Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Thick and adhesive. Used of a fluid.
  • adjective Covered with a sticky or clammy coating.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Sticky; having a sticky or glutinous consistency; produced by or covered by a tenacious coating or secretion.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Sticking or adhering, and having a ropy or glutinous consistency; viscous; glutinous; sticky; tenacious; clammy

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Viscous; having a high viscosity.
  • adjective Sticky, slimy, or glutinous.
  • adjective Covered with a viscid layer.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective having the sticky properties of an adhesive

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Late Latin viscidus, from Latin viscum, mistletoe, birdlime made from mistletoe berries.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Late Latin viscidus, from viscumbirdlime’.

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Examples

  • The nattō strings itself are often described by the Japanese ideophone nebaneba, which roughly translates as 'viscid' or 'gooey'.

    Anime Nano! 2010

  • Considerably more alarming was a series of photographs of Linder and an American gallerist accomplice covered in a wild array of gloopy, dripping colour; in one image, only the artist's eyes were recognisable, such was the quantity of what seemed to be viscid pigment.

    Linder, the artist with the hex factor 2011

  • The hippos, sodden and viscid ... the crocodiles, deaf, angry, hungry ... swambats, as furious as rhinoceri whose size they doubled ...

    Wild Dreams of Reality, 5 2010

  • With the ingestion, she trembles, the meal, thawed, invested now by all of him, crumbling, eyes strained wide, blood moving in viscid rivers, her venom coming back to poison her.

    Kissing Cobras 2010

  • The vague goggling eyes...were cold and merciless in their viscid hatred...

    Sky Monsters Dark Worlds Club 2009

  • Tucson is the viscid sump toward which all these rough beasts slink, and apocalypse-specifically the end of the white man's reign in the Americas and the triumphant reclamation by Native Americans of their lands-is the crossbred offspring of all of their mongrelizing enterprises.

    Reports From The Heartland 2008

  • The stew was barely warm but David started to eat anyway, hoping to forget his troubles for a little while as he shoveled the viscid beef out of the can.

    Final Theory Mark Alpert 2008

  • The stew was barely warm but David started to eat anyway, hoping to forget his troubles for a little while as he shoveled the viscid beef out of the can.

    Final Theory Mark Alpert 2008

  • More generally, an association between Larrea, tarbush (Florensia cernua) and viscid acacia (Acacia neovernicosa) dominates the northernmost portion of the desert.

    Chihuahuan desert 2008

  • The crescent-shaped floor of the caldera teems with a network of smaller volcanic mouths, cones, domes, lava channels, dikes, lavas from light felsic flows to viscid red lavas and black obsidian blocks, ochre plains of sandy alluvial deposits and red and black volcanic ejecta, scoria, lapilli and pumice, from a long series of basaltic effusions.

    Teide National Park, Spain 2008

Comments

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  • Ooh, this word gives good mouthfeel. Interesting usage on staphelia.

    March 6, 2008

  • Our lungs, too viscid to have diffused

    the sulphur of last year's holocaust,

    have merely ingested another's and groan...

    - Peter Reading, November 6th, from For the Municipality's Elderly, 1974

    June 22, 2008