Adjective: bilious
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more bilious |
| Superlative | most bilious |
Sample Sentences
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Does money fail?—come to my mint—coin paper,
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Till gold be at a discount, and ashamed
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To show his bilious face, go purge himself,
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In emulation of her vestal whiteness. [1820, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Oedipus Tyrannus; Or, Swellfoot The Tyrant: A Tragedy in Two Acts:]
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His complexion was pale, not of that deadly pallor which is a kind of neutral beauty, but of a bilious, yellow hue; his colorless hair was short and scarcely extended beyond the circle formed by the hat around his head, and his light blue eyes seemed destitute of any expression. [1845, Alexandre Dumas, chapter 31, in Twenty Years After:]
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The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one block, facing the railroad. It was a row of one-story shops covered with galvanized iron, or with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow. [1920, Sinclair Lewis, chapter 3, in Main Street:]
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A beautiful girl once told me of a recurring nightmare in which she lay in the center of a large dark room and felt her face expand until it filled the whole room, becoming a formless mass while her eyes ran in bilious jelly up the chimney. [1952, Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, prologue:]
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Perry tells me that Mr. Cole never touches malt liquor. You would not think it to look at him, but he is bilious—Mr. Cole is very bilious. [1815, Jane Austen, Emma, volume II, chapter 7:]
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The glorified spirit of a great statesman and philosopher dawdling, like a bilious old Nabob at a watering-place, over quarterly reviews and novels—dropping in to pay long calls—making excursions in search of the picturesque! [1830 January 26, Thomas Macaulay, “[Review of] Southey's Colloquies on Society”, in The Edinburgh Review, page 536:]
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The boarders, sharp-tongued bilious widows, pursued the only man in the establishment, a mild, bald creature who worked in La Samaritaine […] [1934, George Orwell, Burmese Days:]
Adjectives inflected like bilious
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
From French bilieux, from Latin bīliōsus (“full of bile”), from bīlis (“bile”) + -ōsus (“full of”).