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GAUNT
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I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Very thin especially from disease or hunger or cold
Example:
kept life in his wasted frame only by grim concentration
Synonyms:
cadaverous; emaciated; gaunt; haggard; pinched; skeletal; wasted
Classified under:
Similar:
lean; thin (lacking excess flesh)
Derivation:
gauntness (extreme leanness (usually caused by starvation or disease))
Context examples:
His heavily thatched eyebrows covered quick, furtive grey eyes, and his gaunt features were hollowed at the cheek and temple like water-grooved flint.
(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
I approached and knocked at the door, which was instantly opened by a tall, gaunt woman with a harsh, forbidding face.
(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
The soil was barren, scarcely affording pasture for a few miserable cows, and oatmeal for its inhabitants, which consisted of five persons, whose gaunt and scraggy limbs gave tokens of their miserable fare.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
By evening Perrault secured another dog, an old husky, long and lean and gaunt, with a battle-scarred face and a single eye which flashed a warning of prowess that commanded respect.
(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)
It was the first time that the lawyer had been received in that part of his friend’s quarters; and he eyed the dingy, windowless structure with curiosity, and gazed round with a distasteful sense of strangeness as he crossed the theatre, once crowded with eager students and now lying gaunt and silent, the tables laden with chemical apparatus, the floor strewn with crates and littered with packing straw, and the light falling dimly through the foggy cupola.
(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
His face was gaunt and swarthy, scored with deep, savage lines.
(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
So gaunt were these poor folk, so worn and spent—with bent and knotted frames, and sullen, hopeless, mutinous faces—that it made the young Englishman heart-sick to look upon them.
(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
He listened with a sceptical smile on his gaunt face, and roared with laughter on hearing that the Professor had convinced me.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
“Someone is moving in that room,” said Holmes in a whisper, his gaunt and eager face thrust forward to the window-pane.
(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
It was large for a wolf, its gaunt frame advertising the lines of an animal that was among the largest of its kind.
(White Fang, by Jack London)
