adumbrate
/ˈadʌmbreɪt
/verb [with object] formal
1Represent in outline: Hobhouse had already adumbrated the idea of a welfare state...
- This latter course, in fact, is already adumbrated at certain junctures in the Opus Postumum.
- The outlines of the legend of the politically naïve scholar are already adumbrated in the biographical essay Heidegger submitted to the de-Nazification committee in 1945.
- (Reading across texts for a moment, this idea has been adumbrated in Kundera's earlier book Laughable Loves ).
1.1Indicate faintly: the walls were only adumbrated by the meagre light
2Foreshadow (a future event): tenors solemnly adumbrate the fate of the convicted sinner...
- Toward the middle of her 1928 novel Quicksand, Nella Larsen thematizes her authorial relation to the literary past in a scene that uncannily adumbrates the future demise of her career.
3Overshadow: her happy reminiscences were adumbrated by consciousness of something else...
- Consciousness does not perspectivally adumbrate itself.
Derivatives
adumbration
/ noun ...- The predominance of death in the novel is a prophetic adumbration of the real death which will bring the characters to God's love, and Eleanor is granted a vision of this when she meets Leopolda the Catholic nun on the night of the storm.
- We have remarked on Hahn's adumbrations of this movement in an earlier one, but one senses a disconnect between the end of the ‘Gigue’ and the beginning of the ‘Ciaccona.’
- John watched the way she moved and the way the fire light played against her warm colored skin, highlighting through the refined weave in the gown she wore and the adumbration beneath the veil.
adumbrative
- For him language is musical, felicitous, comical, flippant, suggestive, buoyant weaponry and adumbrative of mysteries beyond us.
- This duet is adumbrative of ‘Trane's last album, Interstellar Space, which comprises duets between ‘Trane and drummer Rashied Ali.
- Pasolini clearly did not intend Salò as a late work, much as Mozart did not design his requiem as adumbrative lament.
Origin
Late 16th century: from Latin adumbrat- 'shaded', from the verb adumbrare, from ad- 'to' (as an intensifier) + umbrare 'cast a shadow' (from umbra 'shade').
- ring splice
- ringspot
- ring-spotted
- ring-stand
- ring staple
- ringster
- ring-stopper
- ring-straked
- ring-streaked
- ring system
- ringtail
- ringtail cat
- ring-tailed
- ring-tailed cat
- ring-tailed lemur
- ring-tailed marlin
- ring-tailed pigeon
- ring-tailed possum
- ringtail opossum
- ring taw
- ring the changes
- ring theory
- ring time
- ringtone
- ringtoss