etiolated /EE-dee-ə-lay-təd/. adjective. Whitened due to lack of sunlight. Figuratively, weakened and/or stunted and/or having a pale, sickly appearance. From French étioler (to become pale, to grow into stubble). From éteule (stubble). From Latin stipula (a stalk or straw).
“They ate and drank but were silent. The six candles in their branched entwined stems seemed to burn less brightly than on their first evening so that their features, half shadowed, were sharpened into caricatures of their daytime selves. Pale, etiolated hands reached out to the fruit bowl, to furred and flushed peaches, the curved shininess of bananas, apples burnished so that they looked as artificial as Ambrose’s candlelit skin.” (P. D. James)
“The one she hated most was Williams. He was a sort of defective, not bad enough to be so classed. He could read with fluency, and had plenty of cunning intelligence. But he could not keep still. And he had a kind of sickness very repulsive to a sensitive girl, something cunning and etiolated and degenerate.” (D. H. Lawrence)
“Stained and frayed, these three hung together without speaking, Woodward very tall, giving the impression of an etiolated newt, Whipp small, his glasses repaired with Sellotape, Woolmer-Mills for ever launching himself back and forth on the balls of his feet.” (William Trevor)
“She was an early rescue on the part of Buffalo’s recovery teams, a member of an etiolated clan that had spent a year locked in the basement jail of a small-town police station, the unlucky wards of a madman.” (Colson Whitehead)
“In our own day, the God of the monotheistic tradition has often degenerated into a High God. The rites and practices that once made him a persuasive symbol of the sacred are no longer effective, and people have stopped participating in them. He has therefore become otiosus, an etiolated reality who for all intents and purposes has indeed died or ‘gone away.’” (Karen Armstrong)
“She had loved Louis and lusted for him when hiding that relationship from her family. They would find him boring, etiolated like some rare, pallid, carefully nurtured hothouse plant.” (Fay Weldon)