Sunday Word: Adumbration
adumbration [ad-uhm-brey-shuhn]
noun:
1 a shadow or faint image of something
2 a foreshadowing of or precursor to something
3 concealment or overshadowing
Examples:
Ultimately, this work represents an adumbration for the organization of the hero’s journey, the Quest, as a way to give meaning, purpose, and focus to organizational life. (Nick Morgan, Nancy Duarte And Patti Sanchez Show How To Ignite Change, Forbes, June 2016)
As breezily self-confident as its eponymous heroine, 'Catherine Called Birdy' crucially departs from the original text in the film's final act, a paean to female independence and an adumbration of the change about to take place with the rise of the Renaissance. (Ann Hornaday, 'Catherine Called Birdy' is a sprightly critique of the patriarchy, The Washington Post, September 2022)
He was stayed in a peace that drained his mind, for even a false adumbration of the world of the spirit is better than none at all. (Cormac McCarthy, Suttree)
It held a pulsing adumbration, a suggestion of muted, yet purposeful rhythm, and overshadowing all, an air of black, impinging revelation. The simultaneous effect upon my consciousness was one of those reactions misnamed intuitions. (Robert Bloch, The Secret in the Tomb)
For death is always in the shadow of the delight of love. In faint adumbration there is present the dread, haunting question, Will this new relationship destroy us? (Rollo May, Love and Will)
In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas. (Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics)
The afternoon and evening that followed were tinged as by the tyrannous adumbration of an ill dream. I felt that I had stepped from the solid earth into a gulf of seething, menacing, madness-haunted shadow, and was lost henceforward to all rightful sense of location or direction. (Clark Ashton Smith, The Hunters from Beyond)
Origin:
1550s, 'faint sketch, imperfect representation,' from Latin adumbrationem (nominative adumbratio) 'a sketch in shadow, sketch, outline,' noun of action from past-participle stem of adumbrare 'to cast a shadow, overshadow,' in painting, 'represent (a thing) in outline,' from ad- 'to' + umbrare 'to cast in shadow' (from PIE root andho- 'blind; dark'). (Online Etymology Dictionary)