2. Subscribe to KD Did It, if youd like to track this post for future updates. relates to the verb to elude. on Elusive or illusive or allusive? Posts and ads on KD Did It may contain affiliate links. If you found this post on Allusive vs Delusive vs Elusive vs Illusive interesting, consider tweeting it to your friends.
I blog regularly about issues of English usage, word histories, and writing tips. Posted April 8, 2013 by Kathy Davie in Author Resources, Editing, Self-Editing, Word Confusions, Writing. The no-kill shelter was hoping that elusive donors would finally contribute. But the deliverance and liberation that has been longed for by Jews and Christians has proven to be an elusive thing. Difficult to do and involving a lot of effort, Words used to describe memory and memories, The quality of being complicated or difficult to understand, The quality of being difficult to do or deal with. A brick line is an allusive reference to where the Berlin Wall once stood. A further discovery and confirmation of the late popish plot. preferring or living in solitude and anonymity, Four wild animals that are thriving in cities, PSA: Most aggregate VC trend data is garbage, Splitting the atom: Decoupling audience from inventory unleashes power of pubs, The Hard Lessons of Modeling the Coronavirus Pandemic. 1 January 2019. They must make assumptions not only about the viruss biology, which remains far from fully understood, but about human behavior, which can be even more slippery and elusive. You may also want to explore the post, Allusion vs Delusion vs Illusion. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Yet the real difficulty is still before an author: it is to decide what stamp to put upon such elusive matter as ideas. 147, November 4, 1914. The look in her face was quizzical, yet there was a strange, elusive gravity in her eyes, an almost pathetic appealing. (Scientific American), He proved an elusive foe for law enforcement. To decry or descry?. ", Dictionary.com Unabridged A false promise of what had been. It eludes you. For example, a search for illusive and any words following within three spaces yields this top ten: man, quality, power, concept, nature, dream, leopard, creatures, happiness, desire. Join our community to access the latest language learning and assessment tips from Oxford University Press! Commonly confused words(19-20), Oxford A-Z of English Usage (2nd edition), Follow Jeremy Butterfield Editorial on WordPress.com, If you want to suggest that something is an. Nearly all the quotations for man are for the Illusive Man in a video game. Illusory is interchangeable with illusive, related words are illusorily, illusoriness, illusion. Allusive refers to a statement or reference that is suggestive, rather than mentioning something in a straightforward manner. William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 HarperCollins
Delivered right to your inbox: reviews on books AND self-editing tips for writers. Enjoy!). See the most commonly confused word associated with. Find the answers with Practical English Usage online, your indispensable guide to problems in English. (The Stanford Daily). Commonly confused words(17-18). Of the other 28 examples, only 12 unequivocally usedat least by my readingthe true meaning of illusive: this illusive common interest, this notion of shared stakes encompassed the whole world and large majorities in almost every society .Free India Media. Note: Allusive was added 1 July 2017 and can be quite subtle in its references to, well, anything. I simply cannot grasp so elusive a concept. Elusive comes into the English language in 1719 from the Latin eludere, meaning elude, frustrate. Existentialism, love, and small rodents are among things people find elusive. Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Random House, Inc. 2022, Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition "Is" it time for a new quiz? Copyright 2022 Vocabulary.com, Inc., a division of IXL Learning All Rights Reserved. Commonly confused words(17-18), and Justin Timberlake. An agreement to end the fighting remains elusive. Related words are allusively, allusiveness, allusion. Ms. Jones delicately allusive poetry causes one to feel the joy of that first glorious love. The adjective allusive appears in the early 1600s, from alludere meaning a playing with, a reference to. If you really mean to convey the idea that something is an illusion, Id be tempted to go for illusory, as the more common word, and in order to dispel any suspicion that you meant elusive. Poster of Dorian Gray, the 2009 movie, is courtesy of Rosariomario. Illusory has the same definition as illusive. Huckabee will also need to establish a reliable fundraising base, something that up until now has proved to be elusive. It likes to hang around the library, where it can be easily caught. Sure, being illusive is a false idea or belief, a deception if you will. Whether youre a teacher or a learner, Illusive means not based on reality, deceptive. Correct: Yet happiness is an elusive concept, rather like love. Some examples: Predicting extreme events any further than 10 days in advance has long been an elusive goal for meteorologists. As for the illusive, its always the ghosties for me. Web. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Choose between allusive, elusive, and illusory: 1. allusive 2. elusive 3. illusory 4. illusory 5. elusive/illusory. So, something elusive eludes or escapes you, is difficult to grasp physically or mentally. Vocabulary.com can put you or your class If people describe him as elusive, that means he is hard to track down and photograph or interview; if they were chasing theillusive Justin Timberlake, they would be implying something about his very existence, or about his skill at creating illusions. (The left-leaning nature of the text suggests that common interest between the ruling classes and the ruled is indeed an illusion). Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It was just an illusion! Something illusive, on the other hand, is not real, even if it seems to be. In the next example the appropriate word has been used: If the situation in western Pakistan continues to deteriorate, success will be elusive and very difficult to achieve. Mrs Gaskell, the novelist] did not sentimentalize or yield to the illusive attractions of the English pastoral idyll. This allows us to dramatically increase our digital inventory and efficiently offer this incredibly elusive audience to a whole new set of advertisers. However, establishing a causal relation between approaches to phonics instruction and gains in real reading has been more elusive. This percentage helps offset the expenses of running this site. The jerk made some allusive references to my body. If you dont edit your writing carefully the mistake could slip through, because your spellchecker might accept illusive as a legitimate word. Look up any word in the dictionary offline, anytime, anywhere with the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary app. It means, as the Collins Dictionary puts it, producing, produced by, or based on illusion; deceptive or unreal.
