Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- Pertaining to mephitis; foul; noxious; pestilential; poisonous; stifling.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Tending to destroy life; poisonous; noxious
- adjective Offensive to the smell.
- adjective (Chem.) carbon dioxide; -- so called because of its deadly suffocating power. See Carbonic acid, under
Carbonic .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective
foul -smelling . - adjective
poisonous . - adjective
unbearably disgusting
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective of noxious stench from atmospheric pollution
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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This also applies to other poison-theories, e.g. that the disease was due to rotten fish or to "mephitic" gases emanating from the soil.
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The long curved counter glistens under the flare of the gas; the lines of gaudy bottles gleam like vulgar, sham jewelry; the glare, the glitter, the garish refulgence of the place dazzle the eye, and the sharp acrid whiffs of vile odour fall on the senses with a kind of mephitic influence.
The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions Joints In Our Social Armour James Runciman 1871
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"An unexpected opportunity of personally investigating a highly nauseous kind of mephitic vapor drew me and Jones suddenly hither without time to say farewell or make explanations.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 35, September, 1860 Various
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When it comes to the power of a mephitic atmosphere on the training ground, the Germans showed the way forward.
Note to England's rugby players: embrace Der Aggro | Harry Pearson 2011
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It was also, I learned, scrolling down, a hellhole manned by human ferrets, with overflowing toilets and mephitic smells that had tragically ruined the honeymoon of vox12populi and Iwantmyrum, who were now exacting revenge by describing their nightmarish experience on every message board they could find.
You Don't Say? Andrew Ferguson 2010
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“On the day you see a single, midnight feather floating upon the mephitic winds of this your training base, then you will know it is time to open the secret box and read the secret message, and understand everything ... or mostly everything.”
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A learned professor at UNB named David Murrell went after me today after a wag posted a message on the mephitic Canadian Coalition for Democracies site yesterday and forged my name to it.
Archive 2009-02-01 2009
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And that question was not: Why would anyone want to spend months tramping around the mephitic, reptile-infested and politically dysfunctional northeast coast of South America?
From Guyana to Guiana Wayne Curtis 2011
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Taxes will not significantly be cut, hospitals will not magically become cleaner, Afghanistan will still be an issue and the pall of political correctness will remain a mephitic stain on the mores of society. bert
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Let us keep our fingers crossed and hope that the tide that is swirling about the buckled patent leather pumps of Mr. Speaker sweeps him and her away down the Thames like so much noxious mephitic effluent.
chained_bear commented on the word mephitic
"'Above all, do not stand about in this mephitic atmosphere. But first I beg that Mr Reade may be taken back to the ship and that the loblolly-boy should be told to rub him all over with vinegar and cut off his hair before he goes aboard, where he must be kept in quarantine?'"
--Patrick O'Brian, The Nutmeg of Consolation, 244
March 9, 2008
yarb commented on the word mephitic
...the train ... blocked the end of that street entirely, drawn up across it, hissing mephitically...
- Malcolm Lowry, October Ferry to Gabriola
July 30, 2008
chained_bear commented on the word mephitic
"Spices also had the merit of aesthetic appeal, being sufficiently strong and penetrating to exclude the odors of the medieval townscape, which was, at the best of times, a malodorous place; at times the crowded and filthy streets of hte cramped medieval cities must have smelled, to borrow a phrase from Melville, 'like the left wing of the day of judgment.' London was notoriously mephitic: in 1275, the White Friars who dwelt by the River Fleet in London complained to the king that the river's 'putrid exhalations ... overcame even the frankincense used in the services and had caused the death of many brethren.' The public privy of Ludgate was reported to smell so vilely that it 'rottith the stone wallys.'"
--Jack Turner, _Spice: The History of a Temptation_ (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 178-179
December 3, 2016