7 uses
(click/touch triangles for details)
Definition
existing throughout something; or generally widespread
- Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted.Chapters 52-54 — The Albatross; The Gam; The Town-Ho's Story (88% in)
- ...of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by...Chapters 34-36 — The Cabin-Table; The Mast-Head; The Qarter-Deck—Ahab and all (61% in)
- Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invunerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask.Chapters 40-42 — Midnight, Forecastle; Moby Dick; The Whiteness of the Whale (58% in)
- The Albino is as well made as other men—has no substantive deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion.Chapters 40-42 — Midnight, Forecastle; Moby Dick; The Whiteness of the Whale (79% in)
- As you behold it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point of pervading dignity.Chapters 73-75 — Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; The Sperm Whale's Head, The Right Whale's Head (46% in)
- And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood.Chapters 106-108 — Ahab's Leg; The Carpenter; Ahab and the Carpenter (4% in)
- The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's chest in his sleep.Chapters 130-132 — The Hat; The Pequod meets the Delight; The Symphony (58% in)
There are no more uses of "pervasive" in Moby Dick.
Typical Usage
(best examples)