EFFLUVIUM (effluvia)

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

Irregular inflected form: effluvia   

 Dictionary entry overview: What does effluvium mean? 

• EFFLUVIUM (noun)
  The noun EFFLUVIUM has 1 sense:

1. a foul-smelling outflow or vapor (especially a gaseous waste)

  Familiarity information: EFFLUVIUM used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• EFFLUVIUM (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A foul-smelling outflow or vapor (especially a gaseous waste)

Classified under:

Nouns denoting substances

Hypernyms ("effluvium" is a kind of...):

discharge; emission (a substance that is emitted or released)

 Context examples 

Their apprehensions arise from several changes they dread in the celestial bodies: for instance, that the earth, by the continual approaches of the sun towards it, must, in course of time, be absorbed, or swallowed up; that the face of the sun, will, by degrees, be encrusted with its own effluvia, and give no more light to the world; that the earth very narrowly escaped a brush from the tail of the last comet, which would have infallibly reduced it to ashes; and that the next, which they have calculated for one-and-thirty years hence, will probably destroy us.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

While disease had thus become an inhabitant of Lowood, and death its frequent visitor; while there was gloom and fear within its walls; while its rooms and passages steamed with hospital smells, the drug and the pastille striving vainly to overcome the effluvia of mortality, that bright May shone unclouded over the bold hills and beautiful woodland out of doors.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)