All 8 Uses of
gaunt
in
The War of the Worlds
- Where flames had been there were now streamers of smoke; but the countless ruins of shattered and gutted houses and blasted and blackened trees that the night had hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the pitiless light of dawn.†
Chpt 1.11 *
- They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water as they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like generator of the Heat-Ray.†
Chpt 1.17
- Far away I saw a gaunt cat slink crouchingly along a wall, but traces of men there were none.†
Chpt 2.5
- The red creeper swarmed up the trees about the old palace, and their branches stretched gaunt and dead, and set with shrivelled leaves, from amid its clusters.†
Chpt 2.7
- Nothing but this gaunt quiet.†
Chpt 2.8
- All the gaunt wrecks, the blackened skeletons of houses that stared so dismally at the sunlit grass of the hill, would presently be echoing with the hammers of the restorers and ringing with the tapping of their trowels.†
Chpt 2.8
- Men on cycles, lean-faced, unkempt, scorched along every country lane shouting of unhoped deliverance, shouting to gaunt, staring figures of despair.†
Chpt 2.9
- All down the line from there the aspect of the country was gaunt and unfamiliar; Wimbledon particularly had suffered.†
Chpt 2.9
Definitions:
-
(1)
(gaunt) very thin and bony -- often from hunger or as though having been worn to the bone
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
More rarely, gaunt can reference a place such as a landscape or a home, in which case it indicates that the place is bleak or barren.