What is "preternatural"

Usage examples of "preternatural".

It was as if the armor itself was alive, pulsing with preternatural light.

Set on edge by such casual firsthand reference to Fellowship resources and magecraft, he bristled, his unease lent preternatural spin by the spell-charged effects of the wine.

They also occasionally have an associate muscular development in the subcutaneous tissues similar to the panniculus adiposus of quadrupeds, giving them preternatural motile power over the skin.

One of the two troopers escorting them whirled with the preternatural speed of jumped-up cyborg reflexes, and cranked off a couple of antipersonnel grenades from the launcher built into his left elbow.

Or at least that was so before Maco, with almost preternatural acuity, figured out what he was thinking.

Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment.

The pulse is more compressible and less frequent, the kidneys act freely, respiration is natural, the pains subside, although there remains languor, lassitude, and weariness, a preternatural sensibility to cold, an easily excited pulse, and a pale and sickly aspect of the countenance.

In preternatural silence the black-clad Queller surveyed the scene, featureless gaze slowly sweeping left and right.

Once ensconced behind the lectern, Whiss surveyed the audience at length, preternatural tiger-eyes shifting slowly from face to face, sliding easily over some, elsewhere pausing long and significantly, to the indescribable discomfort of assorted victims.

These silhouetted shapes possess the visionary quality of intrinsic significance, heightened by isolation and unrelatedness to preternatural intensity.

Without introducing any rational or empirical evidence, he dispensed with the preternatural realm altogether, declared that God was ineffectual in nature, and decreed that religious convictions, unlike scientific assertions, were solely matters of belief.

Richard, looking around on wild forms with their persons covered with haiks, their countenance swart with the sunbeams, their teeth as white as ivory, their black eyes glancing with fierce and preternatural lustre from under the shade of their turbans, and their dress being in general simple even to meanness.

If his primitive state was his natural state, and if the political state is supernatural, preternatural, or subnatural, how passed he alone, by his own unaided powers, from the former to the latter?

Atoms, molecules, the stars, the unconscious mind, bizarre drugs and their effects, (he'd tried out LSD and mescaline), the play of consciousness, the insidious interweaving of reality and dream (as climatically in his dreams of the Black Gondola), the bafflingly twisted and folded strata of Earth's crust and man's cerebrum and all history, the subtle mysterious swings of world events and literature and sub-literature and politics—he was interested in all of them, and forever searching for some unifying purposeful power behind them, and sensitive to them to a preternatural degree.

And there now came in Testimony, of Preternatural Mischiefs, presently befalling some that had been Instrumental to Debar her from the Communion, whereupon she was Intruding.