adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a dim/distant memory (= not clear, from a long time ago )
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He had only dim memories of his father, who had died when he was four.
a distant dream (= that it will take a long time to achieve )
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Peace in this area may still be a distant dream.
a distant mountain (= far away )
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The sun was setting over the distant mountains.
a distant peak
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The mist cleared to reveal the distant peaks across the valley.
a distant relation
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He was some distant relation of Pollitt’s wife.
a distant relative
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She claims to be a distant relative of the Queen.
a distant sound (= a long way away )
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All seemed quiet, but for the distant sound of police sirens.
a distant star (= very far away )
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He stared up towards the distant stars.
close/distant cousin
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The Alaskan brown bear is a close cousin of the grizzly bear.
distant rumble
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the distant rumble of gunfire
distant thunder
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Apart from the occasional rumble of distant thunder, there was silence.
in the dim and distant past (= a very long time ago )
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I think she sang Ireland's entry in the Eurovision Song Contest sometime in the dim and distant past.
in the not too distant future (= quite soon )
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We’re planning to go there again in the not too distant future.
the dim and distant future (= a very long time from now )
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He plans to get married in the dim and distant future.
the distant future (= a long time from now )
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I don't worry about what might happen in the distant future.
the distant/remote past
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Rivers of molten lava clearly flowed here in the distant past.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
as
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You are as distant from their worries and their rows as any angel.
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Reporters, from papers as distant as the New York Times, were bored beyond comatose.
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He came to regard Fisher as distant , but forceful and rapid and efficient, and later as friendly.
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P, targets that once seemed as distant as Mars.
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In fact in-laws, and indeed kin as distant as cousins, seem commonly to be included in these employment networks.
far
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Yet a goal was not far distant .
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I closed my eyes and imagined I was in a far distant universe a long, long time ago.
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They have homes, often far distant .
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They come from a far , far distant land.
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That diagnosis is not far distant from Disraeli's own; it is in their prescriptions for the future that they differ.
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This, too, seems far distant , almost as remote as the age of Ava Gardner and Kia-Ora.
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Only 10 of these were far distant from an existing paper.
more
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Do kin who are more distant in genealogical terms necessarily fall in the outer circle?
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Scientists use the data to infer the distances to similar, but much more distant stars.
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She might be compelled to seek help in a more distant village.
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The others do not return, presumably traveling on to another, more distant roost.
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Status relates to our concern for our standing in the eyes of people more distant from us.
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They are closer to some people, more distant from others.
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By contrasting colour and black and white photography, the men seem to appear more distant and further unobtainable.
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Astronomers bootstrap from nearby stars to more distant constellations to the farthest edges of the universe.
most
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There is a stillness over the waters, a stillness which stretches to the most distant mountain-top.
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But as the most distant tiny box would come over the horizon, another box would appear behind it.
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Quasars have red shifts ranging up to 4.5, making them the most distant distinct sources so far detected.
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Family solidarity extended to the most distant cousins and even to childhood friends.
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She radiated goodness and happiness, and listeners even in the most distant recesses of concert-halls became affected by these qualities.
so
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Her anxieties, her tension, her thoughts about racing tomorrow had never seemed so distant .
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Sometimes he was so distant that he seemed to be in another world.
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Mine were of that last tropical downpour in Samaná when the potential violence had seemed so distant to me.
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Such ideas, so distant from the old Puritan concepts of afterlife in heaven, became part of his transcendentalist package.
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Nurses are no longer expected to sublimate their feelings behind starchy officiousness as has been the case in the not so distant past.
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How can we use them to help guide us into our not so distant future?
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This may, inpart, explain why current approaches seem so distant from those applied to other periods of the past.
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In short-sighted people, images are brought into focus just in front of the retina, so distant things are blurred.
too
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At some not too distant day, history surely will account him a will-o'-the-wisp, and file him away accordingly.
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At first Keoni had seemed very remote, too distant to be a real worry.
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The betrayal of a nation was too distant to make her care.
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Maybe he was therefore too distant to intercede in the folie a trois developing right under his nose.
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This, and similar organisations, may well become agents of environmental change in the not too distant future.
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Time and again a permissive present is contrasted with the not too distant past.
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The consequences seemed irrelevant, too distant to consider.
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Eventually it allowed the emergence of institutions not too distant from our own political and legal understanding of the term.
very
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If the object is very distant , linear magnification becomes vanishingly small.
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The doctor nods to the anesthesiologist, and suddenly things be-come very distant .
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A very distant object has to be extremely large to produce an image of appreciable size.
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The rest of the world seems very distant on the isolated campus.
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Siamangs and the closely allied gibbons are apes too, not very distant from the orang itself.
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When he did speak, it was mostly of the very distant past, remembering his brothers as boys.
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Both Alpha and Beta are very distant , and are well over 5000 times as luminous as the Sun.
