cloud-built
Definitions
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- null (adj) Fanciful; imaginary; chimerical; fantastic: applied to day-dreams or castles in the air.
Examples
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Down a delectable street of cloud-built palaces I was mentally pacing, when I happened upon the Artist.
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The same evening he took Alice with him for a ramble round the castle wall, while they talked of grave matters, and he as usual allowed her a dim and doubtful view of some of those cloud-built castles in which he habitually dwelt, and among which his jaded hopes revived.
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The Arapahoes and Camanches of our day are no further removed from the sweetness and light of Christian culture than were the Scandinavian Sea Kings of the middle centuries, whose gods were patrons of rapine and cruelty, their heaven a vast, cloud-built ale-house, where ghostly warriors drank from the skulls of their victims, and whose hell was a frozen horror of desolation and darkness, to be avoided only by diligence in robbery and courage in murder.
Note
The word 'cloud' comes from the Old English 'clud,' mass of rock, based on the similarity of cumulus clouds and rock masses.
