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Iridescence   Listen
noun
Iridescence  n.  Exhibition of colors like those of the rainbow, especially a surface reflection which changes color with the angle at which the object is viewed; the quality or state of being iridescent; a prismatic play of color; as, the iridescence of mother-of-pearl. It is due to interference of light waves reflected from the front and back surfaces of a thin layer transpatrent or semitransparent film.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Iridescence" Quotes from Famous Books



... romantic poets sought for words—whether noble or vulgar—that were coloured, concrete, picturesque. The tendency culminated with Gautier, to whom words were valuable, like gems, for their gleam, their iridescence, and their hardness. Lost treasures of the language were recovered; at a later date new verbal inventions were made. By degrees, also, grammatical structure lost some of its rigidity; sentences and periods grew rather than were ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... their apparent bodies. Here were the ashes of them, after a thousand years, in contemptible little urns; and they were expected to enjoy, in that much impaired state, sundry rusty bric-a-brac, dolls, and tear-vials of spookish iridescence, until, in the vast lapse of time, even a ghost must have got tired. Unaided by the right comment, I was dragged down considerably by those pagan tombs; and as an antidote, the unexplained catacombs were not sufficiently elevating. I did not read the signs of the ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... forest-plumed hills and towering mountains. The abysmal blue of the untainted tropical sky overhead contrasts sharply with the red-tiled roofs and dazzling white exteriors of the buildings beneath; and the vivid tints, mingling with the iridescence of the scarcely rippling waters of the harbor, blend into a color scheme of rarest loveliness in the clear atmosphere which seems to magnify all distant ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... Eliot, in 'Middlemarch,' 'ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintance?' And, to press the metaphor, the cobweb, as far as Mark and Mabel were concerned, brilliantly as it shone in all its silken iridescence, would have rolled up into a particularly small pill. Mark was anxious that his engagement should be as short as possible, chiefly from an uneasy fear that his great happiness might elude him after all. The ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey

... the river lay asleep. Grey patches of melting snow still filled the crevices along its banks, and fragments of broken crystal moved slowly toward the ultimate sea. The late afternoon sun touched the sharp edges, here and there to a faint iridescence. "The river-god dreams of rainbows," thought ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... child! You talk about shine! Of course I know it is only her hair and eyes and now her little teeth, but sometimes it seems to me there is an actual iridescence to her. Just as real as the gold circlets the Italians loved to paint about ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst



Words linked to "Iridescence" :   brightness, opalescence, iridescent



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