dampish

dampish

English

Etymology

From damp +‎ -ish.

Adjective

dampish (comparative more dampish, superlative most dampish)

1. (obsolete) Characterised by noxious vapours; misty, smoky.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, OCLC 960102938:

     All suddenly dim woxe the dampish ayre, / And griesly shadowes couered heauen bright [...].

   • c. 1600, author unknown, once attributed to William Shakespeare, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, London: J.M. Dent, 1897, Act I, Scene 3

     We'll first hang Enfield in such rings of mist / As never rose from any dampish fen: / I'll make the brinèd sea ro rise at Ware, / And drown the marshes unto Stratford Bridge;

2. Moderately damp or moist.
   • 1879, Henry Vizetelly, Facts about Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines, London: Ward, Lock & Co., Chapter X, p. 111,

     Miles of long, dark-brown, dampish-looking galleries stretch away to the right and left, and though devoid of the picturesque festoons of fungi which decorate the London Dock vaults, exhibit a sufficient degree of mouldiness to give them an air of respectable antiquity.

   • 1938, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter 6, in Homage to Catalonia‎, London: Secker & Warburg:

     I remember very clearly the feeling of sitting there reading it; the dampish clay of the trench bottom underneath me, the constant shifting of my legs out of the way as men hurried stopping down the trench, the crack-crack-crack of bullets a foot or two overhead.

   • 1991, Seamus Heaney, "Squarings xl" in Seeing Things, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, p. 94,

     I was four but I turned four hundred maybe,

     Encountering the ancient dampish feel

     Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.

   • 2006, William Trevor, “An Afternoon” in Cheating at Canasta, New York: Viking, 2007, p. 99,

     Her hand was warm, lying there in his, dampish, fingers interlaced with his.

Derived terms

• dampishly
• dampishness

Translations

moderately damp or moist

Armenian: խոնավավուն (hy) (xonavavun)

Anagrams

• amphids, phasmid