ablast

From a- +‎ blast.

ablast (not comparable)

1. Blasting, making a loud noise.

   Synonym: ablare

   • 1907, T. W. H. Crosland, The Abounding American‎^[1], London: A. F. Thompson, page 110:

     […] their real metier is the giddy tenth-rate circus, ablast with drums and the roaring of wild beasts, the snuffling of freaks, and the shrieking mirth of the vulgar.

   • 1942, Gene Fowler, “The Jervis Bay Goes Down”, in Charles G. D. Roberts, editor, Flying Colours‎^[2], Toronto: The Ryerson Press, page 109:

     Still steaming toward the battleship, / Fogarty Feegan keeps his little guns ablast.

   • 1997, Don DeLillo, chapter 3, in Underworld‎^[3], New York: Scribner, page 167:

     The radio was ablast with call-in voices, they’re griping, they’re spraying spit […]

2. Burning intensely; (of a furnace) subject to a continuous blast of hot air. (of fire)

   Synonym: ablaze

   • 1882, Percy Fitzgerald, chapter 2, in Recreations of a Literary Man‎^[4], volume 1, London: Chatto and Windus, pages 30–31:

     So the next golden or profitable rule of the system soon suggested itself, viz. while you kept literary fire all ablast and crackling, to have a number of irons heating in it.

   • 1908, Francis Downman, “Romney”, in Great English Painters‎^[5], Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, page 132:

     […] John Williamson […] had spent his time and money on a process for transmuting base metals into gold. […] For months his furnace had been kept ablast, and at last the hour of the supreme test had drawn near.

   • 1962, Hertha Riese, chapter 8, in Heal the Hurt Child‎^[6], University of Chicago Press, page 306:

     [He] constantly played with matches which, he said, he “stole” from his mother, who smoked all day long. The heat they produced cracked the ashtray one day where he set ablast his mother’s pyre symbolically.

ablast

1. partitive singular of ablas

• Audio:

  (file)

ablast

1. second-person singular/plural dependent preterite of ablesen