Definition of illusive adjective from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Elusive means difficult to catch, to find, to remember. And I will always think first of a ghost as a representation of a person, but it will never be the flesh-and-blood man or woman, so it is illusive. Dreamand desire similarly correspondto illusive; Power, nature, and happiness could go with either, but in the GloWbE contextsare appropriately described as illusive. Word Confusion: Nonchalant versus Nonplussed, [Of a remark or reference] Working by suggestion rather than explicit mention, [Chiefly poetic, literary] Deceptive, not real. But people occasionally use it by mistake. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, Oxford Learner's Dictionaries Word of the Day. Given the prevailing muddle over the meaning of these words, it is perhaps not surprising that one has to turn to literary titans to see them used with absolute precision: at a conference in August 2004, Vikram Seth memorably and alliteratively defined writing as allusive, elusive and illusive. There will be a lot of talk about sustainable development, but so far that has been elusive. (If you enjoy this blog, and find it useful, theres an easy way for you to find out when I blog again. This is the American English definition of elusive.View British English definition of elusive. However, the data in the Oxford English Corpus (OEC) demonstrate how often illusive appears by mistake for elusive. He should just say what he means. (LogOut/ Osama bin Laden Portrait by Abdul Rahman bin Laden, the son of Osama bin Laden, took the photo and released it to Hamid Mir, a Pakistani news reporter with Canada Free Press at the time under the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons. (Forbes), Hungarys foreign minister says effective solution to migrant crisis still elusive (USA Today), Frank Ocean, the elusive, indefinable guard of modern R&B, was supposed to come out with his second album in July. 18 October 2019. Actor Allusion: My 10 Favourite Examples! Samuel Hesed, Geoffrey Hill, and T.S. a film essay about the real and illusive nature of motion pictures. Then prove your excellent skills on using "is" vs. The elusive Bin Laden was finally stopped by the West. They aren't really there. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Although there is no question that Ulysses provided a supreme example of the allusive method in action, deployed on a breathtaking scale, Eliots almost insatiable appetite for allusion sprang from other sources as well.T.S. Ronald Bush, 1991. Illusive appears in the early seventeenth century from the Latin illusivus to play with, mock at. Of the remainder,quality, concept, leopard, and creatures self-evidently match elusive.
U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau Seal is courtesy of the U.S. Government and is in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Click for a side-by-side comparison of meanings. That suddenly altered tone had awakened an elusive memory, but neither of them could succeed in identifying it. In the OEC it is roughly eight times more frequent thanillusive: they give the Palestinians the illusory feeling that via a unilateral strategy and parliamentary resolutions they can obtain their political aspirations, foreign ministry spokesman Emanuel Nachshon told The Irish Times. If flickering candlelight is casting scary shadows on the wall, don't worry, those are illusive villains. Which it is, but, very often, probably not the one you meant! Im tired of his allusive speech. The original photo, Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2010, is by LeNair Xavier and was cropped and brightened by deerstop under the CC BY 2.0 license, Heath Ledger by Howie Berlin (Flickr) is under the CC BY-SA 2.0 license, and Owen Wilson in Cannes 2011 by Georges Biard is under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license; all three are via Wikimedia Commons. Use the word comparison feature to learn the differences between similar and commonly confused words. on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement. (The New Yorker), If that brings you as close to tears as it brought me, youll understand that Ms. Andersons delicately allusive methods can open you up to feelings you didnt expect to feelas in her quietly piercing remembrance of what may have been the only moment of her life when her mother truly loved her. For some reason, when I think of elude, I always think of the Scarlet Pimpernel, for they seek him here, they seek him there, that demned elusive Pimpernel! refers indirectly) to other texts, poetic or otherwise. (The intended meaning must be hard to define and therefore should be elusive); During the long period we spent waiting for this X illusive good weather, there was also tragedy on the mountain.Everest Expedition dispatches. A roughly 10-per cent sample (50 examples) of all examples of illusive contained 23 in which illusive was clearly a mistake: but even after a decade, his [i.e.
