Tikibu: pronunciation dictionary with use examples

Word: elusive
IPA transcription: [ɪl'usɪv]
adverb meaning of the word
  • Synonyms: elusive
    Meaning: difficult to describe; "a haunting elusive odor"
  • Synonyms: elusive
    Meaning: skillful at eluding capture; "a cabal of conspirators, each more elusive than the archterrorist"- David Kline
Usage examples
  • About her seemed to hover something of the ethereal, elusive, and disquieting.
  • The miner came next, fevered to delirium, lured by the siren of an elusive yellow goddess.
  • The theme in F minor has the elusive charm of a slow, mournful valse, that returns twice, bejewelled, yet never overladen.
  • Lines are always daringly constructed, and the "thought-rhyme" appears frequently,--appealing, indeed, to an unrecognized sense more elusive than hearing.
  • She dogged his thoughts with most unmaidenly insistence; her image lay in wait for him at every cross-road of association; it was something vivid yet elusive, protean yet persistent. He recalled that other evening of her dinner-party--their first recognised meeting.
  • For the world of science and evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare.
  • The meteor had now trailed its shining nets across the whole space of the sky and was beginning to set; in the east the blue was coming to its own again; the sea was an intense edge of blackness, and now, escaped from that great shine, and faint and still tremulously valiant, one weak elusive star could just be seen, hovering on the verge of the invisible.
  • The unfenced prairie billowed to the horizon a sea of green, diversified by the sky-blue waters of slough and lake, and decked with the hues of gorgeous flowers--the prairie rose, fragrant, tender, elusive, and fragile as the English primrose; the blood-red tiger-lily; the brown windflower with its corn-tassel; the heavy wax cups of the sedgy water-lily, growing where wild duck flackered unafraid.
  • Between amusement and pique he continued to stare while the elderly American recovered his breath and De Morbihan jabbered on with unfailing vivacity; and he thought that this closer scrutiny discovered in her face contours suggesting maturity of thought beyond her apparent years--which were somewhat less than the sum of Lanyard's--and with this the suggestion of an elusive, provoking quality of wistful languor, a hint of patient melancholy....