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Webster 1828 Edition


Dampish

DAMP'ISH

,
Adj.
Moderately damp, or moist.

Definition 2024


dampish

dampish

English

Adjective

dampish (comparative more dampish, superlative most dampish)

  1. (obsolete) Characterised by noxious vapours; misty, smoky.
    • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III.iv:
      All suddenly dim woxe the dampish ayre, / And griesly shadowes couered heauen bright [...].
    • c. 1600, author unknown, once attributed to William Shakespeare, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, London: J.M. Dent, 1897, Act I, Scene 3
      We'll first hang Enfield in such rings of mist / As never rose from any dampish fen: / I'll make the brinèd sea ro rise at Ware, / And drown the marshes unto Stratford Bridge;
  2. Moderately damp or moist.
    • 1879, Henry Vizetelly, Facts about Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines, London: Ward, Lock & Co., Chapter X, p. 111,
      Miles of long, dark-brown, dampish-looking galleries stretch away to the right and left, and though devoid of the picturesque festoons of fungi which decorate the London Dock vaults, exhibit a sufficient degree of mouldiness to give them an air of respectable antiquity.
    • 1938, George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, Chapter 6,
      I remember very clearly the feeling of sitting there reading it; the dampish clay of the trench bottom underneath me, the constant shifting of my legs out of the way as men hurried stopping down the trench, the crack-crack-crack of bullets a foot or two overhead.
    • 1991, Seamus Heaney, "Squarings xl" in Seeing Things, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, p. 94,
      I was four but I turned four hundred maybe, / Encountering the ancient dampish feel / Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.
    • 2006, William Trevor, "An Afternoon" in Cheating at Canasta, New York: Viking, 2007, p. 99
      Her hand was warm, lying there in his, dampish, fingers interlaced with his.

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