But 15 were ambiguous to me, and in some cases it was impossible to work out quite what the writer intended: After a troubled season at Arsenal, Bergkamp was his illusive best on Friday night, dropping off Kluivert and playing a part in almost all of Hollands better moments.Sunday Herald, 2000. Just sign up (in the right-hand column, above the Twitter feed) and youll receive an email to tell you. Some poetry, such as T.S. 44 commonly confused words(13-14), To defuse or diffuse a situation? started as my way of dealing with a professional frustration with properly spelled words that were out of context in manuscripts I was editing as well as books I was reviewing. Change your default dictionary to British English. A faintly embarrassing situation this, even for an ancestor of the elusive Pimpernel. This post gives plenty of examples of appropriate and mistaken use. They are an elusive bunch, in motion or in the thrall of another time. An elusive fairy is one you can't catch, but an illusive one was never really there at all. Check out some examples from literature: Then he knew it was an illusion of his eyes, straining suddenly in that illusive light. Sarcasticools post, Actor Allusion: My 10 Favourite Examples!, is via Hub Pages. This shows grade level based on the word's complexity. Is there really a science of reading that tells us exactly how to teach kids to read? The names of the four ruffians, designed to have murthered the king. That melts wheneer the sunbeams glow. Join Macmillan Dictionary on Twitter and Facebook for daily word facts, quizzes and language news. Things that are elusive are hard to find, pin down, or remember. "Are" you ready? Its elusive light lay upon the slope, but ledge and stone seemed less distinct than their shadows, which were black as ebony. If you feel confident that you already know all this, why not try the self-test at the bottom of the blog. Related words are elusively, elusiveness, elude. American definition and synonyms of elusive from the online English dictionary from Macmillan Education. (Charles George Douglas Roberts), But though all my rural visions had proved illusive, there were some very substantial realities. Cmon, get it out of your system, bitch, whine, moanwhich words are your pet peeves? (The Bowling Green Daily News), Furthermore, in addition to focusing on the standard measures GDP, per capita GDP, or household incomes he combines data on health with income to create a more holistic perspective; this new approach enables him to assess more rigorously the illusive concept of wellbeing. It is allusive, the adjective corresponding to allusion and used mainly by literary critics, film critics, and the like. Eliots The Waste Land, is highly allusive, since it constantly alludes (i.e. Illusive appeared nearly a century later (1679) according to the OED, in the blood-curdlingly titled The narrative of Robert Jenison, containing 1. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Grammarist is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. Eliot: The Modernist in History, ed. The 2016 presidential campaign was littered with illusive inaccuracies. Although both words can apply to things you don't have, don't let the difference be elusive! Eliot are highly allusive poets. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Was Bergkamp hard to pin down and tackle, or a master of illusion through feints? The word illusive is used mostly in literature, where we find our favorite illusions. Tracing the Berlin Wall by Colocho, Germany, is under the CC BY-SA 2.5 Generic license, via Wikimedia Commons. In written texts, X illusive is more often used by mistake than in its true meaning, though many examples are ambiguous. Note: Delusive was added 30 November 2016 and is more of a purposeful lie, as opposed to the illusive which is more literary, poetic, in its lies. Note: This is an updated example of a post published previously. If people describe him as, , that means he is hard to track down and photograph or interview; if they were chasing the. Marilyn Monroe had that illusive it factor. Find out which words work together and produce more natural sounding English with the Oxford Collocations Dictionary app. (the attractions were indeed an illusion, since country life was harsh and poverty-stricken).
