| Library / English Dictionary |
ELUSIVE
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Skillful at eluding capture
Example:
a cabal of conspirators, each more elusive than the archterrorist
Classified under:
Similar:
artful (marked by skill in achieving a desired end especially with cunning or craft)
Derivation:
elude (escape, either physically or mentally)
elusiveness (the quality of being difficult to grasp or pin down)
Sense 2
Meaning:
Making great mental demands; hard to comprehend or solve or believe
Example:
a problematic situation at home
Synonyms:
baffling; elusive; knotty; problematic; problematical; tough
Classified under:
Similar:
difficult; hard (not easy; requiring great physical or mental effort to accomplish or comprehend or endure)
Sense 3
Meaning:
Difficult to describe
Example:
a haunting elusive odor
Classified under:
Similar:
unidentifiable (impossible to identify)
Derivation:
elude (be incomprehensible to; escape understanding by)
elusiveness (the quality of being difficult to grasp or pin down)
Sense 4
Meaning:
Difficult to detect or grasp by the mind or analyze
Example:
that elusive thing the soul
Synonyms:
elusive; subtle
Classified under:
Similar:
impalpable (imperceptible to the senses or the mind)
Derivation:
elude (be incomprehensible to; escape understanding by)
elusiveness (the quality of being difficult to grasp or pin down)
Context examples:
But the more elusive dark matter does not emit, absorb or reflect light and can only be observed via its gravitational effects.
(Dark Matter Less Influential in Galaxies in Early Universe, ESO)
Quantum computers are the dream of modern physics as they could solve problems that are too difficult for today’s most powerful supercomputers, but creating them requires learning how to manage the elusive quantum particles, which are smaller than atoms.
(Scientists ‘Teleport’ Data between Chips for First Time, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)
It was very hard, but I turned back, though with a heavy heart, and began laboriously and methodically to plod over the same tedious ground at a snail's pace; stopping to examine minutely every speck in the way, on all sides, and making the most desperate efforts to know these elusive characters by sight wherever I met them.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
It is just an indistinct flash of pale green and yellow captured on a motion sensor camera but experts believe Aboriginal rangers have found a new population of one of Australia's most elusive birds.
(Aboriginal Rangers Find Evidence of One of Australia’s Rarest Birds, VOA)
The exact composition of these liquid reservoirs remained elusive until 2014, when the Cassini radar instrument was first used to show that Ligeia Mare, the second largest sea on Titan and similar in size to Lake Huron and Lake Michigan combined, is methane-rich.
(Cassini Explores a Methane Sea on Titan, NASA)
Since then, only Hubble has had the sharpness in blue light to track these elusive features that have played a game of peek-a-boo over the years.
(Hubble Sees Neptune's Mysterious Shrinking Storm, NASA)
He felt like sitting at the feet of the professor, worshipful and absorbent; but, as he listened, he began to discern a weakness in the other's judgments—a weakness so stray and elusive that he might not have caught it had it not been ever present.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
His thin lips, like the dies of a machine, stamped out phrases that cut and stung; or again, pursing caressingly about the inchoate sound they articulated, the thin lips shaped soft and velvety things, mellow phrases of glow and glory, of haunting beauty, reverberant of the mystery and inscrutableness of life; and yet again the thin lips were like a bugle, from which rang the crash and tumult of cosmic strife, phrases that sounded clear as silver, that were luminous as starry spaces, that epitomized the final word of science and yet said something more—the poet's word, the transcendental truth, elusive and without words which could express, and which none the less found expression in the subtle and all but ungraspable connotations of common words.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.
(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)
