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Pungent   Listen
adjective
Pungent  adj.  
1.
Causing a sharp sensation, as of the taste, smell, or feelings; pricking; biting; acrid; as, a pungent spice. "Pungent radish biting infant's tongue." "The pungent grains of titillating dust."
2.
Sharply painful; penetrating; poignant; severe; caustic; stinging. "With pungent pains on every side." "His pungent pen played its part in rousing the nation."
3.
(Bot.) Prickly-pointed; hard and sharp.
Synonyms: Acrid; piercing; sharp; penetrating; acute; keen; acrimonious; biting; stinging.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pungent" Quotes from Famous Books



... pocket a small silver tube, or phial, and uncorking this, measured out a certain number of drops into a silver spoon. As he swallowed the dose the phial slipped from his fingers and rang upon the hearthstone, spilling its contents in the ashes. A pungent and heady odour ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance

... been too thorough to permit of his refusing sustenance or attention to any guest of his master's, no matter how unworthy, and it was not many minutes before he was picking over "de ba'el" containing that peculiar pungent variety of plant so common to ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith

... odour at first produces a stinging sensation on the nerve of smell, but when inhaled in large measure becomes very nauseating. On one occasion, while I was opening a nest, several of the bees buzzing round my head and thrusting their stings through the veil I wore for protection, gave out so pungent a smell that I found it unendurable, and was compelled ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... fascinated beyond her control. The Vigilantes had planned their coup deliberately and well. The air she was breathing began to reek with the pungent smell of burning. A light smoke haze began to flood the picture. Now she beheld moving figures in the lurid glow which backed the scene. They were horsemen. But whether or not they were the Vigilantes she could not be certain. They were racing across the open, and the crack of their ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum

... minds—that his whole life was a cheat upon the world, and that, so far as he was concerned with the public, his little cunning had the upper hand of its united wisdom. Every day would furnish him with a succession of minute and pungent triumphs—as when, for instance, his importunity wrung a pittance out of the heart of a miser, or when my silly good-nature transferred a part of my slender purse to his plump leather bag, or when some ostentatious gentleman ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... With him always, at his side as he watched them, was one to whom he gave his heart and soul in love—a twin brother. Together they strolled along the banks of the stream; together explored the fields lying farther away from it, and gathered pungent mints and sticks of fragrant sassafras in the hills overlooking all—beyond which lay the Realm of Conjecture, and from which, looking southward across the great river, they caught glimpses of the Enchanted Land. Hand in hand and heart in heart they two, the only children of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce

... authority for that patch of paradise? Well, I can. Like the Don! like Sancho! This is the correct Andalusian dawn now—crisp, fresh, dewy, fragrant, pungent—" ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... which Miss Merriman laid over the baby's face, grew moist; a strange, pungent odor began to fill the room. As she bent over to watch intently what the nurse was doing, Rose suddenly found herself beginning to ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... and great bushes of marigold. Now, then! I can do anything! I can dig, and fertilize, and transplant. Best of all, I can plan and plan! The crisp wind stings my cheeks, but as I work I feel the sun hot on the back of my neck. I get the smell of the earth as I turn it over, mingled with the pungent tang of marigold blossoms, very pleasant out of doors, though almost too strong for the house except near a fireplace. I believe the most characteristic fall odors are to me this of marigold, mingled with the fragrance of apples piled in the orchard, the good ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge

... developing advertising director. One book could best be advertised by the conventional means of the display advertisement; another, like Triumphant Democracy, was best served by sending out to the newspapers a "broadside" of pungent extracts; public curiosity in a story like The Lady, or the Tiger? was, of course, whetted by the publication of literary notes as to the real denouement the author had in mind in writing the story. Whenever Mr. Stockton came into the ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok

... was sharp to his hands, but not too pungent, and, fortunately, he kept his face from contact with the floor, while struggling up he for the moment lost his nerve, and felt ready to rush ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn

... one; coves between—now charmed into sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and pungent of the sea—in front of all, the Bass ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... her guests 'were having a look at the mokes' Miss Abingdon still played through her book of sacred pieces; and it was on Sunday afternoons, too, that she always stirred the jars of potpourri upon the cabinets, so that their pungent, faint odour might exhale through the room. The old pieces of music and the scent of the dried rose-leaves together always brought back to Miss Abingdon's mind fragrant memories of ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan

