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Absorbent   /əbzˈɔrbənt/   Listen
Absorbent

adjective
1.
Having power or capacity or tendency to absorb or soak up something (liquids or energy etc.).  Synonym: absorptive.



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"Absorbent" Quotes from Famous Books



... the human flux in front. She was not shopping, save in sweet imagination. This was her theater, and she was fain to make the show last as long as possible. Her absorbent gaze saw everything. Yet it was selective too, for it passed swiftly over the chaff of the shabby and fixed itself on the wheat of the properly gowned. Sometimes she wove romances about her swiftly-disappearing actors, romances not ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter

... dressing tray shall be set up at all times. The following articles are recommended in dressing and caring for infants: Sterile gauze, absorbent cotton, medium and small safety pins, bottle of alcohol, a bar of pure mild soap, a proper lubricant (albolene or olive oil), boric acid solution, pure powder, ...
— Rules and regulations governing maternity hospitals and homes ... September, 1922 • California. State Board of Charities and Corrections

... in outward form, they were too alien to have much in common. Only as intelligences, as life forces, could they share a common bed. And it had evolved to that in fifty years. A bed of protoplasm in a shock-absorbent tank. ...
— Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly? • Bryce Walton

... Rocky Mountains, and traced every affluent of the great river in quest of their respective prey; but the wild, desolate region watered by the Colorado, the Humboldt, or the streams that are lost in the Great Salt Lake, or some smaller absorbent of the scanty waters of the Great Basin, had never proved attractive to our borderers, and for excellent reasons. It is, as a whole, so arid, so sterile (though its valleys do not lack fertility wherever their latent capacities can be developed by irrigation), and its game is so scanty and worthless, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... this period. She should be provided with a circular girdle of some strong material cut upon the bias, so it may be elastic, and provided with tabs to which to pin the folded cloth. She also should have a supply of sanitary cloths made of absorbent cotton fabric, or pads made of absorbent-cotton enclosed in gauze. The latter are especially convenient for the girl who is obliged to room away from home, for they may be burned, and the cost of new ones is no greater than the laundry of cloths. These pads or cloths ...
— Confidences - Talks With a Young Girl Concerning Herself • Edith B. Lowry

... See "Life and Letters," III., page 327, and "Insectivorous Plants," page 431.), which I fancy is the species you told me of. The roots or rhizomes (for I know not which they are; I can see no scales or internodes or absorbent hairs) bear scores of bladders from 1/20 to 1/100 of an inch in diameter; and I traced these roots to the depth of 1 1/2 in. in the peat and sand. The bladders are like glass, and have the same essential structure ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... proximate cause, or to their proximate effect, though they may he somewhat similar in less essential properties; thus the thin and saline discharge from the nostrils on going into the cold air of a frosty morning, which is owing to the deficient action of the absorbent vessels of the nostrils, is one species; and the viscid mucus discharged from the secerning vessels of the same membrane, when inflamed, is another species of the same genus, Catarrhus. Which bear no analogy either in respect to their ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... obtained lodgement in the lungs? Increase the general nutrition of the body in every way, and then the lungs can resist the inroads of the disease. The first thing necessary to improve the nutrition of the body is to stimulate the digestive and absorbent functions of the stomach and intestines. Naturally then, you must throw the so-called cough medicines out of the window. The drugs used to stop a cough are sedatives. Now, no sedative or nauseant is known that does not lock up the natural secretions and thus lessen the digestive powers. The cough ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... the listening and the re-telling, it is dominant for good. The child imitates what he hears you say and sees you do, and the way you say and do it, far more closely in the story-hour than in any lesson-period. He is in a more absorbent state, as it were, because there is no preoccupation of effort. Here is the great opportunity of the cultured teacher; here is the appalling opportunity of the careless or ignorant teacher. For the implications of the oral theory ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant

... corals. On her lap was a beautiful winged smiling genius, who flourished two bright torches. On her left hand stood the man of Modena with his white lamb, a new S. John. On her right stood the man of Torcello with his keys, a new S. Peter. Both were laughing after their all-absorbent, divine, noiseless fashion; and under both was written, Sic Genius. Are not all things, even ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... the whole contents have remained liquid. There would appear to be little gain by the use of the Goux lining as regards freedom from nuisance, and though it removes the risk of splashing and does away with much of the unsightliness of the contents, the absorbent, inasmuch as it adds extra weight which has to be carried to and from the houses, is rather a disadvantage than otherwise from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various

... doubts. They didn't look as though they would easily be put to school. His idea still seemed to him magnificent, a great solution, but would the Annas be able to see it? They might turn out impervious to it; not rejecting it, but simply non-absorbent. As they slowly and contentedly ate their grape-fruit, gazing out between the spoonfuls at the sea shining across the road through palm trees, and looking unruffled itself, he felt it was going to be rather like suggesting to two cherubs to leave their serene occupation of ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

... colour of the bud makes it an absorbent of sunlight, and also serves as a protection from observation by the sharp eyes of bud-eating birds. The gummy scales are waterproof, and the scales, by spreading open gradually, cause the waterproof property to be retained ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education

... activity. In a comparatively small inert animal, such as the hydra, which consists of little more than a sac having a double wall—an outer layer of cells forming the skin, and an inner layer forming the digestive and absorbent surface—there is no need for a special apparatus to diffuse through the body the aliment taken up; for the body is little more than a wrapper to the food it encloses. But where the bulk is considerable, or where the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... find have been said only with their silent answering eyes. Those who talk much often reply to you less than those who silently and thoughtfully listen. And so it came to pass, that, on account of this quietly absorbent nature, Rose had grown to her parents' hearts with a peculiar nearness. Eighteen summers had perfected her beauty. The miracle of the growth and perfection of a human body and soul never waxes old; parents marvel at it in every household as if a child had never grown before; and so Olivia ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... to acknowledge was his point of view—and this he was wise enough not to press at dinner tables and in drawing-rooms—that religion should have the penetrability of ether; that it should be the absorbent of life. He did not have to commit the banality of reminding them of this conviction of his at their own tables; he had sufficient humour and penetration to credit them with knowing it. Nay, he went farther in his ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... to-day. The "madstones" in the possession of many credulous people help to perpetuate the fear of this awful disease. As a matter of fact, the madstone is simply a porous rock which may adhere to a warm, moist surface and exert an absorbent action. Any poison introduced under the skin is disseminated through the system in less than two minutes. If the doctor ever gave you a hypodermic, your knowledge on this point is convincing. The folly then of applying something, days or ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs

... he must have known that the pockets were empty! But the effort to talk had cost him something. The performance over, he relaxed and closed his eyes. Even as she watched, the sweat of weakness began to form on his forehead and under the nether lip. She wet some absorbent cotton with alcohol and refreshed his face and neck. This done, she waited at the side of the bed; but he gave no sign that he was conscious ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath



Words linked to "Absorbent" :   sponge, nonabsorbent, spongy, absorptive, absorber, absorbency, assimilatory, assimilative, sorbent, sorbefacient, hygroscopic, assimilating, thirsty, spongelike, absorbefacient, absorb, sorbent material, receptive



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