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Ears Ringing sounds in ears, vertigo, sensitivity to loud noise, sounds seeming very distant .
■ NOUN
city
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The distant city of Lucy's dreams was becoming steadily demystified.
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Names of distant cities were called out.
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She had not killed him, she was leading him away from the open mouth of the cave and towards the distant city .
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U-turning, he drove off in the direction of the distant city , without so much as another backward glance.
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But Mrs Thomas knows that most of her pupils will go on to college in distant cities , and few return.
country
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But affairs in distant countries can suddenly end up close to home.
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The Jaguar is reported to have crashed in a distant country , mad as hell.
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They travelled by sea and by land to distant countries in search of aromatics and artefacts.
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His ship came safely through the storm which wrecked or drove to distant countries so many others.
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I wondered if our own troops in distant countries behaved in this way.
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Explorers of distant countries found other plants which produced curious mental effects.
cousin
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A distant cousin had once ended up in the hail.
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Charles's distant cousin John Carroll was drawn only once from the religious into the civil sphere during the war.
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Joszef had put capital into the real estate business of a distant cousin .
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He married a distant cousin , Jocasta.
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To think: a distant cousin of the Romanovs, and his love.
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They were, in fat, distant cousins , something they never found out.
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Father-of-two Ivan, who lived modestly, struck rich 10 years ago when a distant cousin left him £8 million.
future
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In any event it will be a vision of bow the profit is going to be achieved in the distant future .
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Unknown distant future threats are not a reason for spending so much money on the military now.
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This, and similar organisations, may well become agents of environmental change in the not too distant future .
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In the not-so-distant future , technology will continue to change radically what we see and how we see it.
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Jacob's dying blessing focusses on the distant future , when the descendants of these twelve will occupy the promised land.
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How can we use them to help guide us into our not so distant future ?
galaxy
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In the 1920s Edwin Hubble observed that distant galaxies look redder than nearby ones.
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High-tech digital cameras are used extensively in astronomy to capture dim light from distant galaxies .
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It was slightly fuzzy and presumably a distant galaxy .
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Quasars are the highly energetic cores of distant galaxies .
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Observations of distant galaxies indicate that they are moving away from us: The universe is expanding.
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Light given out by distant galaxies has to swim against the tide of expansion to get to us.
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But if we look at distant galaxies , there seems to be more or less the same number of them.
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It is now well known that distant galaxies are probably about 10 times farther away than Hubble inferred.
hill
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The sun trembled for an instant on the edge of the distant hills , then started to sink behind them.
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This combination is useful when suggesting distant hills .
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On this side of the Webi, undulating grasslands rose to distant hills , and strips of woodland bordered numerous streams.
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Triangulations on distant hills were attempted, weather records kept, and there was an astronomical observatory.
horizon
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The same summer ... I am looking down on the world, but it does not stretch away over nebulous distant horizons .
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Lassen on the distant horizon , and with the spiked rim of Castle Crags below to the nearby south.
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The village faces west to a distant horizon formed by Skye and the Torridon mountains, a glorious prospect.
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Then go outside and pick out an object, such as a large tree or building, on the distant horizon .
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The wind was blowing free, and if there were any fences they must have been beyond the distant horizon .
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I stormed across the wet barren sands towards the thin line of sea on the distant horizon .
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The undulating East Anglian landscape stretched towards a not distant horizon .
memory
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Consequently the forms of paternalism signified by feudal relations are more likely to be a recent tradition rather than a distant memory .
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Serious problems from a life onshore can fade rapidly to distant memories as sight of land is lost.
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The calm was a strange one - a distant memory .
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Euclid and Cicero were a distant memory now.
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Driven there by some distant memory from his youth.
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But that is now a distant memory .
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The national institution of the past 60-odd years could soon be a distant memory .
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One theory is that it awakens distant memories of floating in the comfort of the womb.
mountain
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The sun was setting on the tops of the distant mountains .
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Over the valley, a full moon was rising, and a chill wind was blowing down from the distant mountains .
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The city fans upwards from the coast, its white towers climbing gracefully into the foothills of the distant mountains .
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Still others were as darkly blue as distant mountains .
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The only things to break the dusty tedium are distant mountains , ragged scars on the horizon.
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Clouds like brassy cauliflowers form over the steel-blue blades of the distant mountain range that borders the plain.
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Then the sun is gone and it's suddenly cold and the distant mountains are their night time black cut-out.
object
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Newton worried about that when his theory of gravitation required apparently instantaneous interaction between two distant objects .
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Telescopes help people see distant objects .
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This is why the method is often applied to soften and diffuse distant objects or hills, as in atmospheric perspective.
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Users can control both magnification and contrast in seeing near as well as distant objects .
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As civilisation evolved painters noted that near objects can overlap distant objects.
