Free TranslationFree Translation
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Prehensile   Listen
Prehensile

adjective
1.
Adapted for grasping especially by wrapping around an object.
2.
Having a keen intellect.
3.
Immoderately desirous of acquiring e.g. wealth.  Synonyms: avaricious, covetous, grabby, grasping, greedy.  "Casting covetous eyes on his neighbor's fields" , "A grasping old miser" , "Grasping commercialism" , "Greedy for money and power" , "Grew richer and greedier" , "Prehensile employers stingy with raises for their employees"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Prehensile" Quotes from Famous Books



... of fastenings for corral gates. One of them squeaks and strains when it is pulled against. It is made of wire that leaves a bitter taste of iron and rust in the mouth when it is touched. Wire is often very difficult but with teeth and prehensile upper lip it may usually be worked up high, and finally it will fall over the top of one of the posts with a rattle, and then the gate is open. Another kind of fastening rattles very much when the gate is shaken. This means ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand

... Of all the prehensile-tailed monkeys which haunt the forests of the Upper Amazon—graceful sahuis, horned sapajous, gray-coated monos, sagouins which seem to wear a mask on their grimacing faces—the guariba is without doubt the most eccentric. ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne

... him covertly. It was his business to know other people's business, and he knew that Lord Dreever was impecunious, and depended for supplies entirely on a prehensile uncle. For the success of the proposal he was about to make, he depended ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse

... Mazurka of op. 24 is in A flat. It is pleasing, not deep, a real dance with an ornamental coda. But the next! Ah! here is a gem, a beautiful and exquisitely colored poem. In B flat minor, it sends out prehensile filaments that entwine and draw us into the centre of a wondrous melody, laden with rich odors, odors that almost intoxicate. The figuration is tropical, and when the major is reached and those glancing ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... what stuff you are telling us, Dinny. A rhinoceros wouldn't eat a man; he'd trample him to death," cried Dick, who had been a studious boy for years. "A rhinoceros is an herbivorous beast, and has a prehensile upper lip." ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn

... furnished with an organ beyond his needs. Also that it could not have produced that peculiar distribution of hair, especially the nakedness of the back, which is common to all races of men, nor the peculiar construction of the feet and hands. He says,[300] after speaking of the prehensile foot, common without a single exception to all the apes and lemurs, "It is difficult to see why the prehensile power should have been taken away" by the mere operation of Natural Selection. "It must certainly have been useful in climbing, and the case ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... are native, the latter, however, more on the Pacific coast. We have included a drawing of an earthenware vessel (Pl. 28, fig. 1) that represents a tapir, about whose neck is a string of Oliva shells. The short prehensile trunk of the tapir is well made and the hoofs are likewise shown. A greatly elongated nose is found in many of the drawings of the deities, but it does not seem clear that these represent trunks of tapirs, or, as suggested by Stempell, mastodons! ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen

... to fashion 'gangways' of my own; I used to descend the cliff at whatsoever point it pleased me, clinging to the lumps of sandy earth with the prehensile power of a spider-monkey. Many a warning had I had from the good fishermen and sea-folk, that some day I should fall from top to bottom—fall and break my neck. A laugh was my sole answer to these warnings; for, with the possession of perfect health, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... carried his four-and- twenty years with feverish animation. Greed had made folds about his eyes, evil smiles had puckered his mouth. The wolf and pig struggled together in his face. It was an eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthly countenance. His hands were small and prehensile, with fingers knotted like a cord; and they were continually flickering in front of him in violent and expressive pantomime. As for Tabary, a broad, complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips: he had become a thief, just as he might have ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson

... twenty times the length of their own tail, or grinning in ones or twos through the bars of a cage in a menagerie? His eyes are red with perpetual weeping—and his smile is sardonic in captivity. His fur is mouldy and mangy, and he is manifestly ashamed of his tail, prehensile no more—and of his paws, "very hands, as you may say," miserable matches to his miserable feet. To know him as he is, you must go to Senegal; or if that be too far off for a trip during the summer vacation, to the Rock of Gebir, now called ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various



Words linked to "Prehensile" :   grabby, nonprehensile, intelligent, avaricious, grasping, covetous, greedy, acquisitive



Copyright © 2024 e-Free Translation.com