sphingine
- adjective
- Literature
:
esfingino
- She gave me a sphingine smile that I couldn't decipher.
Examples
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The detective maintained a sphingine expression as she listened to the suspect.
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The painting had a sphingine quality that captivated everyone.
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His sphingine silence made everyone in the room uncomfortable.
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What a sphingine twist in the story!
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His sphingine silence left everyone pondering what he was really thinking.
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She offered a sphingine smile, leaving me curious about her true feelings.
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The consultant's sphingine demeanor during the meeting suggested there was more beneath the surface.
Synonyms
498
5.1
Hard to understand or explain because it seems strange
27
8.1
Hard to understand and often seems mysterious
1
9.3
Hard to understand, like a puzzle
Calm and showing no feelings so you cannot know thoughts
Having a calm face that hides what someone thinks
Mysterious and hard to understand, like a prophecy
How Mysterious
Surface Forms
Morphology
sphingine = sphinx (semi-transparent) = sphinx + ine
The meaning 'resembling a sphinx' follows directly from the base 'sphinx' plus the adjectival suffix '-ine', but the orthographic change (sphinx -> sphing-) and the relatively uncommon suffix '-ine' may make the relation less obvious to some learners.
Etymology
Sphingine comes from sphinx, the mysterious creature that asked riddles, and the ending -ine, which means 'like' and is the same ending in feline ('like a cat'). So to be sphingine is to be 'like a sphinx': quiet, puzzling, and hard to read.