Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Numb or torpid, either physically or morally: as, benumbed limbs; benumbed faith.
Wiktionary
- v. Simple past tense and past participle of benumb.
- adj. Lacking sensation; numb
- adj. Lacking interest; dulled
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Made torpid; numbed; stupefied; deadened.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. having lost or been caused to lose interest because of overexposure
- adj. lacking sensation
Examples
“Nor are narcotics -- from narkosis, Greek for "benumbed" -- necessarily all about nodding.”
“King responded to the salute from Obama with a kind of benumbed indifference, although later in the show he expressed oddly unctuous gratitude to fellow TV talker "Dr. Phil" McGraw, who popped into the studio for a folksy bye-bye.”
The Washington Post: A star-studded, but still somewhat muted, farewell for 'Larry King Live'
“Besides, they were snarling all the time, and his benumbed and drowsy senses no longer took note of changing pitch and intensity.”
“For the most part, we are benumbed, befuddled or afraid.”
The Huffington Post: Judith Acosta: The Great American Trance
“Sturdy, more frost-resistant than bees, they were already on the wing and preying on the benumbed flies.”
“And for a country that was born of faith and the fearlessness of millions of people crawling, paddling and begging their ways here so they could be free to now be a country paralyzed by magical thinking and benumbed with viral fear is heartbreaking.”
“She wandered through the house and around the backyard in a benumbed state of shock.”
“If it doesn't, we wind up like Fitzgerald, lost in a lost city, besotted by booze and benumbed by grief.”
The Huffington Post: Judith Acosta: The Necessary Death of Romance
“It's an unthreatening simulacrum of dark passion in which everything wild and unheimlich about sexual obsession, murder, disfigurement and – my personal favourite – Dostoyevskian self-loathing is benumbed with unremittingly sweet tunes many of which, according to Kit and the Widow's turn at August's Comedy Prom, Lloyd Webber recycled from older, better composers.”
The Guardian: I don't know how to love him (the Phantom of the Opera, that is)
“The Ayatollah Khomeini thumbed his nose at a Vietnam–benumbed U.S. in the 1970s and the Iranians have been picking at us ever since.”
The Wall Street Journal: The Budget Crisis and American Power
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘benumbed’.
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goodkitten's list
there is going to be a lot of words...
flammivomous, pep, electrolyzation, research, constrain, why, refrigerator, invisible, windblown, curate's egg, echoism, drumble and 103 more...
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Les Misérables
A selection of words from the epic by Victor Hugo
perquisites, dispensations, execrate, spikenard, fireplaace, effeminate foppery, delaine, hoarfrost, lackadaisicalness, ort, geldings, milch and 103 more...
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words words words
words I'd like to keep close at hand; which make me think of Christmas; which are tasty to the tongue.
liminal, galumph, haberdasher, popinjay, medley, coprolalia, elevenses, smackerel, pootle, chattel, fizgig, benumbed and 3 more...
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Nabokovia
slime, mnemoptical, reverbed, forefeel, fair copy, scriggle, gaufrette, inamorata, wanter, noctambule, incarnadine, intercadence and 59 more...
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Words from The Brothers Karamazov
Vocabulary words.
sententiously, mutton, eunuch, anathema, casuistry, imperturbably, forerunner, birch, torpor, precipice, bravado, insolent and 74 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for benumbed.
mollusque . . . my mouth stayed mute and benumbed until I realized I could feel my tongue—feel it in the phantom form of the kind of air bladder that might help a fish with his respiration problems, but was useless to me.
--Vladimir Nabokov, 1974, Look at the Harlequins! p. 245 Jun 13, 2009