surrounded by the high-strung wires of the city's electric buses and squatty apartment buildings.  (source)
high-strung = hanging high
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