Free The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations by David Grambs

thick and soft, and wafted round her neck and shoulders as she moved.
    ISAK DINESEN, “The Caryatids, An Unfinished Tale”
     
    coated
bedaubed, lacquered, filmy, overlayed, glossed
    sticky
viscous, viscid, adhesive, gummy, mucilaginous,
agglutinative
    lying close against
adhering, clinging
     
    moist, damp, wet
dank, bedewed, dewy, roral, rorid, imbrued
    wet, watery
fluid, serous
    very wet
sodden, soaked, saturated, suffused
    coolly moist and sticky
clammy
    absorbent
porous, leachy
    wet and yielding
spongy, semiliquid, pulpy, mushy, squishy, oozy
    thick
clotted, grumous
     
    soft like nap or down
fluffy, downy, fleecy, cottony, feathery, lanuginous,
lanuginose
    soft and lustrous
silken, satiny
    woolly
flocculent, lanate, lanose
    felt-like
pannose
    velvety
velutinous
     
     
A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach.
    HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
     
     
From the branches of these pear trees hung carafes full of a glutinous yellow substance for trapping insects still changed religiously every month by the local horticultural college.
    MALCOLM LOWRY, Under the Volcano
     
     
And worst of all, the old ladies ignoring their foul neighbor munched their sandwiches and sucked on fuzzy sections of orange, wrapping the peels in scraps of paper and popping them daintily under the seat.
    VLADIMIR NABOKOV, King, Queen, Knave
     
     
Fifty dirty, stark-naked men elbowing each other in a room twenty feet square, with only two bathtubs and two slimy roller towels between them all. I shall never forget the reek of dirty feet. Less than half the tramps actually bathed (I heard them saying that hot water is “weakening” to the system), but they all washed their faces and feet, and the horrid greasy little clouts known as toe-rags which they bind round their toes.
    GEORGE ORWELL, Down and Out in Paris and London
     
     
They would never be like Mrs. Grandlieu’s old timber house, with its worn decorative woodwork, its internal arches of fretwork arabesques that caught the dust, its mahogany-stained floor springy but polished smooth, the hard graining of the floorboards standing out from the softer wood.
    V. S. NAIPAUL, Guerrillas
     
    pillow-like
cushiony, puffy
    feathery
plumy
    hairy
hirsute, bristly
    fuzzy
shaggy,nubby
    knobby
studded, lumpy, nubby, nubbly, knubbly, nubbed, noded,
noduled
     
    very thin
sheer, lawny
    dense
compact, compacted, close-textured, thick, close-knit,
consolidated, condensed
    clotted
congealed, coagulated
    separable
fissile, scissile, partable
    light and somewhat transparent
filmy, gauzy, gossamer, cobwebby
     
    powdery, dusty
floury, chalky, triturated, comminuted, pulverous,
pulverulent, powdered
    foamy
frothy, spumescent
    jelly-like
gelatinous, colloidal
    cork-like
suberose
    rocky
petrous, calcified
     
     
“Beate Leibowitz, ora pro me!” whispered Brother Francis. His hands were trembling so violently that they threatened to ruin the brittle documents.
    WALTER M. MILLER, JR., A Canticle for Leibowitz
     
     
The Leibowitz print, another abstraction, appealed to nothing, least of all to reason. He studied it until he could see the whole amazing complexity with his eyes closed, but knew no more than he had known before. It appeared to be no more than a network of lines connecting a patchwork of doohickii, squiggles, quids, laminulae, and thingumbob. The lines were mostly horizontal or vertical, and crossed each other with either a little jump-mark or a dot; they made right-angle turns to get around doohickii, and they never stopped in mid-space but always terminated at a squiggle, quiggle, quid, or thingumbob.
    WALTER M. MILLER, JR., A Canticle for Leibowitz
     
     
Far beyond, cliffs and spires of the familiar green rock rose against the dark blue sky. A