Resplendent

rɪˈsplɛndənt

adjective

shining brightly or splendidly

The word 'resplendent' derives from the Latin verb 'resplendēre', which means 'to shine brightly'. It is often used to describe something that is visually stunning or extraordinarily beautiful.

The pale, lean, hawk-faced man who shared her high table was resplendent in robes of maroon silk and cloth-of-gold, his bald head shining in the torchlight as he devoured a fig with small, precise, elegant bites.

George R. R. Martin

A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Five

O’ershadowing sorrow doth not make thee less Delightful: thou thy griefs dost dress With a bright halo, shining beamily, As when a cloud the golden moon doth veil, Its sides are ting’d with a resplendent glow, Through the dark robe oft amber rays prevail, And like fair veins in sable marble flow; Still warble, dying swan!

John Keats

Poetry

And there stood The Kid, resplendent in an iridescent shirt of green and gold and a pair of sunfaded cords.

King, Stephen

The Stand

So, too, it is, that in these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all storms, the Typhoon.

Herman Melville

Moby Dick

And in the midst of it all stood Prince Aerion, resplendent in a red velvet doublet with long dagged sleeves, twisting Tanselle's arm in both hands.

George R.R. Martin

The Tales of Dunk & Egg

He then closed his eyes as children do in order that they may see in the resplendent night of their own imagination more stars than are visible in the firmament; then he reopened them, and stood motionless with amazement.

Alexandre Dumas

The Count of Monte Cristo

By one of those singular effects, which are peculiar to this sort of ecstasies, in proportion as his reverie continued, as the Bishop grew great and resplendent in his eyes, so did Jean Valjean grow less and vanish.

Victor Hugo

Les Misérables

Benvenuto Cellini tells us in his memoirs, that, after a certain terrible dream or vision which he had during his confinement in the castle of St. Angelo a resplendent light appeared over the shadow of his head at morning and evening, whether he was in Italy or France, and it was particularly conspicuous when the grass was moist with dew.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden

We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d We two, how long we were fool’d, Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes, We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return, We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark, We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks, We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side, We browse, we are two among the wild herds spontaneous as any, We are two fishes swimming in the sea together, We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings, We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals, We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down, We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic and stellar, we are as two comets, We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey, We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead, We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other, We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious, We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe, We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two, We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.

Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass

Silentium Amoris As often-times the too resplendent sun Hurries the pallid and reluctant moon Back to her sombre cave, ere she hath won A single ballad from the nightingale, So doth thy Beauty make my lips to fail, And all my sweetest singing out of tune.

Oscar Wilde

Poetry

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

James Joyce

Ulysses

The band was moving away from the bar, resplendent in their red shirts and glittering vests and neckerchiefs.

Stephen King

'Salem's Lot

Then thus to Hermes the command was given: "Hermes, thou chosen messenger of heaven! Go, to the nymph be these our orders borne 'Tis Jove's decree, Ulysses shall return: The patient man shall view his old abodes, Nor helped by mortal hand, nor guiding gods In twice ten days shall fertile Scheria find, Alone, and floating to the wave and wind. The bold Phaecians there, whose haughty line Is mixed with gods, half human, half divine, The chief shall honour as some heavenly guest, And swift transport him to his place of rest, His vessels loaded with a plenteous store Of brass, of vestures, and resplendent ore (A richer prize than if his joyful isle Received him charged with Ilion's noble spoil), His friends, his country, he shall see, though late: Such is our sovereign will, and such is fate."

Homer

The Odyssey

The pale, lean, hawk-faced man who shared her high table was resplendent in robes of maroon silk and cloth-of-gold, his bald head shining in the torchlight as he devoured a fig with small, precise, elegant bites.

Martin, George, R. R.

A Dance With Dragons

The harlequin, already clad in silver paper out of cigar boxes, was, with difficulty, prevented from smashing the old Victorian lustre chandeliers, that he might cover himself with resplendent crystals.

G. K. Chesterton

The Innocence of Father Brown

Then she let her head fall back, fancying she heard in space the music of seraphic harps, and perceived in an azure sky, on a golden throne in the midst of saints holding green palms, God the Father, resplendent with majesty, who with a sign sent to earth angels with wings of fire to carry her away in their arms.

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary

“Someone told me Flitwick was a dueling champion when he was young — maybe it’ll be him.” “As long as it’s not —” Harry began, but he ended on a groan: Gilderoy Lockhart was walking onto the stage, resplendent in robes of deep plum and accompanied by none other than Snape, wearing his usual black.

J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Thee, Serpent, subtlest beast of all the field I knew, but not with human voice endued; Redouble then this miracle, and say, How cam’st thou speakable of mute, and how To me so friendly grown above the rest Of brutal kind, that daily are in sight: Say, for such wonder claims attention due.” To whom the guileful Tempter thus replied: “Empress of this fair World, resplendent Eve!

John Milton

Paradise Lost

The girls led them up four steep, very long flights of creaking wooden stairs and guided them through a doorway into their own wonderful and resplendent tenement apartment, which burgeoned miraculously with an infinite and proliferating flow of supple young naked girls and contained the evil and debauched ugly old man who irritated Nately constantly with his caustic laughter and the clucking, proper old woman in the ash-gray woolen sweater who disapproved of everything immoral that occurred there and tried her best to tidy up.

Heller, Joseph

Catch-22