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Contaminating   /kəntˈæmənˌeɪtɪŋ/   Listen
Contaminating

adjective
1.
Spreading pollution or contamination; especially radioactive contamination.  Synonym: dirty.  "A dirty bomb releases enormous amounts of long-lived radioactive fallout"
2.
That infects or taints.  Synonym: corrupting.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Contaminating" Quotes from Famous Books



... hallway one of the loungers who had witnessed the recent scene at the hotel. After a second's stare the man passed on down to the shabby-genteel parlor, and soon whist, novels, and papers were dropped, as the immaculate little community learned of the contaminating presence beneath the ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... does Agnes avoid her? She stiffens herself up and curls her lips when the girl goes by, as if there was something contaminating about her; and one night when we were in the music-room and Miss Smith was playing and singing 'Mrs. Brady' for us, Agnes came in with Amy and made a great fuss and noise, disturbing everybody in pretending to ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry

... turns through the streets of your capital, and observe those whom he shall meet, and he will be perfectly satisfied. Amalgamation, indeed! The charge is made with a very bad grace on the present occasion. No, sir; it is not the negro woman, it is the slave and the contaminating influence of slavery that is the mother of amalgamation. Does the gentleman want facts on this subject? let him look at the colored race in the free States; it is a rare occurrence there. A colony of blacks, some three or four hundred, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... malignant type broke out in the common gaol. The place was dirty enough before, and the horrors of that abode were indescribable even when sickness did not prevail; but when about 150 men of all ranks lay prostrate on the ground, contaminating still more the already impure atmosphere, the scene was horrible in the extreme, giving a better idea of the place of torments than even Dante's vivid description. The epidemic lasted until the first rains set in. About eighty died; and many more ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc

... "Well-named!—dirty, smeary, contaminating business," said Croyden. "And the best 'greasers' have the best places, I reckon. I prefer the unadorned garb of the civilian—and independence. I'll permit those fellows to fight the battles and draw the rewards—they can do both ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott

... declared them, 'if not the devil, at least his twin-brother.' There are kennels of the courts wherein there settles down all that the law breeds most foul, loathsome, and hideous and abhorrent to the eye of day; there this contaminating puddle gathers its noisome ooze, slowly, stealthily, continually, agglomerating its fetid mass by spontaneous cohesion, and sinking by the irresistible gravity of rottenness into that abhorred deep, the lowest, ghastliest pit in all the subterranean vaults ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker

... requisite distance, to yell their testimony to the Brahman judge who sat in uncontaminated purity within. The falling of the shadow of a low-caste person upon any Brahman in India necessitates an ablution on the part of the latter. It is this frequency of contaminating and polluting contingencies in the life of the Brahman which requires of him so many ablutions daily, and which renders him perhaps the cleanest in person among the sons of men. So many are the dangers of contamination which daily beset him in the ordinary pursuits of life that relief ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... involved the usual assumption of overshoes to prevent our infidel leather from contaminating the floor), we fell, after evading countless beggars and would-be guides, into the hands of a kindly old man who pressed handfuls of little white nuts upon us and who remains in my memory as the only independent Mussulman priest in India, for he refused a tip. In this respect nothing could be ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas

... cause of this great republic reduced to such extremities? Is this nation of twenty millions of freemen, so richly endowed with all the faculties, resources, and artificial means which constitute power, unable to preserve its national existence, independence, and liberty, without help from the contaminating hand of tyranny, without sacrificing its honor by basely singing hosannas to the imperial butcher of Poland, at the very moment when the blood of the people of Kosciuszko and Pulaski cries to Heaven and mankind for vengeance? Is the peril so great? so imminent? ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... I destroy it in your presence, before I leave the house?" He kindled a match, and, lighting the paper, laid it to burn in a plate on the table. "Any trifling inconvenience that I may suffer is as nothing," he remarked, "compared with the importance of preserving that pure name from the contaminating contact of the world. There! We have reduced it to a little harmless heap of ashes; and our dear impulsive Rachel will never know what we have done! How do you feel? My precious friends, how do you feel? For my poor part, I am as light-hearted ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins

... escape contamination; but the chances are very strongly against it. If you will figure out that a well drains the surface soil in every direction for a distance from ten to thirty times its own depth, and that the average well is about twenty-five feet deep, you can readily see what a risk of contaminating the well is caused by every barn, outhouse, or pen within from sixty to a hundred and fifty yards from ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson

... father shall be visited on the child. I look out into the world, and I see the living witnesses round me to that terrible truth. I see the vices which have contaminated the father descending, and contaminating the child; I see the shame which has disgraced the father's name descending, and disgracing the child's. I look in on myself, and I see my crime ripening again for the future in the self-same circumstance which first sowed the seeds of it in the past, and descending, in inherited contamination ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... long as their appetites are satisfied, seek nothing more! You play the patron to a certain literary 'set' who produce books unfit to be read by any decent human being,—you work your way, by means of your title and position, through society, contaminating everything you touch! You contaminate ME by associating my name with yours!—and my aunt helps you in the wicked scheme! I came here to my own home—to the house where my father died—thinking that perhaps here at least I should find ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... be got from emery which has been used in the previous processes. It is not a good plan to wash the finer grades of emery out of the proceeds of very rough grinding say with anything coarser than flour of emery—as there is a danger of thereby contaminating the finer grades with comparatively coarse glass particles (owing to their lightness) and this may lead to scratching. If the finer grades are very light in colour, it may be inferred that a considerable portion of the dust is composed of ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall

