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''diaphanous'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260718130800-00-⌔

diaphanous - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Adjective

diaphanous (comparative more diaphanous, superlative most diaphanous)

  • Transparent or translucent; allowing light to pass through; capable of being seen through.
    • ✤ Synonyms: translucent, transparent, see-through, sheer
    • ✤ Antonym: opaque
    • ✤ The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.1
    • ✤ Adam requires a touch of feminine lace and a whisper of diaphanous silk, not a direct vision of the gaping maw of the human vulva.2
    • ✤ But nonetheless the purpleness of the imagined purple cow will almost certainly be meaner, more diaphanous, more fleeting than any real-life purple that you ever saw: to imagine a purple cow is just not the same thing as to have a purple sensation (or at least a purple sensation worth the name).3
    • ✤ The evening mist, drifting among the leafless poplars, veiled their silhouettes with a violet film, paler and more translucent than the most diaphanous gauze that might have caught in their branches.4
  • Of a fine, almost transparent, texture; gossamer; light and insubstantial.
    • ✤ Synonyms: delicate, insubstantial, sheer
    • ✤ Antonyms: concrete, solid
    • ✤ The most diaphanous wings carry a burden of pollen from flower to flower.5
    • ✤ What is amazing is that “a concept that is created by mind itself, the sequence of integers, the simplest and most diaphanous thing for the constructive mind, assumes a similar aspect of obscurity and deficiency when viewed from the axiomatic angle” (Weyl, 1963, 220).6
  • (physics) Isorefractive, having an identical refractive index.

Etymology

From Medieval Latin diaphanus, from Ancient Greek διαφανής (diaphanḗs), from δια- (dia-, “through”) + φαίνω (phaínō, “to shine, appear”).

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /daɪˈæf.ən.əs/
  • Audio (US): 🔊

Printed 2026-07-18.

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Footnotes

  1. 1899 February, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number M, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part I: ↩

  2. 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 23: ↩

  3. 1999, Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness ‎, page 96: ↩

  4. 2004, Gustave Flaubert, translated by Margaret Maulden, Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners, page 98: ↩

  5. 1951, Robert Frost, Unpublished preface to a collection, 2007, Mark Richardson (editor), The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, page 169, ↩

  6. 1963, Hermann Weyl, quoted in 1985, Floyd Merrell, Deconstruction Reframed, page 67, ↩

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