All 5 Uses of
vary
in
Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis
- No matter how much you vary, you can make a rough average for——†
Chpt 14 *vary = differ; or change
- She thought of surprises, games, to vary the days.†
Chpt 15
- The towns remain unvaried, yet the individual faces alter like classes in college.†
Chpt 20unvaried = consistent or the samestandard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unvaried means not and reverses the meaning of varied. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
- She came home by the unvarying route.†
Chpt 24unvarying = consistent or the samestandard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unvarying means not and reverses the meaning of varying. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
- When she ventured to Sunday School and heard the teachers droning that the genealogy of Shamsherai was a valuable ethical problem for children to think about; when she experimented with Wednesday prayer-meeting and listened to store-keeping elders giving their unvarying weekly testimony in primitive erotic symbols and such gory Chaldean phrases as "washed in the blood of the lamb" and "a vengeful God"; when Mrs. Bogart boasted that through his boyhood she had made Cy confess nightly upon the basis of the Ten Commandments; then Carol was dismayed to find the Christian religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as Zoroastrianism—without the splendor.†
Chpt 28
Definition:
to be different, or to change
Vary is often used to describe small differences or changes--especially about things of the same type. It would be more common to say "The weight of full-grown elephants varies depending upon diet and other factors," than to say "The weight of elephants varies from that of mice."