wan

• Whome when his Lady ſaw, to him ſhe ran / With haſty ioy : to ſee him made her glad, / And ſad to view his viſage pale and wan, / Who earſt in flowres of freſhest youth was clad. - 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto...
• I have read in some old marvellous tale, / Some legend strange and vague, / That a midnight host of spectres pale / Beleaguered the walls of Prague. // Beside the Moldau’s rushing stream, / With the wan moon overhead, /...
• Blanche smiled languidly out upon the young men, thinking whether she looked very wan and green under her rose-coloured hood, and whether it was the mirrors at Gaunt House, or the fatigue and fever of her own eyes,...

Synonyms: ashen pasty ashen-faced ashy blake blanched bleak bloodless chalky exsanguious ghastly grey livid pale pallid sallow wan washed out white whey-faced

• ’Twas so far away, that evil day when I prayed the Prince of Gloom / For the savage strength and the sullen length of life to work his doom. / Nor sign nor word had I seen or heard, and it happed so long ago; / My youth...

Synonyms: dull dun leaden uncolorful bland colourless dim dingy faint lackluster muddy sad sober unholiday wan

Antonyms: colorful colorific coloury aurora-colored (US) / aurora-coloured colorful (US) / colourful discolored [⇒ thesaurus] (US obsolete) / discoloured kaleidoscopic many-coloured motley multichromatic multicolor (US) / multicolour multicolored (US) / multicoloured multicolorous multihued particolored (US) / particoloured polychromate polychromatic polychromed polyhued prismatic rainbow rainbow-colored (US) / rainbow-coloured tissued

• A wan expression
• My position in the midst of the general indifference was hard to bear ; my silence weighed upon me like remorse. The sight of Lieutenant Castagnac filled me with indignation, — a sort of insurmountable repulsion: the...
• Checking out her brother’s khakis, the gun propped in the corner, Olivia’s hiking boots and her wan expression, she wants to laugh. “Been hunting, I see.” Olivia’s face falls, as expected. Her brother’s obsession with...

Synonyms: insipid lackluster banal basic beat blah commonplace bland boring cold colourless corny drab stuffy dreich drowsy dull dull as dishwater flat heavy going ho-hum humdrum lame languid

• Then I’d tell myself there were plenty of oul wans and oul fellas in work who never got it and that I’d be lucky like them and escape. Only I didn’t. I don’t want to die. - 1993, Elaine Crowley, The Ways Of Women,...
• Growing up in Dún Laoghaire in the 1980s, I remember all the hard men were sinewy, scrawny lads, hence the local description ‘more meat on a seagull’. The reason was simple: they were undernourished. [...] The young...
• He comes streaming out from under the stage, this time a feckin show-stopper, almost literally, because there’s eighty different acrobats above him, [...] for this mad New Year’s show that has no story at all, other...

Synonyms: lass maid babe bint bird cake chick colleen cutty damoiselle damsel elrig frail gal gel girl girlie girly grill hottie lassie little girl maggie maid child

• And while we stood beside the fount, and watch’d / Or seem’d to watch the dancing bubble, approach'd / Melissa, tinged with wan from lack of sleep, / Or sorrow, and glowing round her dewy eyes / The circled Iris of a...

Synonyms: achromatism decolouration paleness pallidity pallor