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Silky vs Diaphanous - What's the difference?

silky | diaphanous |

As adjectives the difference between silky and diaphanous

is that silky is similar in appearance or texture (especially in softness and smoothness) to silk while diaphanous is transparent or translucent; allowing light to pass through; capable of being seen through.

silky

English

Adjective

(er)
  • Similar in appearance or texture (especially in softness and smoothness) to silk.
  • cloth with a silky lustre
    a silky wine

    Derived terms

    * silky oak

    References

    * * * * Random House Webster's Unabridged Electronic Dictionary (1987-1996)

    diaphanous

    English

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • Transparent or translucent; allowing light to pass through; capable of being seen through.
  • * 1899 , Joseph Conrad,
  • 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.
  • * 1999 , Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness , page 96,
  • 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).
  • * 2004 , , Margaret Maulden (translator), Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners , page 98,
  • 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.
  • Of a fine, almost transparent, texture; gossamer; light and insubstantial.
  • * 1951', , Unpublished preface to a collection, '''2007 , Mark Richardson (editor), ''The Collected Prose of Robert Frost , page 169,
  • The most diaphanous wings carry a burden of pollen from flower to flower.
  • * 1963', , quoted in '''1985 , Floyd Merrell, ''Deconstruction Reframed , page 67,
  • 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).

    Synonyms

    * (allowing light to pass through) translucent * delicate, insubstantial

    Antonyms

    * (transparent or translucent) opaque * concrete, solid