... root is obtained by the Indian women; they wade into the water and loosen the root with their feet, which then floats, and is picked up and thrown into a canoe. It is of an oblong shape, of a whitish yellow, with four black rings around it, of a slightly pungent taste, and not disagreeable when ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... proportional deficiency in all that characterizes the vegetable world necessarily follows. This we find to be the case with all forced vegetables; and the mildness of the radish of hastened growth, when contrasted with the highly pungent and almost acrid flavour of the slowly and gradually advanced one, may be adduced as explanatory of this observation. Hence, it is practically well known to manufacturers, that the indigo plant, however fine and luxuriant, as is the natural ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various

... bag made of bed-ticking, about as long as a flour sack and half as wide, stuffed full of something. At sight of it, the crazy boy began to smack his lips. When Mrs. Shimerda opened the bag and stirred the contents with her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell, very pungent, even among the other odors of that cave. She measured a teacup full, tied it up in a bit of sacking, and presented it ceremoniously ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather

... sleep soundly after her emotional ordeal, until she remembered that when at last Don Carlos had desisted in his attempt to make her surrender herself voluntarily and had left her, Madre Dolores had reappeared and insisted upon her drinking something out of a glass. The "something" was a sweet and pungent cordial, which ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage

... munching a lettuce leaf, and placed it in a convenient spot on the table. Then, after Locke, as well as the professor, had carefully adjusted the masks, the latter lighted a Bunsen burner and applied the flame to the deadly crystals. A pungent fume was given off and collected in a rubber bag, or cone, from ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey

... gasp as the pungent liquid almost strangled me, I opened my eyes to find that the physician's arm was supporting my shoulder and his hand holding the ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison

... dwellings rising from masses of glorious greenery, brightened by purple torrents of bougainvillea, or golden-flowered ansena trees, wreathed and roped with a gorgeous tangle of many-coloured creepers. The breath of heavily-scented flowers mingles with the pungent sweetness of clove and nutmeg. An avenue of dadap trees skirts the shore, with varied foliage of amber and carmine. The dark figures sauntering in the shade, and clad in rose-colour, azure, or orange, add deeper notes to the symphony of colour, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... vanity was injured by Nero's sudden withdrawal from a recitation.[254] From servile flattery he turned to violent criticism: he spared his former patron neither in word nor deed. He turned the sharp edge of his satire against him in various pungent epigrams, and was forbidden to recite poetry or to plead in the law courts.[255] But it would be unjust to Lucan to attribute his changed attitude purely to wounded vanity. Seneca was at this very moment attempting to retire ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler

... and clinking of glasses came from the back of the house, but the large schoolroom was empty, and only lighted by a small lamp. His wife was lying on a plank bed; a pungent smell of vinegar pervaded the room. That smell took the heart out of Slimak; surely his wife must be very ill! He stood over her; her eye-lashes twitched and she looked steadily ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... trees, a firebrand in each mouth, I felt a love for them! Luis thought the lighted sticks some rite of their religion, but after a while when we came to examine them, we found them not true stick, but some large, thickish brown leaf tightly twisted and pressed together and having a pungent, not unpleasing odor. We crumbled one in our hands and tasted it. The taste was also pungent, strange, but one might grow to like it. They called the stick tobacco, and said they always used it thus with fire, drinking in the smoke and puffing it out again as they showed ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston

... made. Just before the fifteen minute time allowance had expired, the two girls stepped out into a glorious forest morning. Great trees towered above them, the forest birds were raising their voices in a melodious chorus, fresh, pungent odors from spruce and hemlock trees filled the air and somewhere near at hand, a stream splashed and ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas • Janet Aldridge

... coughed for half a minute. The interval may have given him the courage to defend his own property. Also, he clutched his pungent prize greedily, and, with a show of spirit, ...
— Options • O. Henry

