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Penumbra   /pɪnˈəmbrə/   Listen
Penumbra

noun
(pl. penumbrae, penumbras)
1.
A fringe region of partial shadow around an umbra.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Penumbra" Quotes from Famous Books



... sweet to hear, and though, standing there in the warm penumbra of the olive orchard, tall and erect and graceful, in her bright frock, she made a charming picture, and though she offered a silver lira as a prize, the men merely stared at her churlishly, and ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland

... picture so acidly etched into Miss Slayback's brain that she had only to close her eyes in the slit-like sanctity of her room and in the brief moment of courting sleep feel the pink penumbra of her vision ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... colores; una llamarada de oro y fuego inunda el espacio ilimitado; las soledades se incendian; los monolitos de hielo brillan con todos los matices del arco iris. Cada carambano es una columna de topacio; cada estalagmita una lluvia de zafiros. Rasgase la penumbra, y descubrense oceanos de claridad.... iAlla 20 adivino el Polo alumbrado intensamente, erial solitario que ningun pie humano llegara a hollar nunca! Y en aquella region de continuo espanto creo divisar el eje ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon

... moment before this flat defiance reached the brain of the big man through the penumbra of his mental fog. When it did, he strode across the room with the roar of a wild animal and snatched the girl to him. He would show whether any one could come between ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine

... percepts that practically modified and presumably resembled his own. By 'developing' themselves is meant obeying their tendencies, following up the suggestions nascently present in them, working in the direction in which they seem to point, clearing up the penumbra, making distinct the halo, unravelling the fringe, which is part of their composition, and in the midst of which their more substantive kernel of subjective content seems consciously to lie. Thus I may develop my thought in the Paley direction by procuring the brown ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... Dory that night a long, long letter, the nearest to a love letter she had ever written him. She brought Ross in quite casually; yet—What is the mystery of the telltale penumbra round the written word? Why was it that Dory, in far-away Vienna, with the memory of her strong and of the Villa d'Orsay dim, reading the letter for the first time, thought it the best he had ever got from her; and the next morning, reading it again, could think of nothing but Ross, and what Adelaide ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips

... motionless by the tree, and Gabriel descended into the village of Weatherbury, or Lower Longpuddle as it was sometimes called. He fancied that he had felt himself in the penumbra of a very deep sadness when touching that slight and fragile creature. But wisdom lies in moderating mere impressions, and Gabriel endeavoured ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... there bird-notes fell, liquid, desultory, like drops of rain after a shower; and constantly one heard the cool music of the river. The sun, filtering through worlds and worlds of leaves, shed upon everything a green-gold penumbra. The air, warm and still, was sweet with garden-scents. The lake, according to its habit at this hour of the afternoon, had drawn a grey veil over its face, a thin grey veil, through which its sapphire-blue shone furtively. Far away, in the summer haze, Monte Sfiorito seemed a mere ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... a month of time, it is focussed intensely upon reality. Everything that the author permits us to see and understand is seen through a single point of life—a hole pierced in the wall between two rooms of a grey Paris boarding house. The time is most often twilight, with its romantic penumbra, darkening into the obscurity ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse

... planet when man accomplished his mysterious rebellion. The idea of such a sigh, of a whisper circling through the planet, of the light growing thick with the unimaginable charge, and the purple eclipse of Death throwing a penumbra; that may, but nothing else ever can, equal the unutterable sublimity of that buzz—that rumour, that susurrus passing from mouth to mouth—nobody knew whence coming or whither tending, and about a being of whom nobody could tell ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... PENUMBRA, the name given to the partial shadow on the rim of the total shadow of an eclipse, also to the margin of the light and shade ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... beauty, resulting from the combination, for instance, in a commonplace face, of the roughness and coarser pore of the close shaven lips and chin with the smoothness of the waxy hanging cheeks; the one catching the light, the other breaking it into a ribbed and forked penumbra. The very perfection of this kind of work is Benedetto da Maiano's bust of Pietro Mellini in the Bargello at Florence. The elderly head is of strongly marked osseous structure, yet fleshed with abundant and flaccid flesh, hanging in folds or creases round the mouth and chin, yet not flobbery ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee

... the country, and unable, as Christians, to believe in the divinity of the Tuatha De Danan and their predecessors, they rationalised all the pre-Milesian record. But the disappearance of the gods does not yet bring us within the penumbra of history. After the death of the sons of Milesius we find a long roll of kings. These were all topical heroes, founders of nations, and believed, by the tribes and tribal confederacies which they founded, to have been in their day the chief kings of Ireland. The point fixed upon by the accurate ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady

... sympathetic boy, with a dancing-school manner, instead of an awkward and shy youth (although an exceedingly handsome one), we cannot tell. That is the great secret behind the veil. The answer is not yet made, the oracle has not spoken, and we must not invade the penumbra of genius. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... edge, are sometimes of considerable dimensions. Some have been seen whose size was five times that of the earth. They are generally surrounded by an aureola known as the penumbra, and sensibly less luminous than the other portions of the orb. From this penumbra, first observed by Galileo, many apparently singular deductions have been made: namely, 'The sun is a dark body, surrounded at a certain distance by an atmosphere which may be compared to that of the earth, when the latter is charged with a continuous ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various

... with 'the crepuscular penumbra spreading her dim limbs over the boskage'; with 'jolly rabbits'; with a herd of 'gravid polled Angus'; and with the 'arresting, gipsy-like face of their swart, scholarly owner—as well known at the Royal Agricultural Shows as that of our ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling

... began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them—fixed figure-heads of the social prow—others she recognized ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... states of consciousness (polyideism). Through association there is a radiation in every direction. In this totality of coexisting images no one long occupies first place; it is driven away by others, which are displaced in turn by still others emerging from the penumbra. On the contrary, in attention (relative monoideism) a single image retains first place for a long time and tends to have the same importance again. Finally, in a condition of obsession (absolute monoideism) the fixed ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot



Words linked to "Penumbra" :   shadow



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