All 6 Uses of
vary
in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- But although he was in port, and precisely because he was in port, he never recalled without disquiet the varied haps of his political career, so long uneasy and laborious.†
Chpt 1.1.3 *varied = differed; or changed
- The amusingly varied crests of these beautiful edifices were the product of the same art as the simple roofs which they overshot, and were, actually, only a multiplication of the square or the cube of the same geometrical figure.†
Chpt 1.3.2
- Fifty years later, when the Renaissance began to mingle with this unity which was so severe and yet so varied, the dazzling luxury of its fantasies and systems, its debasements of Roman round arches, Greek columns, and Gothic bases, its sculpture which was so tender and so ideal, its peculiar taste for arabesques and acanthus leaves, its architectural paganism, contemporary with Luther, Paris, was perhaps, still more beautiful, although less harmonious to the eye, and to the thought.†
Chpt 1.3.2
- Let us add a quantity of fine, amusing, and varied streets, like the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair of Paris presenting to the eye, when viewed from a balloon, that richness of line, that opulence of detail, that diversity of aspect, that grandiose something in the simple, and unexpected in the beautiful, which characterizes a checker-board.†
Chpt 1.3.2
- However, admirable as the Paris of to-day may seem to you, reconstruct the Paris of the fifteenth century, call it up before you in thought; look at the sky athwart that surprising forest of spires, towers, and belfries; spread out in the centre of the city, tear away at the point of the islands, fold at the arches of the bridges, the Seine, with its broad green and yellow expanses, more variable than the skin of a serpent; project clearly against an azure horizon the Gothic profile of this ancient Paris.†
Chpt 1.3.2variable = able to changestandard suffix: The suffix "-able" in variable means able to be. This is the same pattern you see in words like breakable, understandable, and comfortable. Note that when "-able" is placed at the end of a word that ends in "Y", the "Y" is often replaced with "I" as in enviable and deniable.
- His lieutenants, civil, criminal, and private, were doing his work, according to usage; and from eight o'clock in the morning, some scores of bourgeois and ~bourgeoises~, heaped and crowded into an obscure corner of the audience chamber of Embas du Châtelet, between a stout oaken barrier and the wall, had been gazing blissfully at the varied and cheerful spectacle of civil and criminal justice dispensed by Master Florian Barbedienne, auditor of the Châtelet, lieutenant of monsieur the provost, in a somewhat confused and utterly haphazard manner.†
Chpt 1.6.1varied = differed; or changed
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."