... because the assistant evidently did not want him to go in, Rostov entered the soldiers' ward. The foul air, to which he had already begun to get used in the corridor, was still stronger here. It was a little different, more pungent, and one felt that this was ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... been dried leaves, leaves of different sorts, broken and powdery. There was a trace of moisture in them still, for a low flame sprang up immediately at the bottom of the dish, and a thick vapour filled the room. It had a singular and pungent odour that Margaret did not know. It was difficult to breathe, and she coughed. She wanted to beg Oliver to stop, but could not. He took the bowl in his hands and ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham

... hearth," commanded the Bishop; adding to his guest: "The evening air strikes chilly. Also I greatly love the smell of burning wood. It is pungent to the nostrils, and refreshing to ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay

... smell violets, or if violets were impossible in July, they must grow something very pungent on the mainland then. The mainland, not so very far off—you could see clefts in the cliffs, white cottages, smoke going up—wore an extraordinary look of calm, of sunny peace, as if wisdom and piety had descended upon the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... few strange chords, and then fell into a monotonous melody with a recurring refrain repeated again and again. The blue smoke from the incense-brazier curled lazily upward in long spirals and floated through the room, filling it with a pungent and heavy sweetness; the monotonous music went on, the strange rhythm recurring in an ever stronger beat. The Mariposa who had sat motionless gazing at the crystal ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... a vague idea so often has the power to unite deeply felt opinions? These opinions, we recall, however deeply they may be felt, are not in continual and pungent contact with the facts they profess to treat. On the unseen environment, Mexico, the European war, our grip is slight though our feeling may be intense. The original pictures and words which aroused ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... in the justice which held the balance, they yet left one with the feeling, that, after all, the delicate main-springs of character had been missed. Broad contrasts, heaps of good and evil, almost exaggerated praises, pungent satire, catalogues of sins that seemed pages from some Recording Angel's book,—these were his mighty methods; but for the subtilest analysis, the deepest insight into the mysteries of character, one must look elsewhere. It was still scene-painting, not portraiture; and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... descriptions of a distant world that they were never likely to see; the splendours of modern civilisation touched them much more nearly than the beauties of heaven as described in the sermons, and in the pungent and dusty atmosphere of the dirty little house they would see unrolled before their mind's eye beautiful and fantastic cities, and they would ask questions in all innocence as to the food and habits of those distant people, as though they ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... Truth no charms?' When first beheld, I grant, But, wanting novelty, has every want: For pleasure's thrill the sickly palate flies, Save haply pungent with a rare surprise. The humble toad that leaps her nightly round, The harmless tenant of the garden ground, Is loath'd, abhor'd, nay, all the reptile race Together join'd were never half so base; Yet snugly find her in some quarry pent, Through ages doom'd ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston

... to be a purely political proceeding. It is needed as a remedy for malfeasance in office and to prevent the continuance thereof. Beyond that it is not intended as a punishment for past offenses or for future example." He made one of his peculiarly pungent speeches, which for some unexplained reason was scarcely less bitter on General Grant than upon President Johnson. The whole day's proceedings had been extraordinary. Never before had so many members addressed the House on a single day. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... myself as I moved with lagging steps over the steep mountainside down to the quiet little brook. 'Enough,' I said again, as I drank in the resinous fragrance of the pinewood, strong and pungent in the freshness of falling evening. 'Enough,' I said once more, as I sat on the mossy mound above the little brook and gazed into its dark, lingering waters, over which the sturdy reeds thrust up their ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... household that knew how to read,—which may account for it in some measure. It was here that Miss Elaine came in while she was thinking so hard, and found old Mistletoe huddled to the fire. She had been secretly reading the first chapters of a new and pungent French romance, called "Roger and Angelica," that was being published in a Paris and a London magazine simultaneously. Only thus could the talented French author secure payment for his books in England; for King John, who had recently murdered ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister

... band-stand this evening, and the leading columns are occasionally excruciatingly good, when a literary corporal of the Fusiliers discusses the political horizon, or unmasks the Herald, pointing out with the most pungent sarcasm how "our virtuous contemporary puts his hands in his breeches pockets, like a crocodile, and sheds tears;" but during the parade season the corporal writes little, and articles by the regular staff, upon the height to which cantonment hedges should be allowed to grow, are apt to be dull. ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA

