gleam

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Panting heavily, Ali started up, but the gleam was about him still, for the bright rays of the morning sun were shining down through the attap roof, and with a moan of misery he sank back once more on finding that he had been overcome by weariness, and that this last painful episode was only a dream.

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American Heritage Dictionary (6)

  1. noun A brief beam or flash of light: saw gleams of daylight through the cracks.
  2. noun A steady but subdued shining; a glow: the gleam of burnished gold.
  3. noun A brief or dim indication; a trace: a gleam of intelligence.

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  • But the gleam was there, really there, and, after another moment, I started walking down through the long grass, stumbling over Red Devils and weeds, skirting around holes I could barely see, but remembered from long familiarity with the place, night vision growing keener as I went down in the dark. —  Asimov's Science Fiction
  • Not a gleam was there! —  The poetical works of George MacDonald in two volumes — Volume 2
  • Panting heavily, Ali started up, but the gleam was about him still, for the bright rays of the morning sun were shining down through the attap roof, and with a moan of misery he sank back once more on finding that he had been overcome by weariness, and that this last painful episode was only a dream. —  Middy and Ensign
  • The passionate natures have an intelligence of their own; they follow a gleam which is visible to them if not to others; they discover, or rather they are discovered by, some truth which flashes forth in one inspired moment — the master-moment of a lifetime; they possess the sublime certainty of love, loyalty, devotion; if they err through a heroic folly and draw upon themselves ruin in things temporal, may there not be some atom of divine wisdom at the heart of the folly, which is itself indestructible, and which ensures for them a welfare out of time and space? —  Robert Browning
  • a gleam of the old sunshine illumines, so to speak, the chambers I occupy, and such a gleam was my retention for the Defence in the cause of _Quicksilver_ v. _Nore_. —  Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 23, 1891
 

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Gleam has been looked up 496 times, favorited 0 times, listed 30 times, commented on 0 times, and has a Scrabble score of 8.

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View all »Etymologies (7)

American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. Middle English glem, from Old English glǣm; see ghel-2 in Indo-European roots.

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Pronunciations

/ (glēm)/
by American Heritage Dictionary

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