Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Atrophied   /ˈætrəfid/   Listen
Atrophied

adjective
1.
(of an organ or body part) diminished in size or strength as a result of disease or injury or lack of use.  Synonyms: diminished, wasted.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Atrophied" Quotes from Famous Books



... to a generous woman; but usually by the time she has suffered enough to be able to blame those whom it has been her habit to love and respect, and to judge of the wrong they have done her, it is too late to remedy it. Even if her faculties have not atrophied for want of use, all that should have been cultivated lies latent in her; she has nothing to fall back upon, and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... but granting a fair frame of mind, one can still "have sight of that immortal sea" which brought us hither from the twelfth century; one can even travel thither and see the children sporting on the shore. Our sense is partially atrophied from disuse, but it is still alive, at least in old people, who alone, as a class, have ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... table. The demands of digestion upon the human economy produce an internal wrestling-bout of human forces which rivals the highest degree of amorous pleasure. The gastronome is conscious of an expenditure of vital power, an expenditure so vast that the brain is atrophied (as it were), that a second brain, located in the diaphragm, may come into play, and the suspension of all the faculties is in itself a kind of intoxication. A boa constrictor gorged with an ox is so ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... lower jaw of the Ruminants and the two enormous gnawing teeth of the Rodents. Apparently the two rodent incisors, or front teeth, of the lower jaw of the rat correspond to the two middle incisors of the Ruminant's lower jaw; the other front teeth of the Ruminant have atrophied, disappeared altogether. The rodent condition has been developed from that of an ancestor which had several front teeth and not two large ones only; but we have not at present found ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... and her slim young figure and her splendid courage. A girl apart from the girls he had known, apart from the women he had known, the women whom he had imagined—and he had not imagined many—his training had atrophied such imaginings of youth. Jeanne. Again her name conjured up visions of the Great Jeanne of Domremy. If only he could ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke

... as they had never seen before. Perhaps from the death of her father, certainly from the beginning of Siddall's courtship, Mildred had been waking up. There is a part of our nature—the active and aggressive part—that sleeps all our lives long or becomes atrophied if we lead lives of ease and secure dependence. It is the important part of us, too—the part that determines character. The thing that completed the awakening of Mildred was her acquaintance with Mrs. Belloc. That positive and finely-poised lady fascinated her, influenced her ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips

... into the bodies of wild beasts if they have given way to excesses of anger ... those who have sought only to satisfy their lust and gluttony, pass into the bodies of lascivious and gluttonous animals ... those who have allowed their senses to become atrophied, are sent to vegetate in trees ... those who have reigned tyranically become eagles, if they have ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... lens, and their secret is betrayed. The eyes are a mockery. Externally they are organs of vision—the front of the eye is perfect; behind, there is nothing but a mass of ruins. The optic nerve is a shrunken, atrophied and insensate thread. These animals have organs of vision, and yet they have no vision. They have eyes, but ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... sense." How man may sense the presence of other living things apart from the operation of his ordinary five physical senses. This power is strongly developed in savages and barbarians, but has become atrophied in most civilized men, by continued disuse. It is now vestigal in civilized man, but may be developed by practice. Animals have this extra sense highly developed, and it plays a very important part in their protection from enemies; ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi

... and left him, realizing that the fellow was morally atrophied. He could not forget, however, that except for this impossible creature he himself would be lying at Petellin's store at Katmai with no faintest hope of completing his mission, wherefore he did his best to ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach

... said, "Granting fully that you are right, that, as woman's old fields of labour slip from her, she must grasp the new, or must become wholly dependent on her sexual function alone, all the other elements of human nature in her becoming atrophied and arrested through lack of exercise: and, granting that her evolution being arrested, the evolution of the whole race will be also arrested in her person: granting all this to the full, and allowing that the bulk of human labour tends to become more and more intellectual and less and less purely ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner

... and heating, insomuch, that for delicate children who are atrophied, and require a multum in parvo of fatty and nitrogenous food in a compact but light form, which is fairly easy of digestion, [372] the pate de foie gras on bread is a capital prescription. Truffles grow in clusters several inches below the soil, being ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... would be fitting with old friends. He had determined to be master of the situation, and to turn the moment to the credit of his account—not hers; and it was easy to do it, for love was dead, and the memory of love atrophied. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... dark red, livid, or bluish color, with sometimes swelling, and tenderness and shooting pains. The termination is usually in gangrene of a dry character, with, in some instances, vesicles and blebs along the edges; in other cases the parts become atrophied, withered, and indurated. ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon

