diaphanous
English
Etymology
From (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Medieval Latin diaphanus, from Ancient Greek διαφανής (diaphanḗs).
Pronunciation
Adjective
diaphanous (comparative more diaphanous, superlative most diaphanous)
- Transparent or translucent; allowing light to pass through; capable of being seen through.
- 1899 February, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number M, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part I:
- The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.
- 1999, Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness[1], page 96:
- But nonetheless the purpleness of the imagined purple cow will almost certainly be meaner, more diaphanous, more fleeting than any real-life purple that you ever saw: to imagine a purple cow is just not the same thing as to have a purple sensation (or at least a purple sensation worth the name).
- 2004, Gustave Flaubert, Margaret Maulden (translator), Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners, page 98,
- The evening mist, drifting among the leafless poplars, veiled their silhouettes with a violet film, paler and more translucent than the most diaphanous gauze that might have caught in their branches.
- Of a fine, almost transparent, texture; gossamer; light and insubstantial.
- 1951, Robert Frost, Unpublished preface to a collection, 2007, Mark Richardson (editor), The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, page 169,
- The most diaphanous wings carry a burden of pollen from flower to flower.
- 1963, Hermann Weyl, quoted in 1985, Floyd Merrell, Deconstruction Reframed, page 67,
- What is amazing is that "a concept that is created by mind itself, the sequence of integers, the simplest and most diaphanous thing for the constructive mind, assumes a similar aspect of obscurity and deficiency when viewed from the axiomatic angle" (Weyl, 1963, 220).
- 1951, Robert Frost, Unpublished preface to a collection, 2007, Mark Richardson (editor), The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, page 169,
- (physics) Isorefractive, having an identical refractive index.
Synonyms
- (allowing light to pass through): translucent
- (of a fine, almost transparent, texture): delicate, insubstantial
Antonyms
Related terms
Translations
of a fine, almost transparent texture
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transparent; allowing light to pass through
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of the same refractive index