| 释义 |
seamless, a.|ˈsiːmlɪs|
Also 5 semlesse, semeles.
[f. seam n.1 + -less.]
1. Without a seam; of a garment, woven without a seam. Now esp. of tubing and women's stockings or tights.
The word was used very freely by 17th c. divines in such phrases as Christ's seamless coat, seamless garment, seamless vest, etc. with reference to John xix. 23, as typifying unity in the Church.
1483Cath. Angl. 329/1 Semlesse (MS. A. Semeles), inconsutilis. 1624Donne Wks. (1839) V. 265 Christ..suffered his flesh to be torn, but not his seamless garment. 1876Encycl. Brit. IV. 218/2 Solid or seamless brass tubes..are made by drawing down short thick cast cylinders of brass till they reach the desired gauge or thinness. 1880Times 21 Sept. 4/4 The one novelty..in the exhibition is a small case of absolutely seamless boots. 1901Westm. Gaz. 5 Feb. 8/1 An ingenious system of building extremely light, seamless boats. 1904Goodchild & Tweney Technol. & Sci. Dict. 146/1 The [cycle] frame is generally formed of thin seamless steel tubing. 1921Daily Colonist (Victoria, B.C.) 4 Oct. 5/1 Seamless (fashioned without seams). The women's hose knit to fit without a seam. 1959Observer 22 Mar. 3/8 The seamless stocking, or ‘circular’ as the trade calls it, has always been made, but used to be thought of as an inferior thing. 1968Economist 9 Nov. 94/1 Tubes is commissioning a new seamless tube mill, where profits ought to start this autumn. 1969A. J. Hall Stand. Handbk. Textiles (ed. 7) iii. 154 The seamless hose are knitted on circular machines.
Comb.a1661Fuller Worthies, York-Sh. (1662) iii. 208 Wearing seamless-woven-coats.
2. fig. spec. as seamless web, orig. with reference to the concept of history as an integral whole (see quot. 1898).
1862E. Dickinson Poems (1955) I. 246 As if some Caravan of Sound Had parted Rank, Then knit, and swept—In Seamless Company. 1898Pollock & Maitland Hist. Eng. Law bef. Edw. I (ed. 2) I. i. i. 1 Such is the unity of all history that any one who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web. 1929Oxf. Poetry 12 A small patch of light on the seamless blank. 1952Auden Nones 39 The three wise Maries come Sossing through seamless waters. 1964[see integralism]. 1976T. Eagleton Crit. & Ideology iii. 94 The Prelude is formally fissured by its ideological contradictions, unable to rise to the seamless impersonal epic it would wish itself to be. 1977Time 10 Oct. 10/3 ‘Many of us find it intellectually difficult’, he said, ‘to penetrate the seamless web of the Japanese politico-economic system.’
Hence ˈseamlessly adv.
1906Saintsbury Hist. Eng. Prosody I. 367 The whole web is woven seamlessly and without break. |