Literary notes about thin (AI summary)
Writers often harness "thin" to evoke both precise physical descriptions and broader moods of fragility or ephemerality. It appears in contexts ranging from practical instructions, such as diluting substances [1], to the depiction of delicate features that suggest vulnerability or otherworldliness—in characters’ physical attributes [2, 3, 4] and the transient beauty of natural elements [5, 6, 7]. The term also conveys a sense of insufficiency or sparsity, whether describing a worn envelope [8] or the fading resolve of a character [9, 10]. In each instance, "thin" enriches the narrative by encapsulating subtle nuances of texture, appearance, and emotional tone.
- In this case, almost any liquid will do which will thin the oil.
— from Simple Sabotage Field Manual by United States. Office of Strategic Services - Large holes in her petticoat permitted glimpses of her long legs and her thin knees.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo - Beside him hung the portrait of his wife, a pallid, thin-lipped woman in black.
— from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde - The swathed figure poised itself a moment, resting one thin hand on the table, and then spoke.
— from He by Andrew Lang and Walter Herries Pollock - There was a waterfall near us, such a lovely thin streak of water, like a thread but white and moving.
— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The large pale thin crescent of the new moon, half an hour high, sinking languidly under a bar-sinister of cloud, and then emerging.
— from Complete Prose Works by Walt Whitman - Already the first thin wisps of it were curling across the golden square of the lighted window.
— from The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle - “I’ll see this minute,” answered the porter, and glancing into his room, he took out and gave her the thin square envelope of a telegram.
— from Anna Karenina by graf Leo Tolstoy - And, indeed, I grew as thin as a rake myself, I was afraid I would break down.
— from White Nights and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The ecliptic had inclined itself beyond recovery till life was as thin as the elm trees.
— from The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
