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Reverse Search
Reverse Search allows you to search within the full text of dictionary entries for words, word parts, and phrases.
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| Ahab |
the tragic hero of Herman Melville's nineteenth-century novel Moby Dick, who is ruled by an obsession to kill the white whale of the title. [1/2 definitions] |
| anti-hero |
a central character in a story, novel, or play who lacks traditional heroic qualities, such as high purpose or moral strength. |
| anti-novel |
a novel-like work which does not have the usual characteristics of a novel, esp. regarding plot. |
| Babbitt |
the title character and protagonist of Sinclair Lewis's early twentieth-century novel, who is smug, conventional, and resolutely middle-class. [1/2 definitions] |
| big brother |
(cap.) in the 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, an invisible but all-seeing and omnipotent force representing totalitarian government. [1/3 definitions] |
| bildungsroman |
a novel that concerns itself primarily with the psychological and moral development of the main character, usually from youth into adulthood. |
| book |
a literary work such as a novel or volume of poetry. [1/13 definitions] |
| Brobdingnag |
in Jonathan Swift's eighteenth-century novel Gulliver's Travels, a land inhabited by giants. |
| character |
a person in a novel, play, poem, or the like. [1/7 definitions] |
| Cheshire cat |
in the nineteenth-century children's novel Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, a grinning cat that magically disappears, his grin being the last to fade away. |
| concept |
a distinct, novel idea that has been arrived at through consideration. [1/2 definitions] |
| cool |
(informal) great, esp. in a novel, clever, or stylish way; appealing. [1/15 definitions] |
| Covid |
shortened form of "Covid-19," a serious, potentially fatal disease caused by a novel coronavirus that broke out initially in 2019 and caused a pandemic in 2020. |
| Covid-19 |
a serious, potentially fatal disease caused by a novel coronavirus that broke out initially in 2019 and caused a pandemic in 2020. "Co" in Covid stands for "corona," "vi" stands for "virus," and "d" stands for "disease." The number 19 refers to the year 2019. |
| curiosity |
an unusual or novel thing. [1/2 definitions] |
| denouement |
in a novel, play, or film, the final resolution of the plot's complexities and questions. [1/2 definitions] |
| dialogue |
talk between two or more people or between characters in a play, film, novel, or the like. [1/5 definitions] |
| dime novel |
a cheap paperback novel with much adventure or romance. |
| Don Quixote |
the idealistic but impractical protagonist and title character of a seventeenth-century Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes. |
| Dracula |
in a late nineteenth-century novel by Bram Stoker, the title character, a vampire, who is able to transform himself into a bat. |
| dramatization |
a version of a story, event, novel, or the like that is made to take the form of a drama. [1/2 definitions] |
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