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A bat lives in a world of echoes from near objects , distant objects and objects at all intermediate distances.
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A very distant object has to be extremely large to produce an image of appreciable size.
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It is an everyday experience; our eyes, ears and noses collect information about distant objects .
past
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What of that other world, the world of the distant past that now lies beneath our feet?
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We move from the distant past , to the past, to the present, to an even earlier past.
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Nurses are no longer expected to sublimate their feelings behind starchy officiousness as has been the case in the not so distant past .
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In the not so distant past , North Dalton's church was well supported.
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The distant past can be introduced through stories.
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But why this excursion into the distant past ?
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When he did speak, it was mostly of the very distant past , remembering his brothers as boys.
place
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Members from many distant places make the effort to attend and find it well worthwhile.
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I was begin-ning to lose touch with my body, floating away to distant places .
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They were imagining the dead man in a beautiful distant place , far from the troubles of this world.
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The place of the setting sun is always a distant place, different from where we live.
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Light from distant places is not only red-shifted by the expansion of the universe, it is also old.
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Travel is easier and we are continuously bombarded with information about distant places .
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Mysterious indigo with its connotations of protection was a substance and colour full of symbolism in the distant places of Arabia.
planet
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The funny man who had found her on a distant planet and had treated her as a human being.
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They got their name more than 100 years ago when astronomers thought their roundish shapes resembled distant planets .
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Perhaps prehistoric visitors from distant planets erected it here - Space Odyssey style - purely for this purpose?
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Why was she on this distant planet , trying to discover how the Althosian civilization was destroyed?
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We pretended to fly to distant planets in futuristic spaceships.
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She knows that the guest has come from another, distant planet , one with an important status in the universe.
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Taking all this into account, we have to ask why the extraterrestrials should be remotely interested in seeding distant planets .
relation
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Their musical directors are Thomas and Brenda Gunn, distant relations of our dear Pastor.
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A distant relation of Halorella, called Peregrinella, is even more remarkable in early Cretaceous rocks.
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And others: distant relations , slight acquaintances.
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John Bryan was not just Steve's good friend but also a distant relation .
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The apprentice was some distant relation of Pollitt's wife; that'd be why he was throwing his weight around.
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The other friends were all Parisian except for a young couple, Rumanians living in Paris, distant relations of Teodor.
relative
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Shrimps are distant relatives of insects.
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No-one was able to locate even a distant relative .
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I even had some distant relatives living here, of the sort that are called cousins, seven times removed.
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Two brothers of wife Gail Spiro and a distant relative of her husband arrived in San Diego yesterday.
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Two letters that might have been written to a distant relative , and that was all.
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All four looked white different, yet slightly the same, like distant relatives with an underlying family resemblance.
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Ali was the name of a warrior, a distant relative of the Prophet Muhammad.
rumble
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The only noise was the distant rumble of traffic on the coastal road.
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A new sound was growing in the tunnel, a distant rumble .
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I could faintly hear the distant rumble of commuter traffic from my bedroom - a reminder of what I had temporarily escaped.
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There was a long, distant rumble .
second
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A distant second to the Littlewoods giant is Vernons pools which can offer punters a mere half million.
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Hart was a distant second with 16 percent.
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Keane is considered to be second in party power, but it is a distant second.
sound
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She heard the distant sound of the tractor starting up, which meant that Fernand had no intention of waiting for her.
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Chewing, waiting to get his hit, he seems to be listening for some distant sound .
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The fires signalled to something else as well ... Shortly before daybreak Tallis was woken by the distant sound of a hunting horn.
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He could already hear distant sounds .
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They weren't distant sounds now.
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After a while there came the distant sound of rushing water.
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We were interrupted by the distant sound of the gate intercom.
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Sometimes too, I could hear the distant sounds of other women, coughing or calling out to one another, laughing.
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
in the dim and distant past
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I am sure in the dim and distant past it had been filched from the wall.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
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As she was growing up, her father was always distant and took little interest in her achievements.
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By now, the plane was just a distant speck in the sky.
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Howard is a distant cousin of my mother's.
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Jeff's been kind of distant lately.
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The neighbors seem very distant , although I try to be friendly.
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There was a flash of lightning and then the rumble of distant thunder.
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There was no sound other than the distant roar of the ocean.
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Travelers came from distant lands to visit the shrine.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
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Adelaida Parra coordinates seven literacy groups each week spending long hours travelling by bus between the distant shanty towns.
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Even the plural in their name seems to make them extend farther into a distant romantic haze.
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Firebug shrugged, his eyes distant .
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Fog hangs on the distant and some of the near hills.
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High-tech digital cameras are used extensively in astronomy to capture dim light from distant galaxies.
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Then her sad eyes met Morse's in a sort of distant , anonymous camaraderie: she smiled across, almost fully.