Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. An abyss.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A gulf; an abyss: as, “the abysm of hell,”
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. An abyss; a gulf.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a bottomless gulf or pit; any unfathomable (or apparently unfathomable) cavity or chasm or void extending below (often used figuratively)
Etymologies
- Middle English abime, from Old French abisme, from Vulgar Latin *abissimus, alteration of Late Latin abyssus; see abyss.
Examples
“First, in refraining the power of the devil, like as it is said (Apocalypsis vicesimo), of the angel that bound the devil and sent him into abysm, that is the pit of hell; and Tobit, which saith that the angel Raphael bound the devil in the outerest desert.”
“It is hard for women to resist the temptation of jewelries and women's jewelry box is like an abysm which is never full.”
TravelPod.com TravelStream™ — Recent Entries at TravelPod.com
“And all my austere nights of midnight oil, all the books I had read, all the wisdom I had gathered, went glimmering before the ape and tiger in me that crawled up from the abysm of my heredity, atavistic, competitive and brutal, lustful with strength and desire to outswine the swine.”
“Even going through it online I learned that, while ‘abysm’ (a lovely word) has fallen out of use in favour of ‘abyss’, we tend to use ‘abysmal’ rather than ‘abyssal’.”
“Showing in the blue abysm vistas luminously strange,”
“It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh.”
The Huffington Post: Asher Smith: Refudiate is the New Normalcy
“For today's younger audience, the 1960s and 1970s are so far lost in the backward abysm of time that they're more or less Victorian.”
“But before I do, I'm going to borrow a meme from a recent blog entry by my friend Lev whose blog you ought to be reading because it is excellent, and sort my iTunes by play count, thus sharing the dark backwards and abysm of my musical taste with you.”
“And all my austere nights of midnight oil, all the book I had read, all the wisdom I had gathered, went glimmering before the ape and tiger in me that crawled up from the abysm of my heredity, atavistic, competitive, and brutal, lustful with strength and desire to outswine the swine.”
“H.L. Mencken once wrote of Warren Harding that his inaugural address was "so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it," that it drug itself out of the "dark abysm ... of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘abysm’.
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Figuratively
Words with definitions containing "figuratively."
spore, plunge, fulminate, rasp, hinge, niche, breathe, approach, hammer, rain, butcher, dazzle and 128 more...
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Ends in "-sm" but isn't an "ism"
pleonasm, prism, schism, orgasm, spasm, iconoclasm, chasm, enthusiasm, phantasm, ectoplasm, cytoplasm, aneurysm and 55 more...
yarb "I resolved to run on for one glimpse of the still remoter future - one peep into the deeper abysm of time - and then to return to you and my own epoch."
- Wells, The Time Machine Jun 5, 2008
skipvia The flabby wine-skin of his brain
Yields to some pathologic strain,
And voids from its unstored abysm
The driblet of an aphorism.
Ambrose Bierce, The Mad Philosopher
I'm never opening my mouth in front of my class again. Oct 14, 2007