The Collaborative International Dictionary
Smolder \Smol"der\, Smoulder \Smoul"der\, v. i. [imp. & p. p. Smolderedor Smouldered; p. pr. & vb. n. Smoldering or Smouldering.] [OE. smolderen; cf. Prov. G. sm["o]len, smelen, D. smeulen. Cf. Smell.]
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To burn and smoke without flame; to waste away by a slow and supressed combustion.
The smoldering dust did round about him smoke.
--Spenser. To exist in a state of suppressed or smothered activity; to burn inwardly; as, a smoldering feud.
Smoldering \Smol"der*ing\, Smouldering \Smoul"der*ing\, a. Being in a state of suppressed activity; quiet but not dead.
Some evil chance
Will make the smoldering scandal break and blaze.
--Tennyson.
Wiktionary
alt. (present participle of smoulder English) n. (context sometimes figurative English) The act by which something smoulders; residual heat. vb. (present participle of smoulder English)
WordNet
adj. showing scarcely suppressed anger; "her tone was...conversational although...her eyes were smoldering"- James Hensel [syn: smoldering]
burning slowly without flame; "smoldering embers" [syn: smoldering]
Wikipedia
Smouldering (or smoldering) is the slow, low-temperature, flameless form of combustion, sustained by the heat evolved when oxygen directly attacks the surface of a condensed-phase fuel. Many solid materials can sustain a smouldering reaction, including coal, cellulose, wood, cotton, tobacco, cannabis, peat, plant litter, humus, synthetic foams, charring polymers including polyurethane foam, and some types of dust. Common examples of smouldering phenomena are the initiation of residential fires on upholstered furniture by weak heat sources (e.g., a cigarette, a short-circuited wire), and the persistent combustion of biomass behind the flaming front of wildfires.
Usage examples of "smouldering".
She was a hard, feverish, bitter, and over-stimulated woman, and yet she had a kind of harsh loyalty to her family: she was, in a fierce and smouldering way, very ambitious for Abe, who seemed to be the most promising of her brothers: she was determined that he should go to college and become a lawyer, and his fees at the university, in part at any rate, were paid by his sister--in part only, not because Sylvia would not have paid all without complaint, but because Abe insisted on paying as much as he could through his own labour, for Abe, too, had embedded in him a strong granite of independence, the almost surly dislike, of a strong and honest character, of being beholden to anyone for favours.
It was obvious that Robert derived a fierce and perverse pleasure from his stupid lie, but the girl was in a state of smouldering rage which blazed out at him the moment his friends had gone away.
She had bent forward still more and was looking down at him with a kind of slow, brooding intensity, her face smouldering and drowsy as a flower.
And all the time the girl did nothing, made no attempt to resist or push him away, just yielded with a dumb sullen passiveness to his embraces, her face smouldering with a slow sullen passion that he could not fathom or define.
Her strong, black brows grew straight and thick in an unbroken line above her eyes, her upper lip was dark with a sparse but unmistakable moustache of a few black hairs, her face, at once cold and hard in its mistrust, and smouldering with a dark and sinister desire, was stamped with that strange fellowship of avarice and passion he had seen in the faces of women such as this all over France.
A tall and sensual-looking Jewess, she was seated on a pile of baggage, smoking a cigarette, her long legs indolently crossed: indifferently, with smouldering and arrogant glances, she surveyed the crowd of passengers on the tender.
And, since the city was not a smouldering heapor no more than was usual after a city-wide celebrationclearly nothing did.
That menagerie is nothing but smouldering pieces scattered for leagues across the plain.
Smoke snaked from smouldering hair, curses rode sparks up into the night air.
Between them was a broad, shallow brazier, perched on three hand-high iron legs and filled with smouldering coals.
Broach continued stomping on his cloak long after the smouldering patches had been extinguished.
Opposite the building there had been another just like it, but fire had reduced it to smouldering rubble.
At the far end, it halted, swung its long-snouted head back, eyes like smouldering coals.
Vinnie muttered, lighting his forty-seventh cigarette of the evening and dropping its smouldering predecessor in his empty beer can.
In the kitchen garden, drenched in dragon-pee, the hapless towel-clad clone that Ffup had mistaken for toilet paper crept closer to the incinerated and still smouldering remains of Hugh Pylum-Haight and attempted to dry herself in the warmth.