... one. It hurts me more than it does you, but I can't help it! I fail to remember the last time I enjoyed a hearty laugh and I know it will be a darned long space before I'll snicker again. My laugher has gone unused for so long that it's atrophied and won't work. I've tried warming it up by going home at night and guffawing before the mirror, but the result is only a mirthless giggle—a ghostly chortle! Of course, I wouldn't dare attempt to laugh ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer

... beauty would be to desecrate a shrine. But the sordid man sees in this symphony of color nothing else than a promise of fruit. His response is wholly physical, not spiritual at all. His spiritual sense seems atrophied and he can do nothing but estimate the bushels of fruit. He feels no respect for the beauty before him and it is evident that somewhere along the line his spiritual education was neglected. He excites our ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... tangible. Thought was slow or alert, heavy or nimble, light or dark; he ascribed to it all the attributes of an active agent, and thought of it as rising, resting, waking, expanding, growing old, shrinking, becoming atrophied, or resuscitating; he described its life, and specified all its actions by the strangest words in our language, speaking of its spontaneity, its strength, and all its qualities with a kind of intuition which enabled him to recognize all the ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... committed a crime, but who, in the common expressive phrase, 'are not all there'—whose eccentricities, illusions and caprices are on the verge of madness, whose judgments are hopelessly disordered; whose wills, though not completely atrophied, are manifestly diseased. In questions of property, in questions of crime, in questions of family arrangements, such persons cause the gravest perplexity, nor will any wise man judge them by the same moral standard as ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... came to him, dressed in all her pretty finery, he loved to look on her, and his dulled eyes glowed with an enthusiasm which had lain atrophied in him these ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... second sub-class, come next to the oviparous monotremes, the oldest of the mammals. But as in their case the food-yelk is already atrophied, and the little ovum develops within the mother's body, the partial cleavage has been reconverted into total. One section of the marsupials still show points of agreement with the monotremes, while another section of them, ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel

... to two, and one to nearly four. In the Scotch deer-hound there is a striking and remarkable difference in the size of the male and female.[65] Every one knows how the ears vary in size in different breeds, and with their great development their muscles become atrophied. Certain breeds of dogs are described as having a deep furrow between the nostrils and lips. The caudal vertebrae, according to F. Cuvier, on whose authority the two last statements rest, vary in number; and the tail in shepherd dogs is almost absent. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... the rest of them at swimming, walking, tennis or squash) and her active but wasted brain. A good brain, too; she had easily and with brilliance passed her medical examinations long ago—those of them for which she had had time before she had been interrupted. But now a wasted brain; squandered, atrophied, gone soft with disuse. Could she begin to use it now? Or was she forever held captive, in deep woods, between the ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay

... incompatible with reason, and love with logic. So strong is the emphasis on this that he is led to suspect that indolence is seeking to deify ignorance, and that men whose intellectual faculties have atrophied by their subjection to the emotional now are envious of those who retain the power to think clearly, and would have them also deprived of ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope

... Jay Jay finds it necessary to mix display ads with his reading matter to make the latter palatable, he declares that his painful monthly emission has "the largest circulation of any medical magazine in the world"—thereby indicating that while his mentality may be atrophied, his imagination is intumescent. I have long noticed that journals having large bonafide circulations do little tooting of their own horns on the house-tops—they don't have to. It is a species of journalistic quackery which every thorough-bred publisher regards with contemptuous pity. Brains ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... Want, or Poverty and Plenty, is a pretty piece of fancy: it is clever: but like mathematics, an explanation of the brain rather than the heart. Something is missing. For Plato, almost always delicate and subtle, is never tender: the reason is, that he was atrophied on the feminine side: he does not consequently understand sex, being himself only half a man: that is, only man and nothing more. But all the really great imaginative men are bi-sexual: they have a large ingredient of woman in ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown

