Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Thick and adhesive. Used of a fluid.
- adj. Covered with a sticky or clammy coating.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Sticky; having a sticky or glutinous consistency; produced by or covered by a tenacious coating or secretion.
Wiktionary
- adj. Viscous; having a high viscosity.
- adj. Sticky, slimy, or glutinous.
- adj. Covered with a viscid layer.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Sticking or adhering, and having a ropy or glutinous consistency; viscous; glutinous; sticky; tenacious; clammy.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. having the sticky properties of an adhesive
Etymologies
- From Late Latin viscidus, from viscum ‘birdlime’. (Wiktionary)
- Late Latin viscidus, from Latin viscum, mistletoe, birdlime made from mistletoe berries. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“The nattō strings itself are often described by the Japanese ideophone nebaneba, which roughly translates as 'viscid' or 'gooey'.”
“Considerably more alarming was a series of photographs of Linder and an American gallerist accomplice covered in a wild array of gloopy, dripping colour; in one image, only the artist's eyes were recognisable, such was the quantity of what seemed to be viscid pigment.”
“With the ingestion, she trembles, the meal, thawed, invested now by all of him, crumbling, eyes strained wide, blood moving in viscid rivers, her venom coming back to poison her.”
“The hippos, sodden and viscid ... the crocodiles, deaf, angry, hungry ... swambats, as furious as rhinoceri whose size they doubled ...”
“The vague goggling eyes...were cold and merciless in their viscid hatred...”
“More generally, an association between Larrea, tarbush (Florensia cernua) and viscid acacia (Acacia neovernicosa) dominates the northernmost portion of the desert.”
“The crescent-shaped floor of the caldera teems with a network of smaller volcanic mouths, cones, domes, lava channels, dikes, lavas from light felsic flows to viscid red lavas and black obsidian blocks, ochre plains of sandy alluvial deposits and red and black volcanic ejecta, scoria, lapilli and pumice, from a long series of basaltic effusions.”
“Tucson is the viscid sump toward which all these rough beasts slink, and apocalypse-specifically the end of the white man's reign in the Americas and the triumphant reclamation by Native Americans of their lands-is the crossbred offspring of all of their mongrelizing enterprises.”
“The stew was barely warm but David started to eat anyway, hoping to forget his troubles for a little while as he shoveled the viscid beef out of the can.”
“If is is not boiling rapidly, there is a possibility of the pasta becoming water-logged and viscid.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘viscid’.
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Unknown
coalition, cabinet, tweet, defuse, steep, ancestral, mindset, breach, infraction, egregious, curb, backbite and 282 more...
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my fab list
blowsabella, aperçu, froideur, salubrious, abject, gallipot, mumchance, wainscot, virago, macerate, lascivious, clandestine and 181 more...
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phrontistery-v
from phrontistery.info
vaccary, vaccimulgence, vaccine, vacillate, vadelect, vade-mecum, vadimony, vadose, vafrous, vagient, vagile, vagility and 396 more...
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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Mycolexical
Scientific words & "folk names" that apply to mushrooms, fungi and mycology That are euphonious, humorous or antiquated.
Later some translated foreign words too.basidia, anastomosis, woronin bodies, clitocybe, ascomycetous, septa, deliquescent, mycophobic, autodeliquescence, floccose, stipe, saprophyte and 38 more...
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Seccotine
Glue; sticky substances; stickiness.
seccotine, propolis, bee glue, slumgum, fish glue, isinglass, bone-glue, glaim, gluing-press, self-adhesive, cheese-cement, gluish and 22 more...
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Insulting or rather nasty words
fetid, malodorous, salacious, lurid, lugubrious, viscid, curmudgeon, tawdry, agglutinate, glaucous, grotty
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Slam Fodder
Those words that will inevitable end up in a Slam Poem
feel free to challenge me!:)bumptious, gamekeeper, slamily, burbuliatorius, cryptomnesia, paradox, pulchritudinous, mimetic, anhedonia, skelf, rampike, furlough and 84 more...
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the lascivious
orgiastic, nymph, breathless, writhe, calypso, Medusa, virago, sapphic, catamite, bisou, buss, succubus and 48 more...
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Fruit, Sex and Other Morsels
Because drippy passionfruit, and he was pricked pineapple but sometime around cherry durian blond twins started persimmon, lychee papaya and before we knew it, quince plum mango mango and O O O Ora...
sweetsop, canistel, velvet apple, sticky, viscid, ganache, damson, rambutan, papain, fruit bat, spread, cream and 6 more...
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color, light & sight
albedo, chromatography, chromatic, tone, penumbra, superluminal, diaphanous, iridescent, amethyst, opalescent, celadon, lapis and 41 more...
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The Aubrey/Maturin List I'm Gonna Mak...
I'm wading through Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels one by one, and someday, I'll wade through them again and list all the words I learned while reading them.
Edit: I started ma...studdingsail, carronade, mumchance, grumlin-futtocks, crosscat-harpings, holystone, sennit, orlop, orchitis, negus, kevel, altumal and 1112 more...
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Verba Dilecta
delectable, notate, pauciloquy, paucity, pauciloquent, paucify, interscapilium, uropygium, inferna, nota, equipollent, prepollent and 677 more...
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I do not like them, Sam I Am
Words that, for various reasons, I wish we could do without.
copacetic, gamut, horehound, lewd, membrane, metrics, mucous, mucus, negligee, nostril, odious, odor and 143 more...
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cxfx's list
callipygous, scaphism, ubermorgen, handschuhschneeba..., farctate, autohagiography, autolatry, spindrift, feculent, verisimilitude, brobdingnagian, ineluctable and 205 more...
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Infinite Jest
Words taken from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
prorector, monograph, post-fourier, snuffle, rototremble, creatus, enfilade, subanimalistic, balletic, espadrilles, leonine, cirri and 1153 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for viscid.

yarb Our lungs, too viscid to have diffused
the sulphur of last year's holocaust,
have merely ingested another's and groan...
- Peter Reading, November 6th, from For the Municipality's Elderly, 1974 Jun 22, 2008
chained_bear Ooh, this word gives good mouthfeel. Interesting usage on staphelia. Mar 6, 2008