... roar on the right had become terrific. The Rebel army was unfolding its front, and the battle was steadily advancing in our direction. We could begin to see the blue rings of smoke curling upward among the trees off to the right, and the pungent smell of burning gun-powder filled the air. As the roar came travelling down the line from the right it reminded me (only it was a million times louder) of the sweep of a thunder-shower in summer-time over the hard ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell

... that carried him towards her as it were of their own accord, he approached her. And as he drew nearer, there came from that creeper a wave of perfume, resembling that of jasmine, but sweeter, and so pungent that it entered like fire into his soul. And then she lifted the pitcher from her head, and set it down upon the ground, and caught him by the hand, and drew him within the hut. And there she cast herself ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain

... and a new one is formed by the mastication of a fresh mouthfull of coca leaves. In Cerro de Pasco, and in places still further south, the Indians use, instead of unslaked lime, a preparation of the pungent ashes of the quinua (Chenopodium Quinua, L.). This preparation is called Llucta or Llipta. In using it a piece is broken off and masticated along with the acullico. In some of the Montana regions ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi

... romantic smell of red roses in this June landscape. Just tobacco smoke, and the faint reminiscent fragrance of fried trout, and the mournful, sizzling, pungent consciousness of a camp-fire quenched for a whole year with a ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... and cigarette, by sparks from donkey engines, by untended camp fires, wherever the careless white man went in the great coastwise forests. The woods were like a tinder box. One unguarded moment, and the ancient firs were wrapped in sheets of flame. Smoke lay on the Gulf like a pall of pungent fog, through which vessels ran by chart and compass, blind between ports, at imminent risk ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... as "Gigues" and "Jeux" and "Karma," Ravel has continued increasingly in power, has developed his art until he has come to be one of the leaders of the musical evolution. If there is a single modern composition which can be compared to "Petruchka" for its picture of mass-movement, its pungent naturalism, it is the "Feria" of the "Rapsodie espagnol." If there is a single modern orchestral work that can be compared to either of the two great ballets of Strawinsky for rhythmical vitality, it is "Daphnis et Chloe," ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... fine, kindly wisdom is brought to bear upon the lives of all, permeating the whole volume like the pungent odor of pine, healthful and life giving. "Old Chester Tales" will surely be among ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... the ocean, ready to destroy the passing ships; the still more wonderful lighthouses, rising, some of them, like tall white needles into the turquoise sky; the gulls, flashing grey and white in the sunshine; the salt scent of the sea mingling with the pungent fragrance of the yellow gorse, hot with the sun ... surely the Cornish coast was a very favoured spot, and the Scilly Isles, to which passage could be taken in a queer, cranky boat, were indeed the Fortunate Isles, cradled by the ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes

... well-watered country, but still occupied by scrub; in which the Capparis, with its large white sweet-scented blossoms, was very frequent; but its sepals, petals, and stamens dropped off at the slightest touch. Its fruit was like a small apple covered with warts, and its pungent seeds were imbedded in a yellow pulp, not at all disagreeable to eat. At last the scrub ceased, and, over an open rise on the right side of Comet Creek, a range of blue mountains was discovered by my companion, promising ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt

... directly after we had glimpses of the lower part of a bearded face, at first seen distinctly, then it grew darker, and again seen plainer as its owner puffed at the big pipe he was lighting. Then all was in darkness once more, and the pungent smoke of coarse tobacco floated ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn

... are sometimes so moderate as scarcely to attract attention, slight and irregular shivering, nausea, perhaps vomiting, thirst, and heat of skin; whilst, at others, there is considerable constitutional disturbance, indicated by pungent heat of skin, flushing of the face, suffusion of the eyes, pain in the head, great anxiety and restlessness, ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.

