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What is "inanimate"

Crossword clues for inanimate

inanimate
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
inanimate
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
inanimate objects (=things that are not alive)
▪ scientists studying plants, animals, or inanimate objects
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
object
▪ This makes the study of human beings different from that of animals and of inanimate objects.
▪ Some people, for example, take on the persona of an animal or a monster or an inanimate object.
▪ It forces them to tease out information from inanimate objects.
▪ Frankly, I never used to feel guilty about disappointing inanimate objects.
▪ The Bible as holy literature, the oracles of the Logos, has become for them an inanimate object of scientific investigation.
▪ If either of these inanimate objects knows you are going to dump it, it will turn on you.
▪ The distinction applies to nouns which refer to animate beings as well as those which refer to inanimate objects.
▪ His world was filled with copulating inanimate objects and people getting their faces ripped off.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ How can you get angry with a car? It's an inanimate object!
▪ Some languages categorise not only living things as masculine or feminine, but inanimate objects as well.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ And yes, the baby is just your standard inanimate stage bundle.
▪ Everything animate and inanimate followed him.
▪ For, instance, inanimate objects are typically easier to identify than animate objects.
▪ If we are imaginative enough we can project ourselves inside plants and inanimate objects as well as other animals.
▪ Only the inanimate objects in view were registered on the plates.
▪ The fall back to the beast and beyond even that-to mere inanimate existence-is complete.
▪ The Minoans also regarded certain inanimate objects as incarnations of a deity.
▪ They seek life's meaning in possessions, and use inanimate objects to tell other Earthlets who they are.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Inanimate

Inanimate \In*an"i*mate\, v. t. [Pref. in- in (or intensively) + animate.] To animate. [Obs.]
--Donne.

Inanimate

Inanimate \In*an"i*mate\, a. [L. inanimatus; pref. in- not + animatus animate.] Not animate; destitute of life or spirit; lifeless; dead; inactive; dull; as, stones and earth are inanimate substances.

Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves.
--Byron.

Syn: Lifeless; dead; inert; inactive; dull; soulless; spiritless. See Lifeless.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
inanimate

early 15c., from Late Latin inanimatus "lifeless," from in- "not" (see in- (1)) + animatus (see animation). The same word in 17c. also was a verb meaning "to infuse with life," from the other in- (see in- (2)).

Wiktionary
inanimate

  1. 1 lack the quality or ability of motion; as ''an inanimate object''. 2 Not being, and never having been alive. n. Something that is not alive. v

  2. (context obsolete English) To animate.

WordNet
inanimate

  1. adj. belonging to the class of nouns denoting nonliving things; "the word `car' is inanimate" [ant: animate]

  2. not endowed with life; "the inorganic world is inanimate"; "inanimate objects"; "dead stones" [syn: nonliving, dead] [ant: animate]

  3. appearing dead; not breathing or having no perceptible pulse; "an inanimate body"; "pulseless and dead" [syn: breathless, pulseless]

Usage examples of "inanimate".

In the act of creation, humans gave things a kind of reality on the aetheric, even though there was no life in inanimate objects per se.

Like all inanimate objects everywhere, the three displaced articles from the Airstream turkey knew instinctively what the seashell was talking about.

Orpheus and Amphion went a little farther, and by the charms of music enchanted things merely inanimate.

Fu-Manchu slowly raised his hands, and a smile dawned upon the impassive features--a smile that had no mirth in it, only menace, revealing as it did his even, discolored teeth, but leaving the filmed eyes inanimate, dull, inhuman.

That the electrochemistry of the inanimate is less valid than that of the animate?

And he greatly errs who imagines that, because the mythological legends and fables of antiquity are referable to and have their foundation in the phenomena of the Heavens, and all the Heathen Gods are but mere names given to the Sun, the Stars, the Planets, the Zodiacal Signs, the Elements, the Powers of Nature, and Universal Nature herself, therefore the first men worshipped the Stars, and whatever things, animate and inanimate, seemed to them to possess and exercise a power or influence, evident or imagined, over human fortunes and human destiny.

Carefully, thoughtfully one day, out of curiosity, he lifted from a guard some yards away a handarm with a tight beam and attacked the outermost wall with it, resin boiling away in a rush of happily lightened molecules, the very, very limited awareness of inanimate matter, so soothing and lovely.

Ritter wondered if those circumstanceswith Morphy constantly thinking of chess, he felt surewere not ideal for the transmission of the vibrations of thought and feeling into inanimate objects, in this case the golden Morphy set and watch.

A fetishist has been classically defined as a person who derives sexual gratification from a nonsexual part of the body or an inanimate object.

Late-nineteenth-century sexual theorists appropriated the concept of religious fetishism to describe the condition in which a person achieves sexual gratification from an inanimate object or a nonsexual body part rather than from another person.

But in a special way some sacraments, which imprint a character, bestow on man a certain consecration, thus deputing him to the Divine worship: just as inanimate things are said to be consecrated forasmuch as they are deputed to Divine worship.

Secondly, because in the other sacraments the consecration of the matter consists only in a blessing, from which the matter consecrated derives instrumentally a spiritual power, which through the priest who is an animated instrument, can pass on to inanimate instruments.

Shelley was turned into a carefully shutout inanimate object on the other side of the room.

At all events, the last fifty years have told us much of the method of the building of the complex machines out of the simpler ones, while we have as yet not even a hint as to the solution of the building of the simplest machine from the inanimate world.

Stars and Planets and all the Universe of Suns and Worlds, as a mere inanimate machine and aggregate of senseless orbs, no more astonishing, except in degree, than a clock or an orrery.