Word Finder - penetrating

definition

To enter into; to make way into the interior of; to pierce.

example

Light penetrates darkness.

definition

To achieve understanding of, despite some obstacle; to comprehend; to understand.

example

I could not penetrate Burke's opaque rhetoric.

definition

To affect profoundly through the senses or feelings; to move deeply.

example

to penetrate one's heart with pity

definition

To infiltrate an enemy to gather intelligence.

definition

To insert the penis into an opening, such as a vagina or anus.

example

a male elephant comes up and penetrates the female elephant

definition

To move a piece past the defending pieces of one's opponent.

definition

Able to pierce or penetrate

example

The skunk produces a penetrating odor.

definition

Demonstrating acute or keen understanding

example

His novel shows a penetrating insight into the criminal mind.

She shivered at his penetrating gaze.

And now, now it seemed to her she was penetrating the mystery....

She met Dustin's penetrating gaze.

His penetrating gaze prowled over her face and pounced on her eyes.

She squirmed under his penetrating stare.

He was seated, his fingers steepled and his gaze penetrating.

Penetrating sealers are absorbed into the granite material.

To it belong (a) superficial grooves or deeper slits situated on the integument near the tip of the head, (b) nerve lobes in immediate connexion with the nervous tissue of the brain, and (c) ciliated ducts penetrating into the latter and communicating with the former.

The west coast is indented by two deep inlets, (t) the northernmost, the Gulf of Ismid (anc. Gulf of Astacus), penetrating between 40 and 50 m.

With docks named after them are connected the Royal and Grand Canals, passing respectively to north and south of the city, the one penetrating the great central plain of Ireland on the north, the other following the course of the Liffey, doing the same on the south, and both joining the river Shannon.

Owing to their growth in length at, or rather in the immediate vicinity of, their tips, roots are enabled to traverse long distances by surmounting some obstacles, penetrating others, and insinuating themselves into narrow crevices.

The object of this is to prevent the plant from starving by the water applied all running off by way of the new soil, and not penetrating the original ball of earth.

They have thick fleshy roots, deeply penetrating, and therefore requiring deep soil, which should be of a light or sandy character.

They form a superficial mycelium on the surface of the plant, the hyphae not usually penetrating the tissues but merely sending haustoria into the epidermal cells.

The meteoric iron of Arizona, some of which contains diamond, is actually found in and about a huge crater which is supposed by some to have been formed by an immense meteorite penetrating the earth's crust.

An expression of keen intelligence lighted up his features, and his large, sparkling grey eyes darted penetrating glances at every one who approached him.

Besides these three great foreign wars, Justinian's reign was troubled by a constant succession of border inroads, especially on the northern frontier, where the various Slavonic and Hunnish tribes who were established along the lower Danube and on the north coast of the Black Sea made frequent marauding expeditions into Thrace and Macedonia, sometimes penetrating as far as the walls of Constantinople in one direction and the Isthmus of Corinth in another.

In common with the other animals of the genus, it has a very peculiar and disagreeable effluvium, which, according to Dr Coues, is more powerful, penetrating and lasting than that of any animal of the country except the skunk.

By careful training her voice, originally hard and harsh, had become flexible and melodious, and its low and muffled notes under the influence of passion possessed a thrilling and penetrating quality that was irresistible.

In this connexion Pfeffer points out that the penetrating power .of light into a clear sea varies for light of different colours.

The coast-line is estimated at 2300 m., the arms of the sea being so numerous and in several cases penetrating so far inland that few places are beyond 40 m.

Lastly, he sailed back westwards, and, after penetrating into the Red Sea, and building a fortress at Ormuz in the Persian Gulf, returned to Goa only to die in 1515.

They are often brilliant, and sometimes very penetrating in their judgment of men and books; but the most constant element is a pervasive humour, and this humour, by turns playful and sentimental, is largely characteristic of his poetry, which sprang from a genial temper, quick in its sympathy with nature and humanity.

It is often asserted that these rapids were artificially formed by the Spaniards themselves to prevent the buccaneers from penetrating to Lake Nicaragua.

In the interval he wrote Madame de Maintenon d'apres sa correspondance authentique (2 vols., 1887), in which he displayed his penetrating critical faculty in discriminating between authentic documents and the additions and corrections of arrangers like La Beaumelle and Lavallee.

