mephitic

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This graveyard, with its ruinous walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpses festering in slime beneath neglected slabs in hollow chambers, and the mephitic wash of poisoned waters that surround it, inspires the horror of disgust The morning has not lost its freshness.

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Definitions (4)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. adjective Of, relating to, or resembling mephitis; poisonous or foul-smelling. See Synonyms at poisonous.

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Examples (50)

  • "I happen to know what a mephitic is because a perfume salesman came into my beauty parlor last week and bored me to death with a lecture about the various perfumes which nature makes Well, what's a mephitic Any type of animal ejecting malodorous fluid," Pat said. —  119 - The Time Terror
  • This graveyard, with its ruinous walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpses festering in slime beneath neglected slabs in hollow chambers, and the mephitic wash of poisoned waters that surround it, inspires the horror of disgust The morning has not lost its freshness. —  New Italian sketches
  • Something unspeakably trivial, vulgar, and evil in it all reminded him of tired children when the romping begins to grow ill-natured And if the intellectual side of the struggle had been offensive, the moral atmosphere of the Committee Rooms, infected as it was by the candidates, had seemed to him to be even worse--mephitic, poisonous. —  Gulmore, The Boss
  • It was not my place, I thought, and thus their bones are bleaching, and the memory of their names has flown away like a mephitic vapour that was better dispersed. —  The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions Joints In Our Social Armour
  • The long curved counter glistens under the flare of the gas; the lines of gaudy bottles gleam like vulgar, sham jewelry; the glare, the glitter, the garish refulgence of the place dazzle the eye, and the sharp acrid whiffs of vile odour fall on the senses with a kind of mephitic influence. —  The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions Joints In Our Social Armour
 

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Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (1)

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. = French mèphitique = Spanish mefítico = Portuguese mephitico = Italian mefitico, from Late Latin mephiticus, pestilential, from Latin mephitis, a pestilential exhalation: see mephitis.
 

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/məˈfɪtɪk/
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