... induces them to leave the room. Beatrice, in the meantime, who has been rating her parent for his cruelty, is subjected to every species of insult; and he sends her to her own apartment, with the hellish intention of prostituting her innocence, and contaminating, as he pithily expresses it, "both body and soul." The second act introduces us to a tete-a-tete between Bernardo (another of Cenci's sons) and Lucretia; when their conference is suddenly broken off, by the abrupt entrance ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... manufactured. Three days' exposure to the dusty air suffices to render them muddy, fetid, and swarming with infusorial life. The liquids are thus proved, one and all, ready for putrefaction when the contaminating agent is applied. I invite my colleague to reflect on these facts. How will he account for the absolute immunity of a liquid exposed for months in a warm room to optically pure air, and its infallible ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... more than this—for his own love for Elizabeth made him eloquent. He must do her this one service: he must deliver her young brother out of the contaminating hands of these Philistines; and so he reasoned and pleaded with Leah as he had never ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... but in the recollection of the story-teller, and the green turf alone marking the lands they once inhabited. It fortunately happened, however, at the period alluded to, that the prophets, together with a few of the elder chiefs, who had stood aloof from the contaminating influence of the white men, were enabled to arouse the almost extinguished energy of the people, so far as to assemble them round a council-fire, that was lighted at early dawn one frosty morning, in the Moon of Falling Leaves, on the Prophets' Plain. The whole tribe ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... year.— But thou, a man exalted high, Conspicuous in the world's keen eye, On record now, thy name's enrolled, And future ages will be told,— There lived a man named BANNEKER, An African Astronomer!— Thou need'st to have a special care, Thy conduct with thy talent square, That no contaminating vice, Obscure thy ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... my fault—one should be accurate— Jews, said I? when I meant Jews, Jewesses, And Jewlings! all betwixt the age Of twenty-four hours, and of five score years. Of either sex, of every known degree, All the contaminating vermin purged With one clean, searching ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... me, now that there is no risk of their contaminating me. M. Rudolph has washed me too well. I am insured ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue

... his promises to his mother and the Archbishop, and in despite, too, of his own conscientious endeavor to keep every contaminating influence from entering his mind, he could not prevent this same Tito from assiduously cultivating his friendship, and voicing the most liberal ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... and raising the protective properties of the immune hog's blood. An animal so treated is called a hyperimmune (Fig. 85). The blood from the hyperimmunes is defibrinated and a preservative added, and after it has been tested for potency and freedom from contaminating organisms, it is ready ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... light!" exclaims the bard of "Paradise." Yes, light is holy. It is undefiled and pure, as when "God saw the light that it was good." Man has ravaged the earth and reddened the seas; but light has escaped his contaminating touch, and is still as God made it, unless, indeed, when man imprisons it within the stained glass of the cathedral, and then obligingly helps its dimness by lighting a score or so of tapers. Did no monk ever think of putting a stained window in the east, and compelling the sun ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... was Sweden freed from his contaminating presence. Within a month he had returned, breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the nation that he had vanquished. A general diet had been summoned to meet at Stockholm on the first day of November. As this diet was to be immediately followed by the coronation ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson

... black waters, producing the most novel and beautiful effects. It was a scene over which the spirit of peace might brood in silent adoration; but how spoiled by the discordant yells of the filthy beings who were sullying the purity of the air and water with contaminating sights ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... became the avenger; the girl born among the social filth of the faubourgs; the golden fly sprung from the rottenness below, that was tolerated and concealed, carrying in the fluttering of its wings the ferment of destruction, rising and contaminating the aristocracy, poisoning men only by alighting upon them, in the palaces through whose windows it entered; the unconscious instrument of ruin and death—fierce flame of Vandeuvres, the melancholy fate of Foucarmont, lost in the Chinese waters, ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola

... Graevenitz with the temptress of Guestrow; and when in answer to her Highness's query, whether the evil woman had been punished for her wickedness, Mueller threw himself at the Duchess's feet and told her openly that the contaminating female was the Graevenitz, whom he had followed from Guestrow—he, the poor instrument of God's righteous wrath, her Highness indeed felt that here was the vengeance of the Almighty coming upon her enemy. Mueller ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... keep at a respectable distance, and not to soil his clothes with your rusty iron jacket. Do you comprehend me, sir; or will this make you recollect in future?" The rattan was raised, and descended in a shower of blows, until the cooper made his escape into the head. "There, take that, you contaminating, stave-dubbing, gimlet-carrying, quintessence of a bung-hole! I beg your pardon, Mr Simple, for interrupting the conversation, but when duty calls, ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat



Words linked to "Contaminating" :   clean, infectious



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