It evolved into a sharing of information with yall. Deals don't last long; check your email daily. Ricardo Chaillys] musical character remains strangely X illusive and lacking any special definition. I heard the pronunciation allusive referring to whales in a recent BBC trailer for a nature programme. See, U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau Seal, Homepage for: Behind the Scenes of Your Author Website, kds list of fantasy, horror, paranormal, & urban fantasy series, kds list of mystery, suspense, and thrillers series, the living will: why you want one, why you need one, your portfolio & you: business for artists. by Jeremy Butterfield.In Confusable Words, Help for writers & editors, Meaning of words.1 Comment on Elusive or illusive or allusive?
I blog regularly about issues of English usage, word histories, and writing tips. Posted April 8, 2013 by Kathy Davie in Author Resources, Editing, Self-Editing, Word Confusions, Writing. The no-kill shelter was hoping that elusive donors would finally contribute. But the deliverance and liberation that has been longed for by Jews and Christians has proven to be an elusive thing. Difficult to do and involving a lot of effort, Words used to describe memory and memories, The quality of being complicated or difficult to understand, The quality of being difficult to do or deal with. A brick line is an allusive reference to where the Berlin Wall once stood. A further discovery and confirmation of the late popish plot. preferring or living in solitude and anonymity, Four wild animals that are thriving in cities, PSA: Most aggregate VC trend data is garbage, Splitting the atom: Decoupling audience from inventory unleashes power of pubs, The Hard Lessons of Modeling the Coronavirus Pandemic. 1 January 2019. They must make assumptions not only about the viruss biology, which remains far from fully understood, but about human behavior, which can be even more slippery and elusive. You may also want to explore the post, Allusion vs Delusion vs Illusion. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Yet the real difficulty is still before an author: it is to decide what stamp to put upon such elusive matter as ideas. 147, November 4, 1914. The look in her face was quizzical, yet there was a strange, elusive gravity in her eyes, an almost pathetic appealing. (Scientific American), He proved an elusive foe for law enforcement. To decry or descry?
Delivered right to your inbox: reviews on books AND self-editing tips for writers. Enjoy!). See the most commonly confused word associated with. Find the answers with Practical English Usage online, your indispensable guide to problems in English. (The Stanford Daily). Commonly confused words(17-18). Of the other 28 examples, only 12 unequivocally usedat least by my readingthe true meaning of illusive: this illusive common interest, this notion of shared stakes encompassed the whole world and large majorities in almost every society .Free India Media. Note: Allusive was added 1 July 2017 and can be quite subtle in its references to, well, anything. I simply cannot grasp so elusive a concept. Elusive comes into the English language in 1719 from the Latin eludere, meaning elude, frustrate. Existentialism, love, and small rodents are among things people find elusive. Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Random House, Inc. 2022, Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition "Is" it time for a new quiz? Copyright 2022 Vocabulary.com, Inc., a division of IXL Learning All Rights Reserved. Commonly confused words(17-18), and Justin Timberlake. An agreement to end the fighting remains elusive. Related words are allusively, allusiveness, allusion. Ms. Jones delicately allusive poetry causes one to feel the joy of that first glorious love. The adjective allusive appears in the early 1600s, from alludere meaning a playing with, a reference to. If you really mean to convey the idea that something is an illusion, Id be tempted to go for illusory, as the more common word, and in order to dispel any suspicion that you meant elusive. Poster of Dorian Gray, the 2009 movie, is courtesy of Rosariomario. Illusory has the same definition as illusive. Huckabee will also need to establish a reliable fundraising base, something that up until now has proved to be elusive. It likes to hang around the library, where it can be easily caught. Sure, being illusive is a false idea or belief, a deception if you will. Whether youre a teacher or a learner, Illusive means not based on reality, deceptive. Correct: Yet happiness is an elusive concept, rather like love. Some examples: Predicting extreme events any further than 10 days in advance has long been an elusive goal for meteorologists. As for the illusive, its always the ghosties for me. Web. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Choose between allusive, elusive, and illusory: 1. allusive 2. elusive 3. illusory 4. illusory 5. elusive/illusory. So, something elusive eludes or escapes you, is difficult to grasp physically or mentally. Vocabulary.com can put you or your class If people describe him as elusive, that means he is hard to track down and photograph or interview; if they were chasing theillusive Justin Timberlake, they would be implying something about his very existence, or about his skill at creating illusions. (The left-leaning nature of the text suggests that common interest between the ruling classes and the ruled is indeed an illusion). Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It was just an illusion! Something illusive, on the other hand, is not real, even if it seems to be. In the next example the appropriate word has been used: If the situation in western Pakistan continues to deteriorate, success will be elusive and very difficult to achieve. Mrs Gaskell, the novelist] did not sentimentalize or yield to the illusive attractions of the English pastoral idyll. This allows us to dramatically increase our digital inventory and efficiently offer this incredibly elusive audience to a whole new set of advertisers. However, establishing a causal relation between approaches to phonics instruction and gains in real reading has been more elusive. This percentage helps offset the expenses of running this site. The jerk made some allusive references to my body. If you dont edit your writing carefully the mistake could slip through, because your spellchecker might accept illusive as a legitimate word. Look up any word in the dictionary offline, anytime, anywhere with the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary app. It means, as the Collins Dictionary puts it, producing, produced by, or based on illusion; deceptive or unreal.
