SUNBEAM

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does sunbeam mean? 

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

1. a ray of sunlight

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

 Dictionary entry details 

• SUNBEAM (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A ray of sunlight

Classified under:

Nouns denoting natural phenomena

Synonyms:

sunbeam; sunray

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

beam; beam of light; irradiation; light beam; ray; ray of light; shaft; shaft of light (a column of light (as from a beacon))

Holonyms ("sunbeam" is a part of...):

sun; sunlight; sunshine (the rays of the sun)

 Context examples 

The air, besides, was fresh and stirring, and this, under the sheer sunbeams, was a wonderful refreshment to our senses.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

She is a sunbeam in my house—sweet, loving, beautiful, a wonderful manager and housekeeper, yet as tender and quiet and gentle as a woman could be.

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

He saw nature—he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect of field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam—of the landscape before us; of the weather round us—and impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Little Red-Cap raised her eyes, and when she saw the sunbeams dancing here and there through the trees, and pretty flowers growing everywhere, she thought: Suppose I take grandmother a fresh nosegay; that would please her too.

(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)

I ventured to offer to the learned among them a conjecture of my own, that Laputa was quasi lap outed; lap, signifying properly, the dancing of the sunbeams in the sea, and outed, a wing; which, however, I shall not obtrude, but submit to the judicious reader.

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

I have seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it—to answer what he asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace—and it increased and grew kinder and more genial, and warmed one like a fostering sunbeam.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.

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