RAYLESS

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does rayless mean? 

• RAYLESS (adjective)
  The adjective RAYLESS has 1 sense:

1. having no parts resembling rays; not having ray flowers

  Familiarity information: RAYLESS used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• RAYLESS (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Having no parts resembling rays; not having ray flowers

Classified under:

Relational adjectives (pertainyms)

Pertainym:

ray (a branch of an umbel or an umbelliform inflorescence)

 Context examples 

I pressed my lips to his once brilliant and now rayless eyes—I swept his hair from his brow, and kissed that too.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Oh, I wish I could make you see how much my mind is at this moment like a rayless dungeon, with one shrinking fear fettered in its depths—the fear of being persuaded by you to attempt what I cannot accomplish!

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

One idea only still throbbed life-like within me—a remembrance of God: it begot an unuttered prayer: these words went wandering up and down in my rayless mind, as something that should be whispered, but no energy was found to express them—Be not far from me, for trouble is near: there is none to help.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

I lingered at the gates; I lingered on the lawn; I paced backwards and forwards on the pavement; the shutters of the glass door were closed; I could not see into the interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the gloomy house—from the grey-hollow filled with rayless cells, as it appeared to me—to that sky expanded before me,—a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb seeming to look up as she left the hill-tops, from behind which she had come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight dark in its fathomless depth and measureless distance; and for those trembling stars that followed her course; they made my heart tremble, my veins glow when I viewed them.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)