Noxious; poisonous

Usage examples of tainted.

His helmet was of old rusty iron, but the vizor was brass, which, tainted by his breath, corrupted into copperas, nor wanted gall from the same fountain, so that, whenever provoked by anger or labour, an atramentous quality, of most malignant nature, was seen to distil from his lips.

The wind had dropped and the night air was tainted somewhat with the smell of the burning street lamps, but it was still cool and luxurious after the dank staleness that had pervaded the cellarage and which still clung to his clothes.

I was glad to see that I should have comfortable quarters, but I was annoyed by a very unpleasant stink which tainted the air, and which could certainly not be agreeable to the spirits I had to evoke.

If it has been done in selfseeking, as, exceptis excipiendis, by Leonardo, Titian, Michael Angelo, and Raffaelle, it will in due course lose hold and power in proportion to the insincerity with which it was tainted.

Pure enough to breathe, but slightly tainted with an unfamiliar smell, she thought as she stepped out of the Fiver and onto the thick grassoid surface covering.

The system of Apollinaris was strenuously encountered by the Asiatic and Syrian divines whose schools are honored by the names of Basil, Gregory and Chrysostom, and tainted by those of Diodorus, Theodore, and Nestorius.

It has become a part of you, you have brooded over it, lived with it, soaked in it, been tainted by it--and now it is going to be hard for you to escape.

Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

I do not know whether a mungoose in a wild state will eat carrion, but he would not touch anything tainted, and, though very fond of freshly-cooked game, would turn up his nose at high partridge or grouse.

For him to be tainted by that contact did not surprise him, and Rym Ramoch had accepted his explanation for the taint without question.

I wished I could overcome that gnawing suspiciousness that had tainted me.

Their leader, a mighty orc almost twice as tall as the sort of tusker Alusair was used to slaying in the Stonelands, whose much-battered breastplate was studded with grinning human skulls, was grinning at her as one large, grubby finger rubbed along the glyphs of the largest tainted tree Alusair had yet seen.

For thousands of years, the threat of anthrax to humans was primarily limited to farmworkers, woolsorters, and, in rare cases, those who ate tainted meat.

The realization pleased Gabriel as much for the promise of how easy it would be to outmaneuver her as the possibility that not all of her beguiling innocence was tainted yet.

I conceive, often misapplied, and indeed, when I consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere of a feverish civilization, I am inclined to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as Missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans despatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.