glabrous /GLAY-brəs/. adjective. Hairless, smooth. Most often used to refer to skin or leaves. From Latin glaber (hairless, bald).
“This abundance of terms is often cited as a virtue. And yet a critic could equally argue that English is an untidy and acquisitive language, cluttered with a plethora of needless words. After all, do we really need fictile as a synonym for moldable, glabrous for hairless, sternutation for sneezing?” (Bill Bryson)
“Glabrous, which is the loveliest of all hair-related adjectives, means having no hair (on a given part) at all. Please note that glabrous means more baby’s-bottom-hairless than bald or shaved, though if you wanted to describe a bald person in an ironically fancy way you could talk about his glabrous dome or something.” (David Foster Wallace)
“…the neophyte attorneys were easily distinguishable from the parasite poets. The attorneys were glabrous, ambitious, social, and grave, the poets mendacious, flagrantly seedy, thinly optimistic, and (worst of all) poetic.” (Cynthia Ozick)
“A hirsute show of manliness ruffled along his forearms and from the collar of his shirt, reminding me of my own relative hairlessness, my chest (and stomach and buttocks) as streamlined and glabrous as a Ken doll.” (Viet Thanh Nguyen)
“The heat, the sombre hush, the contrast between the stillness here and the windy tumult pressing against the glass all around us, provoked in me a kind of excited apprehension, as if I were being led, firmly, but with infinite tact, into peril. Ranked colours thronged me round, crimson, purples, and everywhere green and more green, glabrous and rubbery and somehow ferocious.” (John Banville)
“0 world, strangled and collapsed, where are the strong white teeth? 0 world, sinking with the silver balls and the corks and the life-preservers, where are the rosy scalps? 0 glab and glairy, 0 glabrous world now chewed to a frazzle, under what dead moon do you lie cold and gleaming?” (Henry Miller)
“Yes, I will meet Otto Jansch in Bruges to hand over the illuminated manuscripts in person, but you must broker all the arrangements. Don’t want Jansch knowing whose hospitality I’m enjoying. Like all dealers, Jansch is a gluttonous, glabrous grasper, only more so.” (David Mitchell)
“I had a clear view of him. Black suit of antiquated cut, or perhaps come back into the fashion, black tie, snow-white shirt, heavily starched clown’s cuffs almost entirely covering the hands, oily black hair, a long, dismal, glabrous, floury face, sombre lacklustre eyes, medium height and build, block-hat pressed delicately to stomach with fingertips, then without warning in a gesture of extraordinary suddenness and precision slapped on skull.” (Samuel Beckett)
“Every evening, before lying down, Xha and I would walk through this terrestrial landscape that was protected with such meticulous persistence. It was a smooth, glabrous expanse, interrupted only, at regular intervals, by the stark edges of those pyramid-shaped elevations.” (Italo Calvino)
“I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body, but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I’d come to see as my coconspirator. I knew, somehow, that the call to height and hair came from outside, from whatever apart from Monsanto and Dow made the corn grow, the hogs rut, the wind soften every spring and hang with the scent of manure from the plain of beanfields north between us and Champaign.” (David Foster Wallace)