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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
pleasurable
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
more
▪ What moments in life could be more pleasurable?
▪ What was gained in fusion was a sense of wholeness more pleasurable than the feelings of fragmentation that preceded it.
▪ A tidy Program Manager can make Windows easier, and much more pleasurable, to use.
■ NOUN
activity
▪ For some young people, sniffing is a pleasurable activity.
▪ Behavioural techniques Most treatment programmes include behavioural modification techniques, making the patient's access to pleasurable activities contingent on weight gain.
experience
▪ This social aspect of reading, of sharing a pleasurable experience, should begin at this stage.
▪ The goal is to make each encounter a pleasurable experience that your child will enjoy.
▪ Sniffing is also a cheap and easy substitute for alcohol and can be a pleasurable experience.
▪ Virtually every pleasurable experience in the novel is interrupted.
▪ The loss concerns pleasurable experience, which derives from the immediate release of a direct instinctual impulse.
▪ Choosing fish for the aquarium should be a pleasurable experience but needs to be carefully considered.
▪ Do all pleasurable experiences produce life-long addiction?
▪ It is this choice that helps to make reading a pleasurable experience.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Once you are reasonably fit, you will find the exercise satisfying and pleasurable.
▪ The pleasurable effects of any drug quickly wear off.
▪ We want this to be a pleasurable experience for everyone.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A sharp sad pain, almost pleasurable, thrust into me.
▪ Another way to make reading pleasurable is to work hard to find books that your children will love to read.
▪ It's pleasurable and it's surprising in its detail.
▪ It was cigar smoke she noticed first always - every time a slight, pleasurable stinging of the eyes.
▪ Like a biochemical carrot and stick, these systems generate pleasurable or painful feelings that powerfully guide behavior.
▪ What moments in life could be more pleasurable?
▪ Without some element of suffering in our lives, it is difficult to distinguish a pleasurable life from a happy life.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Pleasurable

Pleasurable \Pleas"ur*a*ble\, a. Capable of affording pleasure or satisfaction; gratifying; abounding in pleasantness or pleasantry.

Planting of orchards is very . . . pleasurable.
--Bacon.

O, sir, you are very pleasurable.
--B. Jonson. [1913 Webster] -- Pleas"ur*a*ble*ness, n. -- Pleas"ur*a*bly, adv.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
pleasurable

1570s, from pleasure (n.) + -able. Related: Pleasurability; pleasurably. For sense, compare comfortable.

Wiktionary
pleasurable

a. that gives pleasure

WordNet
pleasurable

adj. affording satisfaction or pleasure; "the company was enjoyable"; "found her praise gratifying"; "full of happiness and pleasurable excitement"; "good printing makes a book more pleasurable to read" [syn: enjoyable, gratifying]

Usage examples of "pleasurable".

It was on an early day of April that the duke was sitting in his private room, a pen in one hand, and looking up with a face of pleasurable emotion at his wife, who stood by his side, her right arm sometimes on the back of his chair, and sometimes on his shoulder, while with her other hand, between the intervals of speech, she pressed a handkerchief to her eyes, bedewed with the expression of an affectionate excitement.

He had not been inside a theatre for years, and the vivid description that Mr Buskin had given him of the show he was about to witness filled him with pleasurable anticipation.

As second mistress of the Coven, she could have used her powers to punish him, but doing the physical work herself was always so much more pleasurable.

The phase of transitional fetishism, incidentally, can last for a very long time because it is so pleasurable.

She clung to Kadin, knowing he would guide her through this erotic, pleasurable death of innocence.

Then the Family entered into that most pleasurable of hours in their days, a time of relaxed muscles and the loggy stuffed feel that casts an obliging film over the coming sleep.

As his levels of arousal build to a peak, he will experience the first of a series of pleasurable orgasmic contractions.

As the pleasurable orgasmic contractions propel semen through the urethra, he will retain his tight grip on the shaft and continue massaging the frenulum and glans, maximizing the pleasure and stroking through the orgasm and its first expulsion of ejaculate.

According to report, Rekitakh was able to afford fair lodgings in that fair city, and to enjoy the otiose, pleasurable life of an illustrissimus.

She had not thought it possible to manage him, but she had, and she had found the sensation more pleasurable than ever it had been with Rayk, or any of the other Pili she sometimes took as lovers.

The rockery with the pirated wildflowers from the Burren in Clare had taken him three years of intermittent, pleasurable work a decade ago.

Louis Philippe found a home in England, at first at Claremont, and then in Abingdon House, Kensington, where he lived for some time in apparently tranquil enjoyment, the delightful and salubrious vicinity affording to his family means of retired and pleasurable recreation.

To this pleasurable feeling is easily added the effort, at favorable opportunity, to reproduce the product of the apperception, to supplement and deepen it, to unite it to other ideas, and so further to extend certain chains of thought.

In the minutes since the gun was last fired, the indium had cooled to the point that the little Molt found its warmth pleasurable --or at least it seemed to: its eyes were closed, its breathing placid.

Overeaters Anonymous suggests that most people who overeat constantly do not do so because it is pleasurable.