dampish

comparative more dampish · superlative most dampish

1. obsoleteCharacterised by noxious vapours; misty, smoky.

   All suddenly dim woxe the dampish ayre, / And griesly shadowes couered heauen bright [...].

   1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

   1 more example

   c. 1600, author unknown, once attributed to William Shakespeare, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, London: J.M. Dent, 1897, Act I, Scene 3 https://archive.org/details/merrydevilofedmo00fabe We'll first hang Enfield in such rings of mist / As never rose from any dampish fen: / I'll make the brinèd sea to rise at Ware, / And drown the marshes unto Stratford Bridge;

2. Moderately damp or moist.

   Her hand was warm, lying there in his, dampish, fingers interlaced with his.

   2006, William Trevor, “An Afternoon”, in Cheating at Canasta, New York: Viking, published 2007, page 99

   3 more examples

   Miles of long, dark-brown, dampish-looking galleries stretch away to the right and left, and though devoid of the picturesque festoons of fungi which decorate the London Dock vaults, exhibit a sufficient degree of mouldiness to give them an air of respectable antiquity.

   1879, Henry Vizetelly, chapter X, in Facts about Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines, London: Ward, Lock & Co, page 111

   I remember very clearly the feeling of sitting there reading it; the dampish clay of the trench bottom underneath me, the constant shifting of my legs out of the way as men hurried stopping down the trench, the crack-crack-crack of bullets a foot or two overhead.

   1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter VI, in Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC

   I was four but I turned four hundred maybe, Encountering the ancient dampish feel Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.

   1991, Seamus Heaney, “Squarings xl”, in Seeing Things, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, page 94