All 7 Uses
attain
in
Howards End
(Auto-generated)
- Seven miles to the north of Venice the banks of sand which nearer the city rise little above low-water mark attain by degrees a higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of sea.†
Part 6attain = gain or reach something with effort
- Surely, if experience is attainable, she had attained it.†
Part 9 *attainable = able to be gained or reached with effortstandard suffix: The suffix "-able" means able to be. This is the same pattern you see in words like breakable, understandable, and comfortable.
- Surely, if experience is attainable, she had attained it.†
Part 9attained = gained or reached something with effort
- They led a life that she could not attain to—the outer life of "telegrams and anger," which had detonated when Helen and Paul had touched in June, and had detonated again the other week.†
Part 12attain = gain or reach something with effort
- He knew that this fellow would never attain to poetry, and did not want to hear him trying.†
Part 14
- Then they said, "No, we do not believe it," and she admitted that an overworked clerk may save his soul in the superterrestrial sense, where the effort will be taken for the deed, but she denied that he will ever explore the spiritual resources of this world, will ever know the rarer joys of the body, or attain to clear and passionate intercourse with his fellows.†
Part 15
- Though its contours were slight, there was a touch of freedom in their sweep to which Surrey will never attain, and the distant brow of the Chilterns towered like a mountain.†
Part 33
Definitions:
-
(1)
(attain) to gain or reach something with effort
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)