Definition of illusive adjective from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Elusive means difficult to catch, to find, to remember. And I will always think first of a ghost as a representation of a person, but it will never be the flesh-and-blood man or woman, so it is illusive. Dreamand desire similarly correspondto illusive; Power, nature, and happiness could go with either, but in the GloWbE contextsare appropriately described as illusive. Word Confusion: Nonchalant versus Nonplussed, [Of a remark or reference] Working by suggestion rather than explicit mention, [Chiefly poetic, literary] Deceptive, not real. But people occasionally use it by mistake. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, Oxford Learner's Dictionaries Word of the Day. Given the prevailing muddle over the meaning of these words, it is perhaps not surprising that one has to turn to literary titans to see them used with absolute precision: at a conference in August 2004, Vikram Seth memorably and alliteratively defined writing as allusive, elusive and illusive. There will be a lot of talk about sustainable development, but so far that has been elusive. (If you enjoy this blog, and find it useful, theres an easy way for you to find out when I blog again. This is the American English definition of elusive.View British English definition of elusive. However, the data in the Oxford English Corpus (OEC) demonstrate how often illusive appears by mistake for elusive. He should just say what he means. (LogOut/ Osama bin Laden Portrait by Abdul Rahman bin Laden, the son of Osama bin Laden, took the photo and released it to Hamid Mir, a Pakistani news reporter with Canada Free Press at the time under the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons. (Forbes), Hungarys foreign minister says effective solution to migrant crisis still elusive (USA Today), Frank Ocean, the elusive, indefinable guard of modern R&B, was supposed to come out with his second album in July. 18 October 2019. Actor Allusion: My 10 Favourite Examples! Samuel Hesed, Geoffrey Hill, and T.S. a film essay about the real and illusive nature of motion pictures. Then prove your excellent skills on using "is" vs. The elusive Bin Laden was finally stopped by the West. They aren't really there. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Although there is no question that Ulysses provided a supreme example of the allusive method in action, deployed on a breathtaking scale, Eliots almost insatiable appetite for allusion sprang from other sources as well.T.S. Ronald Bush, 1991. Illusive appears in the early seventeenth century from the Latin illusivus to play with, mock at. Of the remainder,quality, concept, leopard, and creatures self-evidently match elusive.
U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau Seal is courtesy of the U.S. Government and is in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Click for a side-by-side comparison of meanings. That suddenly altered tone had awakened an elusive memory, but neither of them could succeed in identifying it. In the OEC it is roughly eight times more frequent thanillusive: they give the Palestinians the illusory feeling that via a unilateral strategy and parliamentary resolutions they can obtain their political aspirations, foreign ministry spokesman Emanuel Nachshon told The Irish Times. If flickering candlelight is casting scary shadows on the wall, don't worry, those are illusive villains. Which it is, but, very often, probably not the one you meant! Im tired of his allusive speech. The original photo, Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2010, is by LeNair Xavier and was cropped and brightened by deerstop under the CC BY 2.0 license, Heath Ledger by Howie Berlin (Flickr) is under the CC BY-SA 2.0 license, and Owen Wilson in Cannes 2011 by Georges Biard is under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license; all three are via Wikimedia Commons. Use the word comparison feature to learn the differences between similar and commonly confused words. on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement. (The New Yorker), If that brings you as close to tears as it brought me, youll understand that Ms. Andersons delicately allusive methods can open you up to feelings you didnt expect to feelas in her quietly piercing remembrance of what may have been the only moment of her life when her mother truly loved her. For some reason, when I think of elude, I always think of the Scarlet Pimpernel, for they seek him here, they seek him there, that demned elusive Pimpernel! refers indirectly) to other texts, poetic or otherwise. (The intended meaning must be hard to define and therefore should be elusive); During the long period we spent waiting for this X illusive good weather, there was also tragedy on the mountain.Everest Expedition dispatches. A roughly 10-per cent sample (50 examples) of all examples of illusive contained 23 in which illusive was clearly a mistake: but even after a decade, his [i.e. But 15 were ambiguous to