The humanists effected a deeply penetrating change in social manners.

The purpose of this article has been to show that, while the Renaissance implied a new way of regarding the material world and human nature, a new conception of man's destiny and duties on this planet, a new culture and new intellectual perceptions penetrating every sphere of thought and energy, it also involved new reciprocal relations between the members of the European group of nations.

According to him, the Rha is a tributary of an interior sea, formed from the confluence of two great rivers, the sources of which are separated by twenty degrees of longitude, but it is scarcely possible to judge from his statements how far the Sla y s had by that time succeeded in penetrating into the basin of the Volga.

The influence of the Renaissance seems to have been tardy in penetrating into Wales itself, nor did the numerous ecclesiastical changes during the period of the Reformation cause any marked signs either of resentment or approval amongst the mass of the Welsh people, although some of the ancient Catholic customs lingered on obstinately.

Hubert and Mauss show in their penetrating analysis of sacrifice that after the rite has been brought to its culminating point there follows as a pendant a ceremony of re-entry into ordinary life, the idea of which is preserved in the Christian formula Ite, miss y est.

His penetrating intellect had mastered the subtleties of the system of Chrysippus, but they seldom appear in his works, at least without, apology.

They began where the Arabs left off, by penetrating far into the Atlantic. The long littoral of their country, with its fine harbours and rivers flowing westward to the ocean, had been the training-ground of a race of adventurous seamen.

Convinced from the first of his disinterestedness and sincerity, and impressed by his penetrating shrewdness and his instinctive faculty of always seizing the main point and sticking to it, his hearers soon felt an absolute confidence in the deputy from Zala county.

Pyridine is a colourless liquid of a distinctly unpleasant, penetrating odour.

It is roughly square in shape, penetrating the land for 22 m., and being 20 in.

At the same time the Parliamentary infantry had mostly crossed the lane and was fighting at close quarters and suffering severely, Newcastle's north-country "White-Coat" brigade driving back and finally penetrating their centre.

In the former case the light penetrating between the particles is unable to escape by reflexion, and is finally absorbed.

It has a sharp burning taste and a penetrating smell, and acts as a violent poison.

There have been many more effective orators, for lack of imaginative suppleness prevented him from penetrating to the inner mind of his hearers; defects in delivery weakened the intrinsic persuasiveness of his reasoning; and he had not that commanding authority of character and personality which has so often been the secret of triumphant eloquence.

It is too often the case to be a mere accident that men who become eminent for wide compass of understanding and penetrating comprehension, are in their adolescence unsettled and desultory.

The latter are abundant throughout the northern hemisphere, and have even succeeded in penetrating into South America, but, with the exception of the Mediterranean zone, have never succeeded in entering Africa, and are therefore of course unknown in Madagascar.

The weasel-tribe (Mustelidae) is clearly a northern group, which has, however, succeeded in penetrating into South America and Africa, although it has never reached Madagascar.

During the following century the Mahommedans under Kotaiba ibn Moslim, after several excursions into West Turkestan, invaded (712-13) East Turkestan, penetrating as far as Turfan and even China.

He brought to his task an intellect of the first calibre - keen, quick, penetrating.

Lamarck's penetrating genius is chiefly responsible for the shrinkage of the word Insecta, since it was he who, forty years after Linnaeus's death, set up and named the two great classes Crustacea and Arachnida (included by Linnaeus under Insecta as the order " Aptera "), assigning to them equal rank with the remaining Insecta of Linnaeus, for which he proposed the very appropriate class-name " Hexapoda."

In the Hexapods and Chilopods, and the Arachnids (usually), they form tree-like branching structures, and their finest branches are finer than any blood-capillary, actually in some cases penetrating a single cell and supplying it with gaseous oxygen.

From this centre they made numerous warlike excursions - to Scythia, Thrace, the coasts of Asia Minor and the islands of the Aegean, even penetrating to Arabia, Syria and Egypt.

The pre-Socratic thinkers were all primarily devoted to ontological research; but by the middle of the 5th century B.C. the conflict of their dogmatic systems had led some of the keenest minds to doubt the possibility of penetrating the secret of the physical universe.

Dionysius, the closest and most penetrating of his ancient critics, exhausts the language of admiration in showing how ' Or.

The Arabs had established themselves firmly on the coast, and thence made continual slave-raids into the interior, penetrating later to the Congo.