gauzy

gauze +‎ -y

• Rhymes: -ɔːzi

gauzy (comparative gauzier, superlative gauziest)

1. Resembling gauze; light, thin, translucent.

   Synonym: gauzelike

   • 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC:

     But first I took up Ayesha's kirtle and the gauzy scarf with which she had been wont to hide her dazzling loveliness from the eyes of men, and, averting my head so that I might not look upon it, covered up that dreadful relic of the glorious dead, that shocking epitome of human beauty and human life.

   • 1899 February, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number M, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part I, page 194:

     The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.

   • 1907, Barbara Baynton, edited by Sally Krimmer and Alan Lawson, Human Toll (Portable Australian Authors: Barