Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The source of a stream or spring.
- n. A source: a wellspring of ideas.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A water-source; a fountainhead; a living spring.
- n. Hence Figuratively, a perennial source of anything; a fountainhead of supply or of emanation.
Wiktionary
- n. The source of water for a stream, spring or well; a fountainhead; a wellhead.
- n. A source of something.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A fountain; a spring; a source of continual supply.
WordNet 3.0
- n. the source of water for a well
- n. an abundant source
Examples
“A. the recently concluded campaign confirmed, presidential debates are wholly unsatisfying, yet their wellspring is the epic series of seven debates held in 1858 between A.raham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, both candidates for the Senate from Illinois.”
“The newfound species has been named Australopithecus sediba, a blend of the established Latin term for "southern ape" and the word for "wellspring" in the SeSotho language.”
“Some people -- don't know who, but they sound disreputable -- think that the people who write about the Park 51 Islamic Community Center being some kind of wellspring for birthing American-born terror babies are nuts.”
“By 2005 Tipoff had morphed into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), the mother of all federal counterterrorism databases and the "wellspring" for watch lists distributed to airlines, law enforcement, border posts and U.S. consulates world-wide.”
911Blogger.com - Paying Attention to 9/11 Related Alternative News
“Guan Moye his real one) is in his hometown of Gaomi, Shandong province, a place he has described as the wellspring of his creativity.”
“The first mystery of the Kalahari, the wellspring of original spirituality, is natural movement unfettered by the constraints and limited manipulations of mind, but not the kind of physical exercise in which you make yourself move.”
“Several of the schools in the for-profit sector derive more than 85 percent of their revenues from federal student aid, putting them perilously close to the 90-percent threshold and placing schools at risk of losing access to the wellspring of federal aid.”
The Huffington Post: For-Profit Colleges Selling Students On High-Risk Loans, Consumer Group Says
“It is the spiritual wellspring of all true healing, both of individuals and also of the entire world.”
“The truth is that the "soft" power of moral persuasion -- the true wellspring of American strength and leadership -- did more to end the Cold War than the "hard" power of military and economic coercion.”
The Huffington Post: Christopher Holshek: The 21st Century's 1989?
“Fannie and Freddie were conceptualized by Greenspan as a wellspring of systematic credit growth outside the banking system.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘wellspring’.
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Five Consecutive Consonants
A list of words containing five consecutive consonants
I do not include words containing "y" as part of the 5-letter string, since that letter invariably functions as a vowel, as in rhythm. <...heartstricken, heartstruck, wellspring, offspring, yachtsman, worthwhile, backstretch, backstroke, downstream, downstroke, breaststroke, birthstone and 187 more...
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Written on Water
An eclectic list of words pertaining to and describing water.
"...I am the faithful husband of the rain,
I love the water of wells and springs
and the taste of roofs in the...water, rain, cistern, thirst, dead-water, eddy-water, surge, flood, ebb, fluid, flow, liquor amnii and 180 more...
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Well
well, wells, swells, hot-well, well-being, wellborn, wellaway, wellness, Ida Bell Wells, H.G. Wells, Henry Wells, that's all well a... and 54 more...
jennarenn ...of the joy of living.... Nov 15, 2007