cataleptic
Americanadjective
noun
-
cataleptics
plural
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
They didn’t have official Black Friday sales during the cataleptic 1970s, because the economy was in woeful shape and the public had basically given up on the idea of bargains.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 28, 2025
Throwing off the cataleptic spell of the cinema, she no longer seems to be waiting for a closeup.
From Time Magazine Archive
Rahman Bey, fakir, recently submerged himself for an hour, asserted that he owed his life to his ability to fall into a cataleptic trance.
From Time Magazine Archive
Best shot: Kiki going into a cataleptic trance to keep the manager from throwing her out of his apartment.
From Time Magazine Archive
Through the rest of the night and most of the following day, Beck lay out on the ice, exposed to the merciless wind, cataleptic and barely alive.
From "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer
These things are not miraculous, being duplicated in experiments on involuntary cataleptics.
From Time Magazine Archive
He then gives excellent descriptions of three types: the deep stupor with paralysis of the faculties, the cases that are absorbed in false ideas, and ecstatic cataleptics.
From Benign Stupors A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type by MacCurdy, John T. (John Thompson)
Gradually life wrestled again out of winter, and the Knight, as cataleptics must, finished the address which he had begun with the word "Unlucky--" "woman, of whom art thou mother?"
From Titan: A Romance Vol. II (of 2) by Jean Paul
Can you wonder that the country is being hypnotized by the sight of so many cantankerous cataleptics?
From Psycho-Phone Messages by Grierson, Francis
This would account for the fact that places where cataleptics and idiots have died are often haunted by semi and by wholly animal types of phantasms.
From Werwolves by O'Donnell, Elliott
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