me, and in some cases it was impossible to work out quite what the writer intended: After a troubled season at Arsenal, Bergkamp was his illusive best on Friday night, dropping off Kluivert and playing a part in almost all of Hollands better moments.Sunday Herald, 2000. Just sign up (in the right-hand column, above the Twitter feed) and youll receive an email to tell you. Some poetry, such as T.S. 44 commonly confused words(13-14), To defuse or diffuse a situation? started as my way of dealing with a professional frustration with properly spelled words that were out of context in manuscripts I was editing as well as books I was reviewing. Change your default dictionary to British English. A faintly embarrassing situation this, even for an ancestor of the elusive Pimpernel. This post gives plenty of examples of appropriate and mistaken use. They are an elusive bunch, in motion or in the thrall of another time. An elusive fairy is one you can't catch, but an illusive one was never really there at all. Check out some examples from literature: Then he knew it was an illusion of his eyes, straining suddenly in that illusive light. Sarcasticools post, Actor Allusion: My 10 Favourite Examples!, is via Hub Pages. This shows grade level based on the word's complexity. Is there really a science of reading that tells us exactly how to teach kids to read? The names of the four ruffians, designed to have murthered the king. That melts wheneer the sunbeams glow. Join Macmillan Dictionary on Twitter and Facebook for daily word facts, quizzes and language news. Things that are elusive are hard to find, pin down, or remember. "Are" you ready? Its elusive light lay upon the slope, but ledge and stone seemed less distinct than their shadows, which were black as ebony. If you feel confident that you already know all this, why not try the self-test at the bottom of the blog. Related words are elusively, elusiveness, elude. American definition and synonyms of elusive from the online English dictionary from Macmillan Education. (Charles George Douglas Roberts), But though all my rural visions had proved illusive, there were some very substantial realities. Cmon, get it out of your system, bitch, whine, moanwhich words are your pet peeves? (The Bowling Green Daily News), Furthermore, in addition to focusing on the standard measures GDP, per capita GDP, or household incomes he combines data on health with income to create a more holistic perspective; this new approach enables him to assess more rigorously the illusive concept of wellbeing. It is allusive, the adjective corresponding to allusion and used mainly by literary critics, film critics, and the like. Eliots The Waste Land, is highly allusive, since it constantly alludes (i.e. Illusive appeared nearly a century later (1679) according to the OED, in the blood-curdlingly titled The narrative of Robert Jenison, containing 1. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Grammarist is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. Eliot: The Modernist in History, ed. The 2016 presidential campaign was littered with illusive inaccuracies. Although both words can apply to things you don't have, don't let the difference be elusive! Eliot are highly allusive poets. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Was Bergkamp hard to pin down and tackle, or a master of illusion through feints? The word illusive is used mostly in literature, where we find our favorite illusions. Tracing the Berlin Wall by Colocho, Germany, is under the CC BY-SA 2.5 Generic license, via Wikimedia Commons. In written texts, X illusive is more often used by mistake than in its true meaning, though many examples are ambiguous. Note: Delusive was added 30 November 2016 and is more of a purposeful lie, as opposed to the illusive which is more literary, poetic, in its lies. Note: This is an updated example of a post published previously. If people describe him as, , that means he is hard to track down and photograph or interview; if they were chasing the. Marilyn Monroe had that illusive it factor. Find out which words work together and produce more natural sounding English with the Oxford Collocations Dictionary app. (the attractions were indeed an illusion, since country life was harsh and poverty-stricken).
It evolved into a sharing of information with yall. Deals don't last long; check your email daily. Ricardo Chaillys] musical character remains strangely X illusive and lacking any special definition. I heard the pronunciation allusive referring to whales in a recent BBC trailer for a nature programme. See, U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau Seal, Homepage for: Behind the Scenes of Your Author Website, kds list of fantasy, horror, paranormal, & urban fantasy series, kds list of mystery, suspense, and thrillers series, the living will: why you want one, why you need one, your portfolio & you: business for artists. by Jeremy Butterfield.In Confusable Words, Help for writers & editors, Meaning of words.1 Comment on Elusive or illusive or allusive?