... evil. In a strawberry, we think only of the fruit; in a hawthorn, or the flowers; in a deadly nightshade, of the poisonous berry; and in a nettle, of the sting. Now, I frankly admit at the present moment that the nettle sting has an obtrusive and unnecessarily pungent way of forcing itself upon the human attention; but it does not sum up the whole life-history of the plant in its own one peculiarity for all that. The nettle exists for its own sake, we may be sure, and not merely for the sake of occasionally inflicting ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... of D'Elei, Guadagnali, and others are characterized by wit and beauty of versification. Those of Leopardi are bitter and contemptuous, while Giusti (1809-1850), the political satirist of his age, scourged the petty tyrants of his country with biting severity and pungent wit; the circulation of his satires throughout Italy, in defiance of its despotic governments, greatly contributed ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... of nitrogen and hydrogen. It has a pungent smell and is familiarly known as hartshorn. The same odor is perceptible around stables and other places where animal matter is decomposing. All animal muscle, certain parts of plants, and other organized substances, consist of compounds ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring

... very hilly, and in many parts the woods were well-nigh impenetrable in spite of our axes. Most of the trees and shrubs had at this time either blossoms or berries on them, red, white, and yellow, that filled the air with sweet and pungent odours. It was a large island, and on the other side of the ridge of hills which rose up so sharply from the place where we first landed the land stretched almost level for a considerable distance before it dropped again in low cliffs to the sea. Part of this plain ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... A pungent smell passed through the chamber. It produced for the moment dizziness in all present. Then the sensation cleared away. The Chinaman at the right of Li Choo looked steadfastly at him; then, all at once, he bared his shoulders and quickly bound a piece of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... saturnine front, was to be an original. There was nobody in whose company one felt so much of the ineffable comfort of being quite safe against an attack of platitude. There was nobody on whom one might so surely count in the course of an hour's talk for some stroke of irony or pungent suggestion, or, at the worst, some significant, admonitory, and almost luminous manifestation of the great ars tacendi. In spite of his copious and ordered knowledge, Pattison could hardly be said to have an affluent mind. He did not impart intellectual direction like ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley

... more than ever. As he gazed rather hopelessly over the landscape the sunset light struck on a window of the old West homestead on the hill. It flared out rosily like a beacon of good hope. He suddenly remembered Rosemary and Ellen West. He thought that he would relish some of Ellen's pungent conversation. He thought it would be pleasant to see Rosemary's slow, sweet smile and calm, heavenly blue eyes again. What did that old poem of Sir Philip Sidney's say?—"continual comfort in a face"—that ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... enormous quantities, preferring hard-wood charcoal. Bruyesinus speaks of a woman who had a most perverted appetite for her own milk, and constantly drained her breasts; Krafft-Ebing cites a similar case. Another case is that of a pregnant woman who had a desire for hot and pungent articles of food, and who in a short time devoured a pound of pepper. Scheidemantel cites a case in which the perverted appetite, originating in pregnancy, became permanent, but this is not the experience of most observers. The pregnant wife of a farmer in Hassfort-on-the-Main ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... of the hill, a vast, torn crater, nearly a hundred feet across and six to ten feet deep, smoked like a stirring volcano and gave off a strange, pungent odor ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael

... and embraced with so much passion, that they fainted, and would have fallen, if the woman who followed Schemselnihar had not hindered them. They supported them to a sofa, where they were brought to themselves, by throwing odoriferous water on their faces, and applying pungent odours to ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.

... the little tent, with the pungent pine-wood smoke drifting past him and his feet toward the fire, while dusk crept up the range and a wonderful stillness settled down upon the lonely valley. His hands were badly blistered, and he was aching in every limb, while some of his knuckles had the flesh torn off them, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... And though the circle of his readers may have no tendency to increase, one can hardly suppose that a charm, which those who still feel it feel so keenly, will ever entirely cease to captivate; or that time can have any power over a perfume which so wonderfully retains the pungent freshness of its fragrance after the ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill

