Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Full of or having pores.
- adj. Admitting the passage of gas or liquid through pores or interstices.
- adj. Easily crossed or penetrated.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Having pores; porose; pervious by means of minute interstices.
Wiktionary
- adj. Full of tiny pores that allow fluids or gasses to pass through.
- adj. full of loopholes
- adj. figuratively With many gaps.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Full of pores; having interstices in the skin or in the substance of the body; having spiracles or passages for fluids; permeable by liquids
WordNet 3.0
- adj. able to absorb fluids
- adj. full of pores or vessels or holes
- adj. allowing passage in and out
Etymologies
- Middle English, from Old French poreux, poros, from Medieval Latin porōsus, from Latin porus, passage; see pore2. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Clearly, there was an interview published in the "New York Times" today with the new defense minister of the newly formed Afghanistan government, where he said that Osama bin Laden is definitely in Tora Bora and he went on to tell these reporters that not only can he find hiding places in this very complicated maze structure, but that if he felt too much pressure from the United States, it would make easy access to what they described as the porous border with Pakistan.”
“They find a nice comfy nesting place in porous materials like woods. anna Says:”
“The walls between Blake's fiction and reality remain porous as characters”
“SpongeBob, as his song goes, "lives in a pineapple under the sea/absorbent and yellow and porous is he!”
“SpongeBush lives in a bubble in D.C./absorbent and shallow and porous is he!”
“The technology is the advancement of the Quantum technology based on the magnetic quantum-optical phenomenon in porous silicon, says Atom Chip.”
“Like the current Norton and Longman anthologies, the Broadview is "porous"--that is, multimedia.”
“Campbell points out that he's a fast healer, which was evident during his years with the Washington Redskins when he was playing behind what charitably can be described as a porous offensive line.”
The Washington Post: Brett Favre gets an injection in his ailing left ankle
“Mine have long been porous, which is a generous way of admitting that my lines between myself and others, in family and even more so at work, have been fuzzy.”
The Huffington Post: Wendy Strgar: The Importance of Boundaries
“What also comes over was that that small British force that was so tragically targeted by the A-10s was at "their limit of exploitation…", meaning that it was at the very edge of the area allocated to it, on a battlefield that "could have been described as porous, or less contiguous, with numerous small groupings of enemy vehicles operating in a 'shoot and scoot' mode of operation.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘porous’.
-
EN - fine scholarly language
exhort, accretion, twenty-nine, atrophy, additive, brilliantly, interreligious, empiricism, pathologic, limitless, half-century, vigilant and 488 more...
-
GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4087 more...
-
LIT - Ulysses - key words and phrases
money cowrie, bedraggle, omphalos, ineluctable, postprandial, bladderwrack, modality barnacle..., loofah, shipworm, cither, embattle, Malachi and 503 more...
-
SCIE - mathematics
The most frequent words in the titles of mathematical books and journals (www.sciencedirect.com)
surface, administration, project, motion, machine, medical, vision, solid, shape, scheme, income, proceed and 205 more...
-
GRE Barron's 800
zealot, wistful, welter, wary, whimsical, warranted, vortex, vivisection, volatile, vitiate, viscous, visage and 787 more...
-
The weird, the wonderful and the plai...
Loved for their ingenuity, an exact description, or simply for the pure joy of it.
acidulous, aprosdoketon, higgledy-piggledy, lexicographical, ninja, audacious, somnabulist, shivaree, amorphous, quidnunc, glib, melancholy and 353 more...
-
Weftage
The many textures of touch.
smooth, warty, velvety, sleek, grainy, shaggy, abrasive, scratchy, bumpy, corded, ribbed, roughish and 95 more...
-
worda
presumptuous, sanitize, sterile, drowsy, regicide, predilection, minutia, lascivious, hagiography, porous, pusillanimous, punctillious and 6 more...
-
pervious
or impervious that clouds and is the tissue
permeable, transcalent, diathermic, pervial, transpicuous, hepatization, leachy, transparent, well water, porous, poromeric, radiolucent and 6 more...
-
Chennessy's Words
philistine, messianic, dyad, cult, bourgeois, blot, ploy, polyglot, lingua franca, cumbersome, lumber, petit-bourgeois and 446 more...
-
curligirli0's Words
crapulous, swish, shiatsu, zen, xenoglossy, nincompoop, loquacious, pianissimo, onomatopoeia, imperturbable, silky, hosanas and 379 more...
-
madmelanie's Words
monkey, folderol, snark, snarky, flibbertigibbet, faith, asshat, pirouette, avuncular, exegesis, memento mori, verisimilitude and 379 more...
-
Novel Words
Concise words to sprinkle in my prose.
apropos, perception, discombobulated, adumbrate, apogee, antinomy, sanguine, glyph, taciturn, aesthetic, truncate, coffee and 143 more...
-
ADW1
obdurate, obstinate, behest, injunction, enjoin, circumspect, ensconce, discursive, lugubrious, doleful, somber, ken and 2476 more...
-
cloudjuice's Words
schadenfreude, sordid, promulgate, erratic, erroneous, amalgamate, sesquipedalian, incongruous, psychosis, etymology, simulacrum, serendipity and 988 more...
-
NakedFringe's Words
masticate, chamber, orchid, mandolin, yellow, pomegranate, conundrum, paradox, gyrate, calamitous, opalescent, cacophony and 533 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for porous.
brandonpepin Filled with holes, IE as in pores. See sponge Dec 7, 2006