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.
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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
Playwright Roffey may not know much about thrillers, but he certainly can throw a cataleptic trance.
From Time Magazine Archive
The man who defined the ideals of pictorial sentiment for an exceedingly pious age; whose angels and Blessed Damozels, Arthurian knights and shrinking, somewhat cataleptic virgins were the very essence of escapist painting.
From Time Magazine Archive
Its occupant has died before your eyes, but you can't be too sure, for she was subject to cataleptic trances.
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
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
Can you wonder that the country is being hypnotized by the sight of so many cantankerous cataleptics?
From Psycho-Phone Messages by Grierson, Francis
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)
Suppose they were in the condition of cataleptics, sensible of what passed around them, but paralyzed to the motionlessness and seeming insensibility of death?
From The Frozen Pirate by Russell, W. Clark (William Clark)
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.