... million needles. To my sight and hearing, the room was whirling and roaring. I felt Tarrano bending swiftly over me; felt the forcible insertion of a branched metal tube in my nostrils; a hand over my mouth. I struggled to hold my breath—failed. Then inhaled with a gasp, a pungent, sickening-sweet gas. Roaring, clanging gongs sounded in my ears—roaring and clattering louder, then fading into silence. A wild, tumbling phantasmagoria of dreams. Then ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... Pumice-stone pumiko. Pumpkin kukurbo. Punch (drink) puncxo. Punch and Judy pulcxinelo. Punctilious precizema. Punctual gxustatempa, akurata. Punctuality akurateco. Punctuate interpunkcii. Punctuation interpunkcio. Puncture trapiki. Pungent pika, morda. Punish puni. Punishment puno—ado. Puny malgranda, malfortika. Pupil (scholar) lernanto. Pupil (of eye) pupilo. Puppet pupo, marioneto. Puppy hundido. Purchase acxeti. Pure (clean) pura. Pure (morals) virta. Pure pistajxo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... abhorred messes. And this was a particularly messy mess. The greater part of the flooring in the neighbourhood of the door was a sea of red paint. The tin from which it had flowed was lying on its side in the middle of the shed. The air was full of the pungent scent. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse

... seen Aholibah look so radiant. She was in high spirits, and her pungent talk aroused her companion from incipient moroseness. After midnight the party grew—some actresses from a near-by theatre came in with their male friends, and another waiter was detailed to the aid of Ambroise. But he stuck to the first-comers and served so much wine to them that he had ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... wounded and taken prisoner in the great engagement at Thiepval in the battle of the Somme, and had to endure all the rigours of captivity in Germany till the end of the war. There was afterwards not a little pungent comment among his friends on the fact that, when honours were descending in showers on the heads of the just and the unjust alike, a full share of which reached members of Parliament, sometimes for no very conspicuous merit, no recognition of ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... the garlic but as a rank, pungent flavor. To the foreigner garlic is as sweet tasting as the onion and its flavor delightful in food. Just that dash that it needs to give it zest. Separate a clump of garlic into cloves and then peel and place in a fruit jar. Now bring one pint of white wine vinegar ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson

... sickly than those possessing higher organiza- tions, especially those of the human form. This would indicate that there is less disease in propor- 555:1 tion as the force of mortal mind is less pungent or sensi- tive, and that health attends the absence of mortal mind. 555:3 A fair conclusion from this might be, that it is the human belief, and not the divine arbitrament, which brings the physical organism ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... with leaves, stood out against the soft blue of the sky, and the sunlight poured over everything, bathing the stone walls, the thatches of the farmhouses, extracting from the copses of stunted pine a pungent, reviving perfume. Sometimes she stopped to rest on the pine needles, and walked on again, aimlessly, following the road because it was the easiest way. There were spring flowers in the farmhouse yards, masses of lilacs whose purple she drank in eagerly; the air, which had just a tang of New England ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... is the mustard of the parable—this common Black Mustard, or a rarer shrub-like tree (Salvadora Persica), with an equivalent Arabic name, a pungent odor, and a very small seed. Inasmuch as the mustard which is systematically planted for fodder by Old World farmers grows with the greatest luxuriance in Palestine, and the comparison between the size of its seed and the plant's great height was already proverbial in the East when Jesus used it, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... fire in the bottom of the pail, feeding it with peat, damp moss, punk maple, and other inflammable smoky fuel. This censer swung twice or thrice about the tent, effectually cleared it. Besides, both men early established on their cheeks an invulnerable glaze of a decoction of pine tar, oil, and a pungent herb. Towards the close of July, however, the insects began sensibly to diminish, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... people the company could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,—who on week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among the pungent, lung-eating vats of acid. The fumes rose in yellow clouds. Each man wore something over his nose and mouth resembling a sponge. But many, grown careless, or through a silly code of mistaken manliness, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... spoke he made us rise, and forced us before him—neither of us speaking—through the bushes and on to the path, a little point of light appearing above me, and puffs of pungent smoke from a cigar ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn

... Dorothy Nevill was possessed neither of gravity nor of pathos; she was totally devoid of sentimentality. This made it easy for a superficial observer to refuse to believe that the author of so many pungent observations and such apparently volatile cynicism had a heart. When this was once questioned in company, one who knew her well replied: "Ah! yes, she has a heart, and it is like a grain of mustard-seed!" But her kindliness was shown, with great fidelity, to those whom she really honoured with ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... upon modulatory changes in the first theme; and then, towards the middle, occurs a passage which seems to be a counterpart of the second theme, save that it is in the major mode. We are now carried onward through a series of passages, with pungent dissonances and imitative phrases, to a fortissimo dominant chord; thence through a descending cadenza-like passage we are whirled back to the Recapitulation. In material and treatment this corresponds exactly to the Exposition and has the same ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... to move away from the vicinity; and, returning to the front of the hut he stood for a time by the side of Fritz, gazing with great admiration at the blaze, which, mounting higher and higher, quickly enveloped the gorge with clouds of that light, pungent smoke which wood fires always ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson

