adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a dim/distant memory (=not clear, from a long time ago)
▪ He had only dim memories of his father, who had died when he was four.
a distant dream (=that it will take a long time to achieve)
▪ Peace in this area may still be a distant dream.
a distant mountain (=far away)
▪ The sun was setting over the distant mountains.
a distant peak
▪ The mist cleared to reveal the distant peaks across the valley.
a distant relation
▪ He was some distant relation of Pollitt’s wife.
a distant relative
▪ She claims to be a distant relative of the Queen.
a distant sound (=a long way away)
▪ All seemed quiet, but for the distant sound of police sirens.
a distant star (=very far away)
▪ He stared up towards the distant stars.
close/distant cousin
▪ The Alaskan brown bear is a close cousin of the grizzly bear.
distant rumble
▪ the distant rumble of gunfire
distant thunder
▪ Apart from the occasional rumble of distant thunder, there was silence.
in the dim and distant past (=a very long time ago)
▪ I think she sang Ireland's entry in the Eurovision Song Contest sometime in the dim and distant past.
in the not too distant future (=quite soon)
▪ We’re planning to go there again in the not too distant future.
the dim and distant future (=a very long time from now)
▪ He plans to get married in the dim and distant future.
the distant future (=a long time from now)
▪ I don't worry about what might happen in the distant future.
the distant/remote past
▪ Rivers of molten lava clearly flowed here in the distant past.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
as
▪ You are as distant from their worries and their rows as any angel.
▪ Reporters, from papers as distant as the New York Times, were bored beyond comatose.
▪ He came to regard Fisher as distant, but forceful and rapid and efficient, and later as friendly.
▪ P, targets that once seemed as distant as Mars.
▪ In fact in-laws, and indeed kin as distant as cousins, seem commonly to be included in these employment networks.
far
▪ Yet a goal was not far distant.
▪ I closed my eyes and imagined I was in a far distant universe a long, long time ago.
▪ They have homes, often far distant.
▪ They come from a far, far distant land.
▪ That diagnosis is not far distant from Disraeli's own; it is in their prescriptions for the future that they differ.
▪ This, too, seems far distant, almost as remote as the age of Ava Gardner and Kia-Ora.
▪ Only 10 of these were far distant from an existing paper.
more
▪ Do kin who are more distant in genealogical terms necessarily fall in the outer circle?
▪ Scientists use the data to infer the distances to similar, but much more distant stars.
▪ She might be compelled to seek help in a more distant village.
▪ The others do not return, presumably traveling on to another, more distant roost.
▪ Status relates to our concern for our standing in the eyes of people more distant from us.
▪ They are closer to some people, more distant from others.
▪ By contrasting colour and black and white photography, the men seem to appear more distant and further unobtainable.
▪ Astronomers bootstrap from nearby stars to more distant constellations to the farthest edges of the universe.
most
▪ There is a stillness over the waters, a stillness which stretches to the most distant mountain-top.
▪ But as the most distant tiny box would come over the horizon, another box would appear behind it.
▪ Quasars have red shifts ranging up to 4.5, making them the most distant distinct sources so far detected.
▪ Family solidarity extended to the most distant cousins and even to childhood friends.
▪ She radiated goodness and happiness, and listeners even in the most distant recesses of concert-halls became affected by these qualities.
so
▪ Her anxieties, her tension, her thoughts about racing tomorrow had never seemed so distant.
▪ Sometimes he was so distant that he seemed to be in another world.
▪ Mine were of that last tropical downpour in Samaná when the potential violence had seemed so distant to me.
▪ Such ideas, so distant from the old Puritan concepts of afterlife in heaven, became part of his transcendentalist package.
▪ Nurses are no longer expected to sublimate their feelings behind starchy officiousness as has been the case in the not so distant past.
▪ How can we use them to help guide us into our not so distant future?
▪ This may, inpart, explain why current approaches seem so distant from those applied to other periods of the past.
▪ In short-sighted people, images are brought into focus just in front of the retina, so distant things are blurred.
too
▪ At some not too distant day, history surely will account him a will-o'-the-wisp, and file him away accordingly.
▪ At first Keoni had seemed very remote, too distant to be a real worry.
▪ The betrayal of a nation was too distant to make her care.
▪ Maybe he was therefore too distant to intercede in the folie a trois developing right under his nose.
▪ This, and similar organisations, may well become agents of environmental change in the not too distant future.
▪ Time and again a permissive present is contrasted with the not too distant past.
▪ The consequences seemed irrelevant, too distant to consider.
▪ Eventually it allowed the emergence of institutions not too distant from our own political and legal understanding of the term.
very
▪ If the object is very distant, linear magnification becomes vanishingly small.
▪ The doctor nods to the anesthesiologist, and suddenly things be-come very distant.
▪ A very distant object has to be extremely large to produce an image of appreciable size.
▪ The rest of the world seems very distant on the isolated campus.
▪ Siamangs and the closely allied gibbons are apes too, not very distant from the orang itself.
▪ When he did speak, it was mostly of the very distant past, remembering his brothers as boys.
▪ Both Alpha and Beta are very distant, and are well over 5000 times as luminous as the Sun.
