Adjective: mephitic
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more mephitic |
| Superlative | most mephitic |
Sample Sentences
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"I could have borne the sight of his crutch," said she, "but the crutch and the nephew together really oppress me like a mephitic vapour." [1842, [anonymous collaborator of Letitia Elizabeth Landon], chapter LXI, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, pages 151–152:]
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It is impossible to convey, in words, any idea of the hideous phantasmagoria of shifting limbs and faces which moved through the evil-smelling twilight of this terrible prison-house. Callot might have drawn it, Dante might have suggested it, but a minute attempt to describe its horrors would but disgust. There are depths in humanity which one cannot explore, as there are mephitic caverns into which one dare not penetrate. [1874, Marcus Clarke, chapter V, in For the Term of His Natural Life:]
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From this crawling flapping mass of obscene reptilian life came the shocking clamor which filled the air and the mephitic, horrible, musty odor which turned us sick. [1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:]
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More than that, perhaps the worst thing, was a sort of mephitic fog, moistureless and invisible, that came and went like an exhalation of the arid earth itself. [1996, Janette Turner Hospital, Oyster, paperback edition, Virago Press, page 3:]
Adjectives inflected like mephitic
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
From Latin mephīticus, from mephītis; compare French méphitique. See: French Adjectives '
méphitique'.