What is "dire"

Usage examples of "dire".

Some kind of dire temperature inversion had clamped itself down over the city like a bell jar, trapping and concentrating the cocktail of dust, automobile exhaust, coal smoke, woodsmoke, manure smoke, and the ammoniated gasses that rose up from the stewn excreta of millions of people and animals.

Lote-Tree are sharing with us the pangs of this bereavement, this direst of torments, and are partners in anguish of those who suffer here.

Caldwell was a little afraid of Bonhomme, wary of the scarred, rawboned trapper whom he only summoned in dire emergencies.

He did not reflect in his dire extremity that he had no arms, that I was stronger than he, that I had twice drawn his blood, and that the police, the landlord, the vetturirco, and the servants, were in the next room.

Her kind feminine fancy conjured up every possible extenuation of his dire offence.

Beith felt her world collapse, and suddenly a dire future flashed before her eyes for the child she had birthed.

And dire to tell, the sacred wine she bore 565 Fell from the cup in fleaks of clotted gore.

The hag sprung up, and stood confronting Glaucus with a face which would have befitted the fiercest of the Furies, so utterly dire and wrathful was its expression--yet even in horror and ghastliness preserving the outline and trace of beauty--and utterly free from that coarse grotesque at which the imaginations of the North have sought the source of terror.

Ty has no evidence of time-mobile races except some dire warnings in accounts half a million years old, plus the closure of his gate when he tried to contact the Kelsed, which was not necessarily indicative.

It spun and jerked, like a hyrax attacked by dire wolves, but it was too, late.

Je voudroy que pouvoy monstrer mon affection, mais je suis tant malhereuse, ci froid, ci layd, ci -- Je ne scay qui de dire -- excuse moi, Je suis tout vostre.

It is true that many workers across the world are subject to forced migrations in dire circumstances that are hardly liberatory in themselves.

Famished and homeless, loathed and loathing, wild, And hating good--for his immortal foe, He changed from starry shape, beauteous and mild, To a dire Snake, with man and beast unreconciled.

Had Lully used his skill in astrology not only to ensure that the best planetary influences should preside over the ignition of the athanor but also, Nostradamus-like, to forecast the future, he could have predicted dire fortunes for England and all Europe within a couple of years.

Whereupon the miserable father of this unfortunate daughter, suspecting that the gods and powers of heaven did envy her estate, went to the town called Milet to receive the Oracle of Apollo, where he made his prayers and offered sacrifice, and desired a husband for his daughter : but Apollo though he were a Grecian, and of the country of Ionia, because of the foundation of Milet, yet hee gave answer in Latine verse, the sence whereof was this :- Let Psyches corps be clad in mourning weed, And set on rock of yonder hill aloft : Her husband is no wight of humane seed, But Serpent dire and fierce as might be thought.