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Heat lightning   /hit lˈaɪtnɪŋ/   Listen
Heat lightning

noun
1.
Bright flashes of light near the horizon without thunder (especially on hot evenings); usually attributed to distant lightning that is reflected by clouds.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Heat lightning" Quotes from Famous Books



... my might and main to subdue my very heart-throbs so that she would not hear me or suspect my presence, the darkness—I should rather say the blackness of the place yielded to a flash of lightning—heat lightning, all glare and no sound—and I caught an instantaneous vision of my father's figure standing with gleaming things about him, which affected me at the moment as supernatural, but which, in later years, I decided to have been weapons hanging ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various

... down at last, and the gray day imperceptibly merged into the gray dusk. Then came the lingering darkness, with a flicker of fireflies and broad wan flares of heat lightning. Con woke once in the night to hear the rain on the roof. The wind was blaring near at hand. In its large, free measures, like some deliberate adagio, there was naught of menace; but when he slept again, and awoke to hear its voice ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... electric machine, and is undoubtedly due to the disruptive discharge from cloud to earth. Sheet lightning has no shape, simply is a sudden glow, and from examination of the spectrum appears to be brush discharges (see Discharge, Brush) between clouds. Heat lightning is attributed to flashes below the horizon whose light only is seen by us. Globe or ball lightning takes the form of globes of fire, sometimes visible for ten seconds, descending from the clouds. On reaching the earth they sometimes rebound, and sometimes explode ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... and hot during that harvest season. The harvesters slept in the hayloft because it was cooler there than in the house. I used to lie in my bed by the open window, watching the heat lightning play softly along the horizon, or looking up at the gaunt frame of the windmill against the blue night sky. One night there was a beautiful electric storm, though not enough rain fell to damage the cut grain. The men went down to the barn immediately ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather

... he sat gloomy and taciturn in the uninclosed passage between the two rooms, watching alternately the fire-flies, as they instarred the dark woods with ever-shifting gold sparks, and the broad, pale flashes of heat lightning which from time to time illumined the horizon. There was no motion in the heavy black foliage, but it was filled with the shrill droning of the summer insects, and high in the branches a screech-owl pierced the air ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)



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