What is "limn"

Usage examples of "limn".

Moonlight glinted softly off the surface of the Amur, limning the cluster of islands at the confluence with the Ussuri.

Above him the dark sky was limned with gold, the lights of Los Angeles, but despite that light and the thin cloud cover he could see a scattering of stars.

The entrance to the Haiphong Lily was marked by a huge water lily limned in red neon.

The man below his window, no more than a youngster really, looked as if he had stepped directly from the stage of some Ruritanian musical comedy: with his high-plumed velvet hat, long, flowing cloak of yellow blanket cloth and magnificently embroidered high boots fitted with gleaming silver spurs all so sharply limned against and emphasised by the dazzling white background of snow, he was a colourful figure indeed, in that drab, grey Communist country, colourful even to the point of the bizarre.

The old tales do limn them the same, what with their eyes like cats and strange ears.

But its face, limned in the bright moonlight, was bestial, with close-set ears, flaring nostrils, and a great flabby-lipped mouth in which gleamed white tusklike fangs.

Those portraits of the freaks were more disturbing now, in the fading moonbeams that barely limned them, than they were in the uncompromising light of day, for it was within the power of the human imagination to conjure up worse atrocities than even God could commit.

As the promise of the sun brightened the eastern sky, limning the crags with its pale glow, the griffins sank down on the sunning stone.

The cloud flowed aside for a moment and Peter saw the sun setting over distant tepuis, limning their silhouettes like the hulks of ancient ships carved from dirty ice.

The imposing buildings standing aloofly apart atop the hill called Tara were become but shadows, some limned darkly against the sky, others spectrally pale.

Out of the country twinned and murderous in a spring of stars let the word bind the body to the wind of the senses bind the invisible nerve of the air bind and loose jess and unfetter the blank and awaiting country here in a season of hawks and O may the word upon word engender past fear and sleep may it ride limning the imagined life of the planets Gilean and Sirrion book and flame here at the Alchemist's Gate where the sound of our singing assembles, dissembles, weaving a veil over nothing.

Mary Catherine instinctively looked to her father, who was just visible through the confetti as a glowing outline, limned by the television lights, blurred by the red-white-and-blue blizzard.

He caught the boy before he had started falling, heaved him over the taffrail, slid across himself, stood there for a second, sharply limned in a cone of light from a torch new lit in the boat -- McKinnon had prudently bided his time until he had heard the sharp thud of the blow -- crooked an arm round the young soldier's waist and jumped.

The forest around them turned instantly from dimly perceived tree trunks shrouded in the gloom of night, to black obelisks limned in silver surmounted by a glittering canopy of broad leaves.

And there, as if the big greengrocer in the sky, he who smiles favorably on all such hegiras, had finally come back into the office and noticed Arlo's button lit on the board, and sent her to him--there she stood, limned by the fluorescents of dalliance, lush in the simplicity of her skintight yellow ochre capris, seen through a glass starkly, wrestling with a grocery cart in the immense front window of Ralph's.