... magazine shot-guns, taking instead the double-barrelled kind, on account of the rapidity with which this enabled them to fire the second barrel after the first, and threw away the water that had collected in the bucket, out of respect to the spirit's warning. They noticed a pungent odour, and decided to remain on high ground, since they had observed that the birds, in their effort to escape, had flown almost vertically into the air. On reaching the grove in which they had seen the storm, they found their table and everything on it exactly as they had left it. Bearwarden ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... of artemisias, as they were called, that diffused a pungent fragrance. We had not shaken hands so neighborly with Japan then, nor learned how she ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas

... they with sorrow-riven hearts Searched all Jerusalem's costliest marts In quest of,—nards whose pungent arts ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... past summer, Polunin and Kseniya Ippolytovna used to greet the glowing dawn together. At sundown, when the birch-trees exhaled a pungent odour and the crystal sickle of the moon was sinking in the west, they bade adieu until the morrow on the cool, dew-sprinkled terrace, and Polunin passionately kissed—as he believed—the pure, innocent ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak

... temperature of from 226 to 230 degrees Fahrenheit. Wool when ignited does not burn with a bright flame, as vegetable fiber does, but consumes with a feeble smouldering glow, soon extinguishes, spreading a disagreeable pungent vapor, as of burning horn. By placing a test tube with a solution of five parts caustic potash in 100 parts water, a mixture of vegetable fibers and wool fibers, the latter dissolve if the fluid is brought to boiling ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various

... I have likewise more then once seen a spontaneous Coagulation in the Receiver: And I have of it by me thus Congeal'd; which is of such a strangely Penetrating scent, as if 'twould Perforate the Noses that approach it. The like pungent Odour I also observ'd in the Distill'd Liquor of common sope, which forc'd over from Minium, lately afforded an oyle of a most admirable Penetrancy; And he must be a great stranger, both to the Writings and preparations of Chymists, that sees not in the Oyles ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle

... same, with the addition of a tablespoonful of brown flour wet into a paste with cold water, adding a tablespoonful of catsup, Worcestershire, or other pungent sauce, and a glass ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette

... humour; but there was fine sentiment, touches of pathos, and now and then imagination peeped over like an Alp above meaner hills. Swift alone, we suspect, was his match; but his power lay rather in severe and pungent sarcasm, in broad, coarse, though unsmiling wit, and at times in the fierce and terrible sallies of misanthropic rage and despair. Addison, on leaving England, had, by his modesty, geniality, and amiable manners, become the most popular man ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville

... senses,—you can know what is the matter with you,—you can keep from visiting your overdose of Christmas mince-pies and candies and jocularities on the heads of Mrs. Crowfield, Rover, and Jennie, whether in the form of virulent morality, pungent criticisms, or a free kick, such as you just gave ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... These, for a time, were unsuccessful. The first indication of revival was afforded by a partial descent of the iris. It was observed, as especially remarkable, that this lowering of the pupil was accompanied by the profuse out-flowing of a yellowish ichor (from beneath the lids) of a pungent and highly offensive odor. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... the theme. A vain, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy egotist, defending his own sordid doings with his own cheap and weather-beaten philosophy, is very likely to express himself best in a language flexible and pungent, but indelicate and without dignity. But the peculiarity of these loose and almost slangy soliloquies is that every now and then in them there occur bursts of pure poetry which are like a burst of birds singing. Browning does ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... constitute the more immediate seat of this sense. It is in these sensitive papillae that the ramifications of the gustatory or tasting nerves terminate. When fluids are taken into the mouth, and especially those whose taste is pungent, these papillae dilate and erect themselves, and the particular sensation produced is transmitted to the brain through the medium of the minute filaments of the ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew

