English

A woman wearing a gown with a diaphanous overskirt

Adjective

diaphanous ‎(comparative more diaphanous, superlative most diaphanous)

1. Transparent or translucent; allowing light to pass through; capable of being seen through.
   • 1899, Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, section 1

     The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.

   • 1999, Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness, page 96,

     But nonetheless the purpleness of the imagined purple cow will almost certainly be meaner, more diaphanous, more fleeting than any real-life purple that you ever saw: to imagine a purple cow is just not the same thing as to have a purple sensation (or at least a purple sensation worth the name).

   • 2004, Gustave Flaubert, Margaret Maulden (translator), Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners, page 98,

     The evening mist, drifting among the leafless poplars, veiled their silhouettes with a violet film, paler and more translucent than the most diaphanous gauze that might have caught in their branches.

2. Of a fine, almost transparent, texture; gossamer; light and insubstantial.
   • 1951, Robert Frost, Unpublished preface to a collection, 2007, Mark Richardson (editor), The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, page 169,

     The most diaphanous wings carry a burden of pollen from flower to flower.

   • 1963, Hermann Weyl, quoted in 1985, Floyd Merrell, Deconstruction Reframed, page 67,

     What is amazing is that "a concept that is created by mind itself, the sequence of integers, the simplest and most diaphanous thing for the constructive mind, assumes a similar aspect of obscurity and deficiency when viewed from the axiomatic angle" (Weyl, 1963, 220).

Synonyms

• (allowing light to pass through): translucent
• (of a fine, almost transparent, texture): delicate, insubstantial

Related terms

• diaphanously
• diaphanousness

Antonyms

• (transparent or translucent): opaque
• (of a fine, almost transparent, texture): concrete, solid

Translations