| / English Dictionary |
CALLOUS
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Emotionally hardened
Example:
cold-blooded and indurate to public opinion
Synonyms:
callous; indurate; pachydermatous
Classified under:
Similar:
insensitive (deficient in human sensibility; not mentally or morally sensitive)
Derivation:
callosity; callousness (devoid of passion or feeling; hardheartedness)
Sense 2
Meaning:
Having calluses; having skin made tough and thick through wear
Example:
with a workman's callous hands
Synonyms:
Classified under:
Similar:
tough; toughened (physically toughened)
Derivation:
callosity (an area of skin that is thick or hard from continual pressure or friction (as the sole of the foot))
II. (verb)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Make insensitive or callous; deaden feelings or morals
Synonyms:
Classified under:
Verbs of size, temperature change, intensifying, etc.
Hypernyms (to "callous" is one way to...):
harden; indurate; inure (cause to accept or become hardened to; habituate)
Sentence frame:
Something ----s somebody
Context examples:
This vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men; he is of cunning more than mortal, for his cunning be the growth of ages; he have still the aids of necromancy, which is, as his etymology imply, the divination by the dead, and all the dead that he can come nigh to are for him at command; he is brute, and more than brute; he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not; he can, within limitations, appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to him; he can, within his range, direct the elements; the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat—the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times vanish and come unknown.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
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