What is another word for abysses?

Pronunciation: [ɐbˈɪsɪz] (IPA)

Abysses are deep, dark chasms or gaps that create an overwhelming sense of emptiness. Synonyms for abysses include voids, pits, (bottomless) chasms, gulfs, crevasses, clefts, ravines, precipices, canyons, and deeps. Each of these words carries slightly different connotations to describe the idea of an abyss, from the sheer drop of a precipice to the winding crevasses of a canyon. Regardless of the specific word chosen, they all evoke a sense of vastness and an inability to see or comprehend what lies within. These synonyms can be useful for writers looking to describe an emptiness or fear that comes from facing the unknown.

What are the hypernyms for Abysses?

A hypernym is a word with a broad meaning that encompasses more specific words called hyponyms.

Usage examples for Abysses

For a moment those tourmalines of her eyes seemed to flicker, as if she would have shown me again the abysses beyond them; but they remained shut as she spoke more slowly still.
"The Debit Account"
Oliver Onions
From the abysses she floated up to the peaks and far above them.
"The Way of Ambition"
Robert Hichens
Foreign visitors have indeed often noticed with surprise that the American public, in spite of its cleverness and its practical trend and its commercial instinct, is more ready to throw its money into speculative abysses than the people of other lands.
"Psychology and Social Sanity"
Hugo Münsterberg

Famous quotes with Abysses

  • A child's fear is a world whose dark corners are quite unknown to grownup people; it has its sky and its abysses, a sky without stars, abysses into which no light can ever penetrate.
    Julien Green
  • Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
    Thomas Huxley
  • The passage of the mythological herois inward—into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. ...Something of the light that blazes invisible within the abysses of its normally opaque materiality breaks forth, with an increasing uproar. The dreadful mutilations are then seen as shadows, only, of an immanent, imperishable eternity; time yields to glory; and the world sings with the prodigious, angelic, but perhaps finally monotonous, siren music of the spheres. Like happy families, the myths and the worlds redeemed are all alike.
    Joseph Campbell
  • Religion is not a primitive type of scientific theorizing, any more than science is a superior kind of belief-system. Just as rationalists have misunderstood myths as proto-versions of scientific theories, they have made the mistake of believing that scientific theories can be literally true. Both are systems of symbols, metaphors for a reality that cannot be rendered in literal terms. Every spiritual quest concludes in silence, and science also comes to a stop, if by another route. As George Santayana has written, ‘a really naked spirit cannot assume that the world is thoroughly intelligible. There may be surds, there may be hard facts, there may be dark abysses before which intelligence must be silent for fear of going mad.’ Science is like religion, an effort at transcendence that ends by accepting a world that is beyond understanding. All our inquiries come to rest in groundless facts. Just like faith, reason must at last submit; the final end of science is a revelation of the absurd.
    John Gray (philosopher)
  • As a child walking over a slippery and dangerous path cries out, "Father, I am falling!" and has but a moment to catch his father's hand, so every believer sees hours when only the hand of Jesus comes between him and the abysses of destruction.
    Theodore L. Cuyler

Related words: deep sea abysses, dark abyss, abyssal depths, benthic zone, deep ocean abyss, dark abyssal depths

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