Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In botany, becoming liquid at maturity, as certain agarics.
  • Liquefying in the air; capable of becoming liquid by attracting moisture from the atmosphere: as, deliquescent salts.
  • Hence Apt to dissolve or melt away; wasting away by or as if by melting.
  • In vegetable histology, liquefying or melting away gradually, as part of the normal process of growth.
  • In botany, branching in such a way that the stem is lost in the branches.
  • noun A substance which becomes liquid by attracting moisture from the air.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Dissolving; liquefying by contact with the air; capable of attracting moisture from the atmosphere and becoming liquid.
  • adjective (Bot.) Branching so that the stem is lost in branches, as in most deciduous trees.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective chemistry absorbing moisture from the air and forming a solution
  • adjective botany Branching so that the stem is lost in branches, as in most deciduous trees.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective (especially of certain salts) becoming liquid by absorbing moisture from the air

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Latin deliquescens, present participle of deliquesco; de + liquesco ("I melt"): compare French déliquescent.

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Examples

  • Quickly and easily spell check more than 130,000 biotechnical terms such as deliquescent, magnetophoresis opiomelanocortin,

    MyLinkVault Newest Links 2009

  • His songs have been co-opted of late under the ironic rubric of "yacht rock," but classic songs like "Sailing" and "Ride Like the Wind"—both from a ubiquitous debut album with a deliquescent pink flamingo on it—serve nonetheless now as minor masterpieces of melody and mood.

    Go Back to Those Gold Sounds Andy Battaglia 2012

  • Dean creates webs of deliquescent, wintry sounds, through which the singer threads the atomised texts, syllable by syllable; it's fragile and transient, and finally delicately elusive.

    Cheltenham festival 2010

  • It is like putting your foot on a rock only to find that it has become deliquescent and trickled away.

    Clarification 2009

  • As we crossed the Station Heath on our way back, I checked the damp peat for sundew plants, and they too were still there, leaves unfurled so an unwary insect might trigger their honeyed, deliquescent tentacles.

    Wildwood Roger Deakin 2009

  • As we crossed the Station Heath on our way back, I checked the damp peat for sundew plants, and they too were still there, leaves unfurled so an unwary insect might trigger their honeyed, deliquescent tentacles.

    Wildwood Roger Deakin 2009

  • There was a time when naif alphabetters would have written it down the tracing of a purely deliquescent recidivist, possibly ambidextrous, snubnosed probably and presenting a strangely profound rainbowl in his (or her) occiput.

    Finnegans Wake 2006

  • Besides which he was deliquescent and scarlet, and felt so.

    The Wheels of Chance: a bicycling idyll Herbert George 2006

  • When, on the other hand, the composition of the deliquescent particles is congenial to the tongue, and disposes the parts according to their nature, this remedial power in them is called sweet.

    Timaeus 2006

  • Guermantes, who, a great deal more ‘old French’ even than the Duke when he was not trying, did often deliberately seek to be, but in a manner the opposite of the lace-neckcloth, deliquescent style of her husband and in reality far more subtle, by a sort of almost peasant pronunciation which had a harsh and delicious flavour of the soil.

    The Guermantes Way 2003

Comments

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  • "Even in Bergotte's books, all those Chinese puzzles of form, all those subtleties of a deliquescent mandarin seem to me to be quite futile."

    -- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 62 of the Modern Library paperback edition

    March 5, 2008

  • "'Don't listen to him, Ma'am, he's having you on; she's as stupid as a (h'm) goose,' came in a loud and husky voice from Mme de Guermantes, who, a great deal more 'old world' even than the Duke when she wasn't trying, often deliberately sought to be, but in a manner entirely different from the deliquescent, lace jabot style of her husband and in reality far more subtle, with a sort of almost peasant pronunciation which had a harsh and delicious flavour of the soil."

    --The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 664-665 of the Modern Library paperback edition

    September 10, 2008

  • "But Brichot was determined that I should have my share in the entertainment, and having learned, from those oral examinations which he conducted like nobody else, that the best way to flatter the young is to lecture them, to make them feel important, to make them regard you as a reactionary: 'I have no wish to blaspheme against the Gods of Youth,' he said, with that furtive glance at myself which an orator turns upon a member of his audience when he mentions him by name, 'I have no wish to be damned as a heretic and renegade in the Mallarméan chapel in which our new friend, like all the young men of his age, must have served the esoteric mass, at least as an acolyte, and have shown himself deliquescent or Rosicrucian.'"

    --Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 482-483 of the Modern Library paperback edition

    March 14, 2009