... at the man in the long robe, who smoked yellow cigarettes and filled the air with their peculiar fumes. It seemed to him, suddenly, that he had taken leave of his senses, and that this cell—this pungent perfume—this man with the soul-searching eyes, the incisive voice—all were tricks ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... all rush for the stairway that led out-of-doors, the air gradually became filled with something even more stifling than coal-dust—something that choked them and made their eyes smart. It was the pungent smoke of burning wood; and by the time they fully realized its presence the air was thick with it, and to breathe seemed wellnigh impossible. Then, just as the boys were beginning to start from their ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe

... nearly to the end, burned noisily. Small explosions took place in the heart of the flame, driving through its smoky blaze strings of hard, round puffs of white smoke, no bigger than peas, which rolled out of doors in the faint draught that came from invisible cracks of the bamboo walls. The pungent taint of unclean things below and about the hut grew heavier, weighing down Lingard's resolution and his thoughts in an irresistible numbness of the brain. He thought drowsily of himself and of that ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad

... from human excrement burnt and calcined and made into lees, and dried by a slow fire, and all dung in like manner yields salt, and these salts when distilled are very pungent. ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... the pleasures of the city, the love of friends or relatives, could make us wish to end the wild, free life of the year gone by. Silently we left the house and walked across the sunlit road into a grove of graceful, drooping palms; a white pagoda gleamed between the trees, and the pungent odor of wood smoke ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews

... last frail bond of winter and had set the spring world free. Trees and bushes and shrubs were frosted with clinging, glistening diamonds that shimmered and gleamed in the sun, while the moist, warm earth sent up a pungent sweetness found only in the ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield

... yet repaired the omission; she had not even produced any humorist of a high order. Among her great writers, Lessing is the one who is the most specifically witty. We feel the implicit influence of wit—the "flavor of mind"—throughout his writings; and it is often concentrated into pungent satire, as every reader of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie remembers. Still Lessing's name has not become European through his wit, and his charming comedy, Minna von Barnhelm, has won no place on ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... The one blouse that was indifferent to what went on was stretched on a mat in a corner. One end of a clumsy pipe was in his mouth, the other held over a little spirit-lamp on the divan on which he lay. Something fluttered in the flame with a pungent, unpleasant smell. The smoker took a long draught, inhaling the white smoke, then sank back on his couch ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... applied to the surface of the eye—such as a cold wind, slow inflammatory action, or a blow on the eyelids— would cause a copious secretion of tears, as we know to be the case. The glands are also excited into action through the irritation of adjoining parts. Thus when the nostrils are irritated by pungent vapours, though the eyelids may be kept firmly closed, tears are copiously secreted; and this likewise follows from a blow on the nose, for instance from a boxing-glove. A stinging switch on the face produces, as I have seen, the same effect. In these latter cases the secretion ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin

... to-day had rooted up the geraniums and dug over the empty flower beds, just below, preparatory to planting them with bulbs for spring blossoming. The keen, pungent scent of the newly-turned earth hung in the humid air, as, mingling with it—a less agreeable incense—did the reek of the mud-flats. On the right the twin ilex trees formed a mass of soft imponderable gloom. Above and behind ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... mindful of the freezing temperature, the thought of the duty of rising may become so pungent that it determines action in spite of inhibition. In the latter case, I have a sense of energetic moral effort, and consider that I have done ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James

... boat-hook in his right hand and kept his eyes and ears alert. He heard a dog bark somewhere in front of him in the whitish-gray obscurity. Presently he came to where the path kinked and sloped down among a jumble of rocks, and at the same moment he caught the pungent, comforting smell of wood-smoke on the fog. Then he knew that Chance Along—the roof which sheltered Flora Lockhart—lay hidden and dripping beneath him. He was about to commence a cautious descent of the ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts

... husband; but, with this exception, little is said of him in the story. It would seem that Tasma regards broadly humorous exaggeration to be scarcely compatible with her somewhat grave style, for in all the later stories her satire, if not less pungent, is of ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne



Words linked to "Pungent" :   acrid, pungency, biting, barbed



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