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SEVERED
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Detached by cutting
Example:
an old tale of Anne Bolyn walking the castle walls with her poor cut-off head under her arm
Synonyms:
cut off; severed
Classified under:
Similar:
cut (separated into parts or laid open or penetrated with a sharp edge or instrument)
II. (verb)
Sense 1
Past simple / past participle of the verb sever
Context examples:
She could not endure that such a friendship as theirs should be severed unfairly.
(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)
Grafting is done by cutting a plant off near the root, shaping its stalk into a wedge and fitting this into a matching groove on the severed stem of another plant.
(Grafting helps pepper plants deal with drought, SciDev.Net)
A surgical procedure to prevent rotational relapse of teeth after an orthodontic treatment; the epithelial attachment surrounding the involved teeth is severed.
(Circumferential Supracrestal Fiberotomy, NCI Thesaurus)
It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature.
(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
For, friend John, hardly had my knife severed the head of each, before the whole body began to melt away and crumble in to its native dust, as though the death that should have come centuries agone had at last assert himself and say at once and loud I am here!
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
As he spoke he whirled the covering from the object in front of him and showed to their horror that it was a newly-severed human leg.
(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
"Now is my time to slip away," thought I: but the tones that then severed the air arrested me.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
A heavy swivel-hook, baited with fat salt-pork, was dropped overside; and by the time I had compressed the severed veins and arteries, the sailors were singing and heaving in the offending monster.
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that suffice; and yet even to these, habit brought—no, not alleviation—but a certain callousness of soul, a certain acquiescence of despair; and my punishment might have gone on for years, but for the last calamity which has now fallen, and which has finally severed me from my own face and nature.
(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
Three dead men lay huddled together in front of them: while a fourth, with the blood squirting from a severed vessel, lay back with updrawn knees, breathing in wheezy gasps.
(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
