Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The act of blinking.
- n. A blink or twinkle: the twinkling of a starry sky.
- n. The time it takes to blink once; an instant: disappeared in the twinkling of an eye.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The act of one who or that which twinkles; especially, a quick twitching or fluttering movement of the eye; a wink.
- n. The phenomenon of scintillation of the fixed stars, consisting of fluctuations of light and of color at the rate of from fifty to a hundred per second. ; The fluctuations of light did not escape the notice of the ancients; those of color were noticed by Robert Hooke in 1665. The phenomenon was, without any reason at all, generally supposed to have its origin in the eye, until William Nicholson, the chemist, showed in 1813 that, if the image of a twinkling star was stretched out into a ribbon by an irregular movement of the telescope, the fluctuations would appear as variations of light and color along this ribbon. Charles Dufour, in 1856, published the following generalizations of his observations, now known as Dufour's laws:
- n. The time required for one twinkle or wink, as of the eye; a flash; hence, a very short time.
Wiktionary
- adj. Sparkling intermittently.
- n. A shining with fast intermittent light.
- n. The time it takes to blink the eyes.
- v. present participle of twinkle.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. The act of one who, or of that which, twinkles; a quick movement of the eye; a wink; a twinkle.
- n. A shining with intermitted light; a scintillation; a sparkling.
- n. The time of a wink; a moment; an instant.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. shining intermittently with a sparkling light
- n. a very short time (as the time it takes the eye to blink or the heart to beat)
Examples
“I was delighted to find a huge globe that showed, in twinkling lights, the route of the Galleon Trade.”
“The figure of twinkling is thus evidence of ambience, a paradoxical "ground" for this figure, as the atmosphere is in front of the star.”
“Nevertheless, its twinkling is not useful for the traveler.”
“But without waiting for any permission, around her waist I put an arm, and had her raised in a twinkling from the ground, and bore her across the pool, she not struggling, but only whispering faintly when I set her down after it was well passed.”
The Heart's Highway: A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century
“Kelly Greene The descent to the idyllic spa at the Grove Park Inn. The Grove Park Inn The Grove Park Inn has an indoor pool built into a grotto with thousands of fiber-optic lights meant to look like stars twinkling from the rocks overhead.”
“They have powerful computers that can perform the multiplication in twinkling.”
Regulate Mutual Funds?, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
“The twinkling was the light falling upon the cabin windows of the ship's stern.”
“Generally speaking, TV is a glittery distraction: a shiny coin twinkling at a magpie.”
“The laser's optical system would have to overcome the distorting effect of atmospheric turbulence, the variations in pressure and temperature that refract starlight to create the "twinkling" effect in the night sky.”
The Wall Street Journal: Pentagon Loses War to Zap Airborne Laser From Budget
“That sunshine, should be a nice day there, and the lights kind of twinkling in the background.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘twinkling’.
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Visuals
A list of words which yield surprising, beautiful, amusing, or otherwise noteworthy images here on Wordnik.
photochrom, fufluns, thank you, cool l..., postcard, picture postcard, cricket, physiological ill..., Gakuryū Ishii, ametropia, One Froggy Evening, rhodopsin, Santiago Calatrava and 636 more...
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Fairylike
fairylike, enchanted, pixieish, pixyish, impish, mischievous, fluttery, magical, bewitching, enchanting, fey, otherworldly and 126 more...
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To a point
to the point
dot, betoken, cusp, nib, neb, nadir, bespeak, eutectic, punctilio, fulcrum, stretch a point, make a point and 69 more...
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lux
All things light-filled and radiant.
scintillate, radiate, elucidate, emanate, illuminate, sparkling, sparkle, glitter, glittering, glisten, shine, brighten and 97 more...
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The things they carried (List 2)
Listening to this as an audio book for the second time. Tim O'Brien uses simple words and phrases to great effect. Very few unfamilar and big words . The writing style reminds me of words from Joh...
The, Things, They, Carried, meant, fond, By necessity,, presented to him, far beyond, against the brick..., reaching, taut and 2940 more...
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amsstory's list
pretentious, delectable, egomaniacal, lionize, titillate, nebulous, obfuscation, ostentatious, wry, precipice, ethereal, echo and 150 more...
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My Enchanted Tree
by Trevor Duncan
enchanted, peculiar, represented, twinkling, gnomes, pixies, elves, beings, magnified, shrubs, glow, furnace and 2 more...
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Quantities&Groups&Time
dollop, fascicle, ladle, trice, blob, bout, coterie, bevy, pellet, throng, slew, crop and 10 more...
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I'll Be There In a Second, Pt. I
second, jiffy, trice, wink, flash, instant, moment, minute, shake, tick, twinkling, split second and 6 more...
Tweets
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