sallow
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈsæl.oʊ/
ipa: /ˈsæl.əʉ/
rhymes: -æləʊ
Forms: form: sallows
form: sallowing
form: sallowed
form: sallowed
form: salley
Etymology: From Middle English salowe, from Old English salu, from Proto-West Germanic *salu, from Proto-Germanic *salwaz, from Proto-Indo-European *selH-.
See also Dutch zaluw, dialectal German sal; also Irish salach (“dirty”), Welsh halog, Latin salīva, Russian соло́вый (solóvyj, “cream-colored”), and - through Frankish - French sale.
Senses: examples: text: The tan of his sunburnt face and hands contrasted sadly with the sallowing skin of the girl-wife, who, despite his care, was sinking under her task of son-bearing.
ref: 1912, Flora Annie Steel, King-Errant, New York: Frederick A. Stokes, Book 2, Chapter 6, p. 212:
text: I might have stemmed them in a narrow vase
And watched each petal sallowing . . .
ref: 1918, Lola Ridge, “The Garden”, in The Ghetto and Other Poems, New York: Huebsch, page 93:
text: His complexion had darkened, sallowed; his black moustache had lost boldness, become sardonic; there were lines which she did not know about his face.
ref: 1920, John Galsworthy, “‘Here We are Again!’”, in In Chancery (The Forsyte Saga; 2), London: William Heinemann, →OCLC, part II, page 225:
text: My maiden reviews,
once the verbal equivalent of murder,
are now a brief, compact pile,
almost as old as I.
They fall apart sallowing,
their stiff pages
chip like dry leaves
flying the tree that fed them.
ref: 1977, Robert Lowell, “Death of a Critic”, in Day by Day, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, page 48:
glosses: To become sallow.
examples: text: 1835, Fanny Kemble (as Frances Anne Butler), Journal, London: John Murray, Volume 1, entry for 15 September, 1832, p. 105, footnote,
The climate of this country is the scape-goat upon which all ill looks and ill health of the ladies is laid; but while they are brought up as effeminately as they are, take as little exercise, live in rooms like ovens during the winter, and marry as early as they do, it will appear evident that many causes combine with an extremely variable climate, to sallow their complexions, and destroy their constitutions.
text: But would a pretender carry his or her cunning to the extreme of fortifying the manuscript in every possible way against the sallowing touch of time[…]?
ref: 1889, George Washington Cable, “How I Got them”, in Strange True Stories of Louisiana, New York: Scribner, page 10:
text: Mary Gowd, with her frumpy English hat and her dreadful English fringe, and her brick-red English cheeks, which not even the enervating Italian sun, the years of bad Italian food or the damp and dim little Roman room had been able to sallow.
ref: 1918, Edna Ferber, chapter 9, in Cheerful — By Request, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, page 252:
text: All she knew was that she had been stiffened and thickened by the same years that had given the other woman added grace and suppleness, that her skin had been dried and sallowed by the same lights and weathers that had added luster to the radiant beauty of the other […]
ref: 1940, Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again, Garden City, NY: Sun Dial, published 1942, Book 2, Chapter 11, pp. 169-170:
glosses: To cause (someone or something) to become sallow.