woolliness BrE
wooliness AmE

Dark eyes completely surrounded by white woolliness blinked at her.

The woolliness of the subsequent analysis is hard to overstate.

It also makes another point: If digital sound was once tainted by hard edges and woolliness, that time has passed.

Vagueness and woolliness are inescapable in the human sciences.

He leaned his elbows on his knees and shook his head to shake out the woolliness within.

Hair and beard grew sleek over his head, gray in color, as was the woolliness which everywhere covered his otherwise naked form.

Hustle the Panda along your average back road and you'll find none of the woolliness that might be expected from a car of this price range.

The choir, though 320 strong, almost everywhere avoids woolliness and conveys the text clearly, with the usual help from Telarc.

Sometimes my fellow thinkers it seems that the "poor dears" woolliness IS everything the real far right would have is written off as.

The defect in "Soul Mountain" is not obscurity, though there is a fair amount, but lofty woolliness.

By the woolliness of her thighs, Valentine guessed her to be Whitefang's eldest daughter.

They also are valued in bird-friendly gardens, because some species of birds actively collect the woolliness of the empty seed follicles for their nests.

This uncertainty is prone to be interpreted as "woolliness" by parents who prefer to trade in certitude"(Briault and West 1990:21).

The religious correspondent for The Times, Clifford Longley, commented that "Mrs Thatcher's known impatience with theological and moral woolliness ... will have been a factor."

"Serenity" works nicely as a movie, although in blowing his television series up to the big screen, Mr. Whedon has lost some of the woolliness that made "Firefly" such a pleasant oddity.

Tim Dowling reviewed the second episode, also for The Guardian saying that "Heston's mission suffered from a woolliness of intent that made it hard to justify the grandeur of the project".

Despite Wilkinson's attempts to moderate criticism of the Area Board's policies, and a trade unionist member's introduction of some woolliness in the text to accommodate his dislike of any rationing by the purse, the committee's report, submitted to Gaitskell in June, did make some strong proposals.

Minor criticisms included the "woolliness" of certain glossary definitions (which "has unfortunate consequences in the descriptions that follow"), issues with the main key, a lack of ranges for many measurements, truncated peduncles in some line drawings, and no mention of bract morphology in the species descriptions.

But the child protection system had broken down in this instance, not because of the excessive timidity or woolliness of social workers who missed the warning signs and failed to act, but because of their over confidence in medical diagnoses and their ready reliance on compulsory measures to remove the children.

As a textile man I don't mind woolliness too much but I do object to vagueness because this motion is so vague that it can mean as much as you want it to mean while, at the same time, it says to little as to leave an escape route for it's supporters.

Mr Gossage's critical examination of some of the major concepts of the Library-College movement usefully dwells on some of the present flaws in the movement's thinking: the woolliness of their approach to curriculum, their silence on student motivation, their too-easy dismissal of the usefulness of the lecture.

After initial running-in, E.S.Cox was quoted as discerning a distinct "woolliness" in their steaming, and although they missed their appointment at the Rugby Testing Station due to late completion, some modifications were carried out, most notably to the diameter of the blastpipe, resulting in better steaming and increased power.

Despite the wooliness of his tongue, he did not swallow.

He replied: "There is no sharp boundary, just a gradual descent into wooliness."

"Wooliness" of thinking, in Dr. Hawking's view, is a sin that science cannot tolerate.

"At the risk that we may be accused of vagueness and wooliness, we are determined to reconnoiter the ground step by step," he said.

Ms. Riedel, an Australian, relied more on main force, and occasionally fell prey to wildness and wooliness, especially in her upper register.

The surface of the skin is heavily drilled, either to evoke a wooliness of the fur or to represent the spots of a leopard with shadow.

Its climbing branchlets, which are cylindrical and gradually tapering, have longitudinal ridges and sometimes a slight, pale wooliness.

For another, the much-vaunted wildness and wooliness of Texas' story would seem to lend itself to Mr. Brands's accessible, personable approach.

His compositions for this quintet, with their skillfully written sequential episodes through patches of wooliness and calm, are fast gaining pace with his strong tone and improvisational skill.

"But the ignoring of history . . . produced a vagueness of outlook, a divorce from life as it is, a credulity, a wooliness of the mind where fact was concerned."

When Haldane came to see him to explain the nature of the Cabinet's hesitations, Balfour could not help feeling they were marked by "a certain wooliness of thought and indecision of purpose."

That storm was a distant white sea beginning to form up slowly in the southern hemisphere, the trailing puffs of cloud scurrying to join the rest of the white herd with sun glancing off the rounded wooliness.