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Great Expectations vocabulary
361 vocabulary words, including people, places, music, artists, etc.
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sagacious
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► definition
Definition:wise; shrewd
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Uses:
he would smoke his pipe at the Battery with a far more sagacious air than anywhere else,—even with a learned air,—as if he considered himself to be advancing immensely.
Charles Dickens. Great Expectations (1861)
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For all his sagacity, for all his caution and astuteness, [he] had gone the way of the rest.
Agatha Christie. And Then There Were None. p.157 (1939)
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Davidson: no, it's a straight stick. This (holding pencil) could be a gnomon.
Carson: Well, why didn't you just say a "straight stick"? I mean these people are trying to learn something, and you say "gnomon", I saw lots of people turn to each other and say, "What's a 'gnomon'?" While they were doing that [they] missed most of the explanation because these people... If you'd just said, "you take a stick", we can relate to that. You don't have to bring in "gnomons" and "declinations" and "ascensions"
Davidson: You have to challenge people. If you're not sagacious, then uhhh (audience starts jeering, Davidson smirks)
Carson: That's right, one has to be sagacious.
NBC. The Tonight Show, Dec. 19, 1979
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Young ladies have great penetration in such matters as these; but I think I may defy even your sagacity, to discover the name of your admirer.
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice (1813)
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some eagle had got the ring of my box in his beak, with an intent to let it fall on a rock, like a tortoise in a shell, and then pick out my body, and devour it: for the sagacity and smell of this bird enables him to discover his quarry at a great distance, though better concealed than I could be within a two-inch board.
Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels Into Several Remote Regions of the World (1726)
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I told him, too, that he being in other things such an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved.
Herman Melville. Moby Dick
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“Well, he stormed at me, as the saying is, stormed and stormed and stormed! It was not a matter of life but rather of death, as the saying is. ‘Albanians!’ and ‘devils!’ and ‘To Siberia!’ ” said Berg with a sagacious smile.
Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace: With bonus material from Give War and Peace A Chance by Andrew D. Kaufman
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‘Oh, indeed! Well, then, I must trust to my own sagacity.’
Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights (1847)
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We must not be too sagacious in judging people by the little excrescences of their character.
Oliver Wendell Holmes. The Poet at the Breakfast Table
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you watched me, and now and then smiled at me with a simple yet sagacious grace I cannot describe.
Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre (1847)
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