▪ Ears Ringing sounds in ears, vertigo, sensitivity to loud noise, sounds seeming very distant.
■ NOUN
city
▪ The distant city of Lucy's dreams was becoming steadily demystified.
▪ Names of distant cities were called out.
▪ She had not killed him, she was leading him away from the open mouth of the cave and towards the distant city.
▪ U-turning, he drove off in the direction of the distant city, without so much as another backward glance.
▪ But Mrs Thomas knows that most of her pupils will go on to college in distant cities, and few return.
country
▪ But affairs in distant countries can suddenly end up close to home.
▪ The Jaguar is reported to have crashed in a distant country, mad as hell.
▪ They travelled by sea and by land to distant countries in search of aromatics and artefacts.
▪ His ship came safely through the storm which wrecked or drove to distant countries so many others.
▪ I wondered if our own troops in distant countries behaved in this way.
▪ Explorers of distant countries found other plants which produced curious mental effects.
cousin
▪ A distant cousin had once ended up in the hail.
▪ Charles's distant cousin John Carroll was drawn only once from the religious into the civil sphere during the war.
▪ Joszef had put capital into the real estate business of a distant cousin.
▪ He married a distant cousin, Jocasta.
▪ To think: a distant cousin of the Romanovs, and his love.
▪ They were, in fat, distant cousins, something they never found out.
▪ Father-of-two Ivan, who lived modestly, struck rich 10 years ago when a distant cousin left him £8 million.
future
▪ In any event it will be a vision of bow the profit is going to be achieved in the distant future.
▪ Unknown distant future threats are not a reason for spending so much money on the military now.
▪ This, and similar organisations, may well become agents of environmental change in the not too distant future.
▪ In the not-so-distant future, technology will continue to change radically what we see and how we see it.
▪ Jacob's dying blessing focusses on the distant future, when the descendants of these twelve will occupy the promised land.
▪ How can we use them to help guide us into our not so distant future?
galaxy
▪ In the 1920s Edwin Hubble observed that distant galaxies look redder than nearby ones.
▪ High-tech digital cameras are used extensively in astronomy to capture dim light from distant galaxies.
▪ It was slightly fuzzy and presumably a distant galaxy.
▪ Quasars are the highly energetic cores of distant galaxies.
▪ Observations of distant galaxies indicate that they are moving away from us: The universe is expanding.
▪ Light given out by distant galaxies has to swim against the tide of expansion to get to us.
▪ But if we look at distant galaxies, there seems to be more or less the same number of them.
▪ It is now well known that distant galaxies are probably about 10 times farther away than Hubble inferred.
hill
▪ The sun trembled for an instant on the edge of the distant hills, then started to sink behind them.
▪ This combination is useful when suggesting distant hills.
▪ On this side of the Webi, undulating grasslands rose to distant hills, and strips of woodland bordered numerous streams.
▪ Triangulations on distant hills were attempted, weather records kept, and there was an astronomical observatory.
horizon
▪ The same summer ... I am looking down on the world, but it does not stretch away over nebulous distant horizons.
▪ Lassen on the distant horizon, and with the spiked rim of Castle Crags below to the nearby south.
▪ The village faces west to a distant horizon formed by Skye and the Torridon mountains, a glorious prospect.
▪ Then go outside and pick out an object, such as a large tree or building, on the distant horizon.
▪ The wind was blowing free, and if there were any fences they must have been beyond the distant horizon.
▪ I stormed across the wet barren sands towards the thin line of sea on the distant horizon.
▪ The undulating East Anglian landscape stretched towards a not distant horizon.
memory
▪ Consequently the forms of paternalism signified by feudal relations are more likely to be a recent tradition rather than a distant memory.
▪ Serious problems from a life onshore can fade rapidly to distant memories as sight of land is lost.
▪ The calm was a strange one - a distant memory.
▪ Euclid and Cicero were a distant memory now.
▪ Driven there by some distant memory from his youth.
▪ But that is now a distant memory.
▪ The national institution of the past 60-odd years could soon be a distant memory.
▪ One theory is that it awakens distant memories of floating in the comfort of the womb.
mountain
▪ The sun was setting on the tops of the distant mountains.
▪ Over the valley, a full moon was rising, and a chill wind was blowing down from the distant mountains.
▪ The city fans upwards from the coast, its white towers climbing gracefully into the foothills of the distant mountains.
▪ Still others were as darkly blue as distant mountains.
▪ The only things to break the dusty tedium are distant mountains, ragged scars on the horizon.
▪ Clouds like brassy cauliflowers form over the steel-blue blades of the distant mountain range that borders the plain.
▪ Then the sun is gone and it's suddenly cold and the distant mountains are their night time black cut-out.
object
▪ Newton worried about that when his theory of gravitation required apparently instantaneous interaction between two distant objects.
▪ Telescopes help people see distant objects.
▪ This is why the method is often applied to soften and diffuse distant objects or hills, as in atmospheric perspective.
▪ Users can control both magnification and contrast in seeing near as well as distant objects.
▪ As civilisation evolved painters noted that near objects can overlap distant objects.