... rarely flows, at least in excess, to another part; thus it is difficult to get a cow to give much milk and to fatten readily. The same varieties of the cabbage do not yield abundant and nutritious foliage and a copious supply of oil-bearing seeds. When the seeds in our fruits become atrophied, the fruit itself gains largely in size and quality. In our poultry, a large tuft of feathers on the head is generally accompanied by a diminished comb, and a large beard by diminished wattles. With species in a state ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... rounded than normal. The changes in the appearance of the inferior surface of the hoof vary. The changes here may be so slight that they are not noticed. In well advanced and neglected cases the arch of the sole is increased, the frog is narrow and atrophied and the bars high and perpendicular. Corns may accompany the contraction. The foot may feel feverish. The animal may manifest the pain in the feet when standing at rest by pointing and changing their position. When lameness is present, it may resemble that occurring in inflammation ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... of chronic disease, where the muscles are atrophied and condensed, the following posterior flap method may be used with advantage. It is approved of by Mr. Spence. An incision is made across the front of the leg from the posterior edge of the fibula to the posterior edge of the tibia, or vice versa, according ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... their spotless gardens, reached the common where the goats and the donkeys were tethered, the geese screamed with stretched necks, the children rolled and played. Plenty of good air there to fill lungs atrophied by long night hours in the sick atmosphere of the wards. Then, at a swinging pace home again to her welcome bed and ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann

... making people love you, yet you do nothing for it except, perhaps, exist. One ought not to ask any more; I don't ask it, but you ought to learn to give. You'll find it's the only thing worth doing. Taking—taking—one becomes atrophied. No, it isn't that I don't care for you, it isn't that. I am ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG

... our weakness and the atrophied state of our stomachs, proved disastrous to a good many. They soon recovered though. Our beds were just shake-downs on cushions and settees, though the officer on watch very generously gave up his ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... if filled with cotton. Their limbs were truly skeletal, and curiously I tugged the white robe from the strange insect body as I followed the prince. The thorax, the wasp-waist, the long pendulous abdomen, the atrophied center limbs folded across the wasp-waist—the whole thing was like a great white wasp without wings. As we flung them into an empty chamber, I turned the burden face down, and on the back were two thin wisps of residual wings. Once these things ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell

... thing I could see very clearly," Leithen went on, "and that was Hollond's own case. This crowded world of Space was perfectly real to him. How he had got to it I do not know. Perhaps his mind, dwelling constantly on the problem, had unsealed some atrophied cell and restored the old instinct. Anyhow, he was living his daily life with a ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... advent of the Bagrees, even on their way from Karowlee, Hunsa had been plotting evil. He was a man who would have shrivelled up, become atrophied, in an atmosphere of decency—he would ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... were away back in the years that they have almost forgotten? I wonder in how many of our cases there has been an arrested development, like that which you will sometimes see in deformed people, the lower limbs all but atrophied? I wonder how many of us are babes of forty years old, and from how many of our minds the very conception of continual growth, as an essential of Christian life, has altogether vanished? Brother! are you any further than you were ten ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... possible to restore the forest floor; the place remained visible—a darker, rougher patch on the bronzed carpet of needles beaten smooth by decades of rain and snow. No animal would have trodden that suspicious space. But it was with man she had to deal—a dangerous but reasoning man with few and atrophied instincts—and with no experience in traps; and, therefore, in no dread ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers

... he could see it he could not grip it and hold it and convey it to another who has not. Therefore either these feelings must be left altogether unexpressed and, if unexpressed, then soon undeveloped and atrophied, or they must be expressed by the help of images or idols—by the help of something not more actually true than a child's doll is to a child, but yet helpful to our weakness of understanding, as the doll no doubt ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... destruction of caste and the incorporation of undesirable persons into the "Body Politick," the Quakers proceeded on the principle that all men are brethren and, being equal before God, should be considered equal before the law. On account of unduly emphasizing the relation of man to God the Puritans "atrophied their social humanitarian instinct" and developed into a race of self-conscious saints. Believing in human nature and laying stress upon the relation between man and man the Quakers became the friends of ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson

... Or perhaps she depended for companionship upon the children—there were a dozen such, about the place, between the ages of two and six. And she stood between these two groups, just blooming into womanhood, with her beautiful young body, and her atrophied young brain. Her eyes fell shyly under his penetrating, speculative glances, and a wave of colour rose into her white cheeks. She felt, then, hey? ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte

