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  1. liminal love

Definitions

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. Pertaining to the threshold or entrance; hence, relating to the beginning or first stage; inceptive; inchoative.
  2. Specifically In psychophysics, pertaiuing to the stimulus limen or differential limen. See limen.

Wiktionary

  1. adj. Pertaining to a threshold or entrance.
  2. adj. Relating to a beginning or first stage of a process; inceptive; inchoative; marginal; insignificant.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. adj. of or pertaining to a limen, especially a sensory threshhold.
  2. adj. marginally perceptible.

Etymologies

  1. From Latin liminalis, from limen, "threshold", + -alis, adjective ending (Wiktionary)

Examples

  • “Havdalah marks what is called a "liminal moment," a boundary between the sacredness of the Sabbath and the ordinary days of the week.”

    The Huffington Post: Rabbi Lawrence Troster: The Spice-Box Of Earth: Remembering Where We Come From

  • “Dragonflies tend to turn up at times in my life that I would describe as liminal -- threshold moments when you stand in the doorway between what your life was before and what it will be.”

    The Huffington Post: Cathleen Falsani: God Nods: Girl With the Dragonfly Tattoo

  • “In anthropological terms, the transformative experience discussed above takes place during a phenomenon called the liminal state, that moment when a person has stepped across a psychological "threshold" out of the ordinary "world" of existence into a new "place" where they are open to experience, something undefined and unknown.”

    A Motley Vision

  • “I was inspired to buy this by Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy, which ranks it as a key exemplar of one of the four modes of fantasy story-telling, the 'liminal' in which the boundary with the fantastic is hazy and uncertain; other examples being Little, Big (which I bounced off) and the first two Gormenghast books (which I remember loving as a teenager).”

    June Books 17) Lud-In-The-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees

  • “Power's photographs of contemporary Poland, taken over five years, often present what the writer Iain Sinclair has called "liminal" landscapes: in-between places often on the outskirts of cities, neglected and overlooked, neither here nor there.”

    The Guardian: The Sound of Two Songs by Mark Power

  • “The nachtzehrer is a dead body kept in a kind of liminal life by supernatural forces or Satan.”

    Plague Vampire Exorcism

  • “In our extended family, we have defined the "liminal" as the place where two very different states of being meet.”

    they lost our crib in CLT

  • “So right now, I am living in another kind of liminal space.”

    Random Thoughts on Life

  • “I'm so glad I started reading this anthology of "liminal", literary/genre works around the time I served on a panel on comics as interstitial art; for one thing, the panel was another project of the IAF, which is a great force for bringing literary attention to writers whose work might otherwise disappear, incorrectly, into the genre ghetto.”

    Archive 2007-06-22

  • “It's a fancy word that means "in between", in case you wondered -- kind of like "liminal".”

    Wednesday Stuff: Book Talk

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same context (18)

Words that are found in similar contexts

  1. main sequence
  2. inxationary
  3. pregenital
  1. all-pass
  2. pre-contest
  3. raffinate
  1. low-melting
  2. timeand
  3. secondorder
  1. incommensurate
  2. post-agnostic
  3. expiratory
  1. clonic
  2. host-guest
  3. elicitation
  1. sinusoid
  2. ever-constant
  3. anti-evolution

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  • hernesheir Railroad telegraphers' shorthand for the phrase Supreme Court of the United States. --US Railway Association, Standard Cipher Code, 1906, p.317. Jan 29, 2013

  • hernesheir A pair of nods to Victor Turner, my pals' Folklore advisor at Indiana University, would be "time-out-of-time" and "betwixt and between". Aug 5, 2009

  • catspringer Being neither altogether of one state or another. Between worlds. Mar 2, 2009

  • mollusque See also supraliminal. Dec 23, 2008

  • corylusavellana I was always told that Bronze Age burial mounds were often placed on the brows of hills, in a liminal location, giving a feeling of ancestral belonging to the residents of the valleys below. Dec 23, 2008

  • seanahan Interesting, knowing subliminal, but not this. Aug 1, 2008

  • houdini From Oxford Dictionary Online:


    a. gen. Of or pertaining to the threshold or initial stage of a process. rare.

    b. spec. in Psychol. Of or pertaining to a ‘limen’ or ‘threshold.’ Jul 31, 2008

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‘liminal’ has been looked up 5259 times, loved by 27 people, added to 116 lists, commented on 7 times, and has a Scrabble score of 9.