larger than life
Adjective
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Adjective
larger than life
- (sometimes, hyphenated) Of greater size or magnitude than is naturally or normally the case.
- 1838, Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, ch. 30:
- Miss Snevellicci's papa looked very big indeed—several sizes larger than life.
- 1849, Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage, ch. 31:
- At uniform intervals round the base of the pedestal, four naked figures in chains, somewhat larger than life, are seated in various attitudes of humiliation and despair.
- 1838, Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, ch. 30:
- (idiomatic, sometimes, hyphenated, usually of a person) Very imposing, renowned, or impressively influential.
- 1984, Bonnie Tyler, Holding Out for a Hero
- 1988 Jan. 3, Joyce Carol Oates, "Intellectual Seduction: Meeting with Gorbachev," New York Times, p. SM16:
- This is a person of surpassing integrity; a man of the utmost sincerity; somewhat larger than life, perhaps.
- 2007 Dec. 31, Orville Schell, "[http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_1695388_1695753,00.html Person of the Year Runners-up: Hu Jintao]," Time:
- Nor has he cultivated the kind of flamboyant style with which his country became well acquainted in larger-than-life leaders from Chiang Kai-shek to Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.
- large as life
This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.003