EMINENT

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does eminent mean? 

• EMINENT (adjective)
  The adjective EMINENT has 2 senses:

1. standing above others in quality or position

2. of imposing height; especially standing out above others

  Familiarity information: EMINENT used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• EMINENT (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Standing above others in quality or position

Synonyms:

eminent; high

Context example:

eminent members of the community

Similar:

superior (of or characteristic of high rank or importance)

Derivation:

eminence (high status importance owing to marked superiority)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Of imposing height; especially standing out above others

Synonyms:

eminent; lofty; soaring; towering

Context example:

towering icebergs

Similar:

high ((literal meaning) being at or having a relatively great or specific elevation or upward extension (sometimes used in combinations like 'knee-high'))

 Context examples 

Bingley urged Mr. Jones being sent for immediately; while his sisters, convinced that no country advice could be of any service, recommended an express to town for one of the most eminent physicians.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

He had the advice of an eminent oculist; and he eventually recovered the sight of that one eye.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Pre-eminent yet invisible, Sgr A* has the mass equivalent to some four million Suns.

(Scientists Take Viewers to the Center of the Milky Way, NASA)

Mrs. Churchill had been recommended to the medical skill of an eminent person there, and had otherwise a fancy for the place.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

When you have finished, come downstairs with me, and I will introduce you to a detective who is a very eminent specialist in the work that lies before us.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I had been very happy there, I had a great attachment for the Doctor, and I was eminent and distinguished in that little world.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

However, a key step in the life of the embryo – gastrulation, described by the eminent biologist Lewis Wolpert as “truly the most important time in your life” – was missing.

(Scientists generate key life event in artificial mouse ‘embryo’ created from stem cells, University of Cambridge)

The nurseries for males of noble or eminent birth, are provided with grave and learned professors, and their several deputies.

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

Eminent herpetologist and co-author of the study Romulus Whitaker from the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust and Centre for Herpetology, Tamil Nadu state, tells that India needs either region-specific antivenom or antivenom made with venoms pooled from different regions and from the species not yet used in antivenom production.”

(‘India needs region-specific snakebite antivenoms’, SciDev.Net)

This reticence upon his part had increased the somewhat inhuman effect which he produced upon me, until sometimes I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)