▪ A bat lives in a world of echoes from near objects, distant objects and objects at all intermediate distances.
▪ A very distant object has to be extremely large to produce an image of appreciable size.
▪ It is an everyday experience; our eyes, ears and noses collect information about distant objects.
past
▪ What of that other world, the world of the distant past that now lies beneath our feet?
▪ We move from the distant past, to the past, to the present, to an even earlier past.
▪ Nurses are no longer expected to sublimate their feelings behind starchy officiousness as has been the case in the not so distant past.
▪ In the not so distant past, North Dalton's church was well supported.
▪ The distant past can be introduced through stories.
▪ But why this excursion into the distant past?
▪ When he did speak, it was mostly of the very distant past, remembering his brothers as boys.
place
▪ Members from many distant places make the effort to attend and find it well worthwhile.
▪ I was begin-ning to lose touch with my body, floating away to distant places.
▪ They were imagining the dead man in a beautiful distant place, far from the troubles of this world.
▪ The place of the setting sun is always a distant place, different from where we live.
▪ Light from distant places is not only red-shifted by the expansion of the universe, it is also old.
▪ Travel is easier and we are continuously bombarded with information about distant places.
▪ Mysterious indigo with its connotations of protection was a substance and colour full of symbolism in the distant places of Arabia.
planet
▪ The funny man who had found her on a distant planet and had treated her as a human being.
▪ They got their name more than 100 years ago when astronomers thought their roundish shapes resembled distant planets.
▪ Perhaps prehistoric visitors from distant planets erected it here - Space Odyssey style - purely for this purpose?
▪ Why was she on this distant planet, trying to discover how the Althosian civilization was destroyed?
▪ We pretended to fly to distant planets in futuristic spaceships.
▪ She knows that the guest has come from another, distant planet, one with an important status in the universe.
▪ Taking all this into account, we have to ask why the extraterrestrials should be remotely interested in seeding distant planets.
relation
▪ Their musical directors are Thomas and Brenda Gunn, distant relations of our dear Pastor.
▪ A distant relation of Halorella, called Peregrinella, is even more remarkable in early Cretaceous rocks.
▪ And others: distant relations, slight acquaintances.
▪ John Bryan was not just Steve's good friend but also a distant relation.
▪ The apprentice was some distant relation of Pollitt's wife; that'd be why he was throwing his weight around.
▪ The other friends were all Parisian except for a young couple, Rumanians living in Paris, distant relations of Teodor.
relative
▪ Shrimps are distant relatives of insects.
▪ No-one was able to locate even a distant relative.
▪ I even had some distant relatives living here, of the sort that are called cousins, seven times removed.
▪ Two brothers of wife Gail Spiro and a distant relative of her husband arrived in San Diego yesterday.
▪ Two letters that might have been written to a distant relative, and that was all.
▪ All four looked white different, yet slightly the same, like distant relatives with an underlying family resemblance.
▪ Ali was the name of a warrior, a distant relative of the Prophet Muhammad.
rumble
▪ The only noise was the distant rumble of traffic on the coastal road.
▪ A new sound was growing in the tunnel, a distant rumble.
▪ I could faintly hear the distant rumble of commuter traffic from my bedroom - a reminder of what I had temporarily escaped.
▪ There was a long, distant rumble.
second
▪ A distant second to the Littlewoods giant is Vernons pools which can offer punters a mere half million.
▪ Hart was a distant second with 16 percent.
▪ Keane is considered to be second in party power, but it is a distant second.
sound
▪ She heard the distant sound of the tractor starting up, which meant that Fernand had no intention of waiting for her.
▪ Chewing, waiting to get his hit, he seems to be listening for some distant sound.
▪ The fires signalled to something else as well ... Shortly before daybreak Tallis was woken by the distant sound of a hunting horn.
▪ He could already hear distant sounds.
▪ They weren't distant sounds now.
▪ After a while there came the distant sound of rushing water.
▪ We were interrupted by the distant sound of the gate intercom.
▪ Sometimes too, I could hear the distant sounds of other women, coughing or calling out to one another, laughing.
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
in the dim and distant past
▪ I am sure in the dim and distant past it had been filched from the wall.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ As she was growing up, her father was always distant and took little interest in her achievements.
▪ By now, the plane was just a distant speck in the sky.
▪ Howard is a distant cousin of my mother's.
▪ Jeff's been kind of distant lately.
▪ The neighbors seem very distant, although I try to be friendly.
▪ There was a flash of lightning and then the rumble of distant thunder.
▪ There was no sound other than the distant roar of the ocean.
▪ Travelers came from distant lands to visit the shrine.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Adelaida Parra coordinates seven literacy groups each week spending long hours travelling by bus between the distant shanty towns.
▪ Even the plural in their name seems to make them extend farther into a distant romantic haze.
▪ Firebug shrugged, his eyes distant.
▪ Fog hangs on the distant and some of the near hills.
▪ High-tech digital cameras are used extensively in astronomy to capture dim light from distant galaxies.
▪ Then her sad eyes met Morse's in a sort of distant, anonymous camaraderie: she smiled across, almost fully.