... She has sacrificed the most wonderful part of her endowment, that which when trained gives her vision, sharpens her intuitions, reveals the need and the true course. This superior affectability crushed, leaves her atrophied. ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... situations, and the worst kinds of murder are by no means capital offences. It is true that all engagements are not made by the same vital bonds as that of Jenny's and Theophil's, but many are. For a man wilfully to break an engagement means sometimes that the whole love-life in a woman is atrophied, all that made her woman stabbed ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne

... tattlers; one or two had sunk into gross indulgence. This had had its effect on him: he did not wish to grow red-faced, slothful, and fleshy, as they had done, nor to busy himself with trivialities until such capacities for useful work as he possessed had atrophied. ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss

... opponent. This is eminently the case with the most dangerous poisonous snakes. In them a highly peculiar specialization has been carried to the highest point. They rely for attack and defence purely on their poison-fangs. All other means and methods of attack and defence have atrophied. They neither crush nor tear with their teeth nor constrict with their bodies. The poison-fangs are slender and delicate, and, save for the poison, the wound inflicted is of a trivial character. In consequence ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... comma—for, like Browning, we too seem to breathe with this woman's panting breath, our hearts to beat with the very pain and rage of hers, and every pause she comes to in her speech is our pause, so intense is the evocation, so unerring the expression of an impulse which, whether or no it be atrophied in our more hesitant and civilised consciousness, is at ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... feminine malice, for it is to a silent congress that she is made her deputy. [Laughter and applause.] And in the hundred years since we asserted for ourselves a separate place and proper name among the nations, our college has been no palsied or atrophied limb in the national organization. To the jurisprudence, to the legislation, the diplomacy, the science, the literature, the art of the country, her contribution has certainly not fallen short of its due proportion. Our triennial ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... Without much feeling, a man is likely to be narrow and unyielding. Gradgrind, in Dickens's Hard Times, is a shining example of this type. In his excessive devotion to "hard facts" his emotional nature atrophied, until the many valuable cues or suggestions about the conduct of his business and the training of his children that a kindlier nature would have caught from the events occurring about him, failed ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... often has this been noticed that its association with prostatic trouble or disease tends to the belief that the irritation produced by this condition of prepuce often lays the foundation for prostatic disease in not a few cases.[100] In elderly people, with the atrophied penis and elongating prepuce, the constant moisture from the urine on the inner fold and glans adds greatly to the irritation as well as to the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... prescribed conduct, or again in the details of formulated belief. As the idea of salvation through mechanical obedience develops into a systematised scheme of life, the higher and more spiritual faculties of Man's nature become gradually atrophied by disuse. In other words, the channel of soul growth—the only channel that leads to spiritual health, and therefore to "salvation"—becomes gradually obstructed, with the result that the vital energies of the soul tend either to dissipate themselves and run to waste, or to make ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... He did not realize it, but they were the emotions which should have come to him thirty years before and driven him out to hunt Indians in the garden. An imagination which might well have become atrophied through disuse had him as thoroughly in its control as ever he had ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... woman desired to show dislike or contempt she would, in all likelihood, have done it with a sword thrust or a movement of her trigger finger; but as their sentiments are mostly atrophied it would have required a serious injury to have aroused such passions in them. Sola, let me add, was an exception; I never saw her perform a cruel or uncouth act, or fail in uniform kindliness and good ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Life, O atrophied soul, In trappings of ease is not confined; That touch from Infinite Will 'neath the Whole In Nature's temple, not man's, is shrined! From hovel-shed come out and be strong! Be ye free! Be redeemed from the wrong, Of soul-guilt, I charge you as sons ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... little account of descenders in reading, because it runs along a line just below the tops of the ordinary letters, about at the bar of the small e; nevertheless, to one who has learned to appreciate beauty in type design there is something distressing in the atrophied or distorted body of the g in so many modern types and the stunted p's and q's—which the designer clearly did not mind! The ascenders sometimes fare nearly as badly. Now types of this compressed character really ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman

... supposed final, vanished. Solitude again acted on his disordered nerves; he was once more obsessed, not by religion itself, but by the acts and sins it forbids, by the subject of all its obsecrations and threats. The carnal side, atrophied for months, which had been stirred by the enervation of his pious readings, then brought to a crisis by the English cant, came to the surface. His stimulated senses carried him back to the past and he wallowed in memories of ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans



Words linked to "Atrophied" :   hypertrophied, diminished, wasted



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com