| / English Dictionary |
LEADEN
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Darkened with overcast
Example:
the sky was leaden and thick
Synonyms:
dull; leaden
Classified under:
Similar:
cloudy (full of or covered with clouds)
Sense 2
Meaning:
Lacking lightness or liveliness
Example:
a leaden conversation
Synonyms:
heavy; leaden
Classified under:
Similar:
dull (lacking in liveliness or animation)
Sense 3
Meaning:
(of movement) slow and laborious
Example:
leaden steps
Synonyms:
leaden; plodding
Classified under:
Similar:
effortful (requiring great physical effort)
Sense 4
Meaning:
Made heavy or weighted down with weariness
Example:
weighted eyelids
Synonyms:
leaden; weighted
Classified under:
Similar:
heavy (marked by great psychological weight; weighted down especially with sadness or troubles or weariness)
Sense 5
Meaning:
Made of lead
Example:
a leaden weight
Classified under:
Relational adjectives (pertainyms)
Pertainym:
lead (a soft heavy toxic malleable metallic element; bluish white when freshly cut but tarnishes readily to dull grey)
Context examples:
When I awoke, the recollection that Uriah was lying in the next room, sat heavy on me like a waking nightmare; and oppressed me with a leaden dread, as if I had had some meaner quality of devil for a lodger.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
I would have got out to make certain on the point, but some leaden lethargy seemed to chain my limbs and even my will.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
They were eyes that masked the soul with a thousand guises, and that sometimes opened, at rare moments, and allowed it to rush up as though it were about to fare forth nakedly into the world on some wonderful adventure,—eyes that could brood with the hopeless sombreness of leaden skies; that could snap and crackle points of fire like those which sparkle from a whirling sword; that could grow chill as an arctic landscape, and yet again, that could warm and soften and be all a-dance with love-lights, intense and masculine, luring and compelling, which at the same time fascinate and dominate women till they surrender in a gladness of joy and of relief and sacrifice.
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
We soldered up the leaden coffin, screwed on the coffin-lid, and gathering up our belongings, came away.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
Van Helsing forced back the leaden flange, and we all looked in and recoiled. The coffin was empty!
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
He bent over and again forced back the leaden flange; and then a shock of surprise and dismay shot through me.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
Outrageous as it was to open a leaden coffin, to see if a woman dead nearly a week were really dead, it now seemed the height of folly to open the tomb again, when we knew, from the evidence of our own eyesight, that the coffin was empty.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)
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