deliquescent
/diˈlɪkwəsənt/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 1.29 in modern English
24
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
4
Syllables
10
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Becoming liquid as a phase of its life cycle.
Example Sentences
- "“Any one who stands outside, who hides himself in a deliquescent aloofness, is a sneak and a spy—”"
- "Yes, laugh, as I want to laugh for instance in the concert hall when the orchestra trundles to a stop and the virtuoso at his piano, hunched like a demented vet before the bared teeth of this enormous black beast of sound, lifts up deliquescent hands and prepares to plunge into the cadenza."
- "[…] Manet painted him [ Stéphane Mallarmé ] in a boneless, deliquescent slouch;"
- "deliquescent salts"
- "[…] dew fell in sufficient quantity to make the streets muddy, and it would certainly have washed so deliquescent a substance as salt into the soil."
- "1850, Asa Gray, The Botanical Text-Book, New York: Putnam, 3rd edition, rewritten and enlarged, Chapter 4, p. 102, In other cases, the main stem is arrested, sooner or later, either by flowering, by the failure of the terminal bud, or the more vigorous development of some of the lateral buds, and thus the trunk is lost in the branches, or is deliquescent, as in most of our deciduous-leaved trees."
Etymology
Latin deliquescens, present participle of deliquesco; de + liquesco (“to melt”): compare French déliquescent. By surface analysis, deliquesce + -ent
Inflected Forms
more deliquescent (comparative)
most deliquescent (superlative)