dampish
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
Adjective[edit]
dampish (comparative more dampish, superlative most dampish)
- (obsolete) Characterised by noxious vapours; misty, smoky.
- 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
- c. 1600, author unknown, once attributed to William Shakespeare, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, London: J.M. Dent, 1897, Act I, Scene 3 [1]
- We'll first hang Enfield in such rings of mist / As never rose from any dampish fen: / I'll make the brinèd sea to rise at Ware, / And drown the marshes unto Stratford Bridge;
- Moderately damp or moist.
- 1879, Henry Vizetelly, chapter X, in Facts about Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines[2], London: Ward, Lock & Co, page 111:
- Miles of long, dark-brown, dampish-looking galleries stretch away to the right and left, and though devoid of the picturesque festoons of fungi which decorate the London Dock vaults, exhibit a sufficient degree of mouldiness to give them an air of respectable antiquity.
- 1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter VI, in Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC:
- I remember very clearly the feeling of sitting there reading it; the dampish clay of the trench bottom underneath me, the constant shifting of my legs out of the way as men hurried stopping down the trench, the crack-crack-crack of bullets a foot or two overhead.
- 1991, Seamus Heaney, “Squarings xl”, in Seeing Things, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, page 94:
- I was four but I turned four hundred maybe,
Encountering the ancient dampish feel
Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.
- 2006, William Trevor, “An Afternoon”, in Cheating at Canasta, New York: Viking, published 2007, page 99:
- Her hand was warm, lying there in his, dampish, fingers interlaced with his.
Derived terms[edit]
Translations[edit]
moderately damp or moist
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