Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Made of silk.
- adj. Resembling silk in texture or appearance; smooth and lustrous. See Synonyms at sleek.
- adj. Delicately pleasing or caressing in effect: a silken voice.
- adj. Luxurious.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Of, pertaining to, or consisting of silk.
- Like silk; soft or lustrous; hence, delicate; tender; smooth.
- Dressed in silk; hence, luxurious.
- To make silky or like silk; render soft or lustrous.
Wiktionary
- adj. Made of silk.
- adj. Having a smooth, soft, or light texture, like that of silk; suggestive of silk.
- adj. figuratively, of speech, singing, etc. Smoothly uttered; flowing, subtle, or convincing in presentation.
- v. transitive To render silken or silklike.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Of or pertaining to silk; made of, or resembling, silk.
- adj. Fig.: Soft; delicate; tender; smooth.
- adj. Dressed in silk.
- v. To render silken or silklike.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. having a smooth, gleaming surface reflecting light
Etymologies
- From Middle English silken, from Old English seolcen ("made of silk, silken"), equivalent to silk + -en. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“She wrapped her tree in silken lies, spun promise-dreams of innocence, beguiling the fetid flies that were the souls of her progeny generations upon generations gone.”
“If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees, -- if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself”
“Sahim in silken robes of honour gold inwoven and set on”
“Truth, and they sought for it with such instance, and they so highly valued it that the high priests of the Greeks used to send it to all the countries of the Christians in silken wraps after mixing it with musk and ambergris.”
“He was beginning to be a very pretty baby; his golden hair curled in silken ringlets all over his little round head and his eyes were beautiful.”
“Their petals fell in silken heaps along the old paths or clung to the lush grasses among which Eric lay and dreamed, while Kilmeny played to him on her violin.”
“Garbed was she in silken raiment of tenderest green, wrought upon with some quaint workmanship of gold and silver.”
“The ripples of their hair, drawn back from the broad brown brows and knotted in silken abundance at the nape, glitter like polished jet, and the fine, haughty, dark features lit with little points of gold – tiny studs set in the high nostrils and the upper rims of the little ears.”
“Close to the strong stem, dangled oranges and rosy-cheeked apples; the sugar-plums were contained in silken bags, made in the shape of flour-sacks, and tied at the neck with a gilt string.”
“He had been for many years a cruel sufferer from the most atrocious form of rheumatic gout; chalkstones exuded from him like drops of blood; his limbs were all swathed in silken bandages; but at seventy years of age, and all but bedridden, there were still in his eye and in his voice the vigour and cheeriness of a young man.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘silken’.
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Artistic words
Good for poetry, or just artistic on their own.
fluxus, gallant, kinetic, lurk, disengage, mist, agleam, voyeur, devoid, crimson, ebony, azure and 94 more...
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Silk
filator, quadrivoltine, trivoltin, trivoltine, trigoneutic, grasserie, grege, samia cynthia, Bombyx, bombycid, silkworm, silk moth and 108 more...
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[Open] Suffix “-en” Meaning “Made Of”
or Yet Another Thing I Learned from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
These are adjectives formed (in Old or Middle English) by adding the suffix -en to a noun representing (in all...woolen, wooden, silken, oaten, oaken, leaden, hempen, golden, flaxen, earthen, brazen, birchen and 24 more...
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Suffix -en
-en
verb: to cause, to become
adjective: materialglisten, hasten, heighten, lengthen, mositen, silken, sharpen, sweeten, woolen, woven, moisten, darken and 4 more...
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Alternate
vixen, dulcet, iridescent, maiden, elysian, rhapsody, doll, ambrosia, azalea, daisy, holly, star and 8 more...
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Just 'cause I like 'em, S
scrunch, solace, sabotage, saccade, sacerdotal, sacrilegious, sacristy, snappy, skew, steadfast, scowl, scorch and 781 more...
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the most beautiful
velvet, wainwright, susurrous, nutmeg, pegasus, tintinnabular, gossamer, lyricism, rococo, townlet, prince, nymph and 139 more...
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#1
Words I Like
abide, sashay, microbial, scented, nature, amorphous, unknown, imagine, photogenic, soft, silken, history and 188 more...
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Words grabbed from real life conversa...
If I've seen it, heard it, or marvelled at it, I'll stick it here.
cruft, ermine, redundant, shakespearean, camino, marvelous, stupendous, chagrin, shaven, sleek, smug, stillness and 325 more...
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beatricks's Words
tremendous, naiad, thrush, samsara, thronging, nascent, broom, aristeia, streak, susurrant, reverberate, resistentialism and 352 more...
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Listless
Nowhere else to put these yet.
sibilant, cloying, pithy, apologia, odyssey, amanuensis, pleasantries, ginormous, burnish, sojourn, quonset, over-under and 217 more...
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just words.
coquette, solecism, peripherally, recrudescence, viscid, turpitude, sententious, light-heeled, interminably, unflappable, palpably, solicitous and 215 more...
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A list
clench, shudder, clamp, twisting, sharply, thrusting, crashing, pulsing, curling, thrumming, rippling, wrench and 94 more...
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Words That Are Sexy To My Ears
coloratura, chiaroscuro, leather, cognac, pulse, luscious, auburn, tawny, sibylline, murmur, delicious, musk and 107 more...
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good words
words that are mostly fun to say or just lovely
undulate, voluptuous, whimsy, parse, dank, cerulean, peen, traipsing, listless, coup de grace, reconnoiter, mercurial and 499 more...
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MISSGIVEN TITLES
words that i might put in my projects's titlte
medium, effigy, cineclub, ∞, guide, biscuit, voodoo, friends, spirit, palindrome, premium, minimus and 73 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for silken.
justBear Used for 31 MAR 11 Apr 1, 2011