breath-catching
English
[edit]Adjective
[edit]breath-catching (comparative more breath-catching, superlative most breath-catching)
- Inspiring awe or deep admiration; impressive.
- 2004, Mel Bradshaw, Death in the Age of Steam: A Mystery, →ISBN, page 99:
- The theory was breath-catching, but quickly fell apart when the accountant could give no account of what Sibyl might have done with Theresa's body.
- 2010, James Neufeld, Lois Marshall: A Biography, →ISBN, page 239:
- Donal Henahan reported that her performance of it was “breath-catching in its vocal warmth and emotional power.”
- 2011, Harry Harrison, Tunnel Through the Deeps, →ISBN:
- For here was a vista that was breath-catching and inspiring, a wholly new thing come into the world.
- Extremely frightening or overwhelming.
- 1964 June 5, “Now Man Conquers Mt. Eiffel”, in Life, volume 56, number 23, page 106:
- To cap the feat, their leader made a breath-catching descent by what mountain men call a rappel, riding down a rope almost 400 feet.
- 2009, R.V. Jones, Most Secret War, →ISBN:
- I asked whether he would mind if I looked through them, and after a few minutes I found the map: it was a breath-catching moment for, as I unfolded it, I saw that it must show the deployment of a whole searchlight regiment covering the entire southern half of Belgium.
- 2014, Elizabeth Power, Back in the Lion's Den, →ISBN:
- He was moving towards her with a purposefully predatory stride, stopping only when he was breath-catching inches away from her.
- Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see breath, catching. (Can we add an example for this sense?)