Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Progressively wasting away.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- In medicine, suffering from tabes; wasting away; becoming emaciated.
- In botany, wasting or shriveling.
Wiktionary
- adj. Wasting away, or becoming emaciated.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Withering, or wasting away.
Etymologies
- Latin tābēscēns, tābēscent-, present participle of tābēscere, to waste away, inchoative of tābēre, from tābēs, a wasting away.
Examples
“At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim its literary property .”
“... as Wolfe makes clear, a writer needs to be big and strong because a real writer is more warrior than artist: “At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.””
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘tabescent’.
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theyearofglad's list
Awesome words.
palimpsest, portmanteau, prolix, sycophant, eschew, revenant, haecceity, velleity, equipoise, caesura, soteriology, inchoate and 23 more...
zweidinge wasting away; becoming emaciated or consumed May 17, 2009