sensuously

[sen-shoo-uhs-lee]

adverb

1. in a way that gratifies or delights the senses.

   The still life drips sensuously with color, life, and stylistic innovation.

   We swooned over the sensuously edible little Nantucket bay scallops, seared but nearly raw, and topped with thin garlic coins.

2. in a way that affects or can be perceived by the senses.

   An ideal exists outside peoples’ consciousness, unrelated to the external, sensuously perceptible world.

Other Word Forms

• antisensuously adverb
• hypersensuously adverb
• nonsensuously adverb
• subsensuously adverb
• supersensuously adverb
• unsensuously adverb

Word History and Origins

Origin of sensuously¹

sensuous ( def. ) + -ly

Example Sentences

“He transported curving movements of concentrated simplicity — an arm slowly dropping, a leg stretching sensuously — into a joyous pas de deux.”

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And her works go about answering them studiously but sensuously — with earnestness, wit, whimsy, self-awareness and music that ranges freely among, for a start, Baroque madrigals, power ballads and barbed modernism.

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The message could be either: “The classical past remains sensuously alive even as it lies in ruins all around us” or “Don’t ever burn the wood of oleander trees!”

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Even a simple alphabet by the graffiti artist known as Worm is sensuously pictorial, since it’s rendered in bulbous, smeary and hot-colored letters.

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Twisting her body to the edge of contortion, she spiraled sensuously.

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