What is "lurid"

Usage examples of "lurid".

One evening a fire flamed up in Hoboken, and burned for hours against the west, in the lurid crimson tones of a conflagration as memorably and appealingly native as the colors of the sunset.

Miles realized belatedly that the lurid historical example might have acquired a new personal edge for him.

All the fierce and lurid passions which he inherited from his nation and his clime, at all times but ill concealed beneath the blandness of craft and the coldness of philosophy, were released in the breast of the Egyptian.

Drear shadows drooped and thickened above the Pass of Dariel,--that terrific gorge which like a mere thread seems to hang between the toppling frost-bound heights above and the black abysmal depths below,--clouds, fringed ominously with lurid green and white, drifted heavily yet swiftly across the jagged peaks where, looming largely out of the mist, the snow-capped crest of Mount Kazbek rose coldly white against the darkness of the threatening sky.

The unexpected, lurid death of Lannes-- Rigid as iron, reaped down like a straw-- Tiptoed Assassination haunting round In unthought thoroughfares, the near success Of Staps the madman, argue to forbid The riskful blood of my previsioned line And potence for dynastic empery To linger vialled in my veins alone.

He went to bed a little after midnight, and was awakened from lurid dreams in the small hours of Monday by the sound of door knockers, feet running in the street, distant drumming, and a clamour of bells.

The vanishing sun, whose disc was now a quarter concealed behind the impenetrable blackness of the Wall, had dyed the sky with gamboge and cerise, vermilion and lurid violet.

While Inc was keen on the whole lurid mirror-across-highway terrorism thing of early O.

The senses of General Ople were struck by the aspect of a lurid Goddess, who penetrated him, read him through, and had both power and will to expose and make him ridiculous for ever.

Encouraged to tell and retell his story, with no guidance or restraint from adults, he embellished his account from a man with yellow teeth to scenes of orgies in the woods, and finally to lurid visions of buckets of blood.

Black draperies, likewise, in the gloomy room, shut out from our view the moon, the lurid stars, and the peopleless streets--but the boding and the memory of Evil, they would not be so excluded.

The massacre of September is one of the most lurid events of the Revolution, easier therefore for the romancist to deal with than for the historian.

Between these lurid streams, underlying translucent colors and textures teasingly appeared: glassy seracs of ruby and rubellite, rounded moraines in blue tourmaline and amethyst.

There is a general feeling among the old women of Salies that it is their duty to create and promulgate fabrications and rumors replete with lurid details as a way to protect the Trevilles from the excessive imaginations of the gossips.

High above the tattered clouds, the aurora borealis forms a veil across the sky, a garish mother-of-pearl haze riddled with thousands of long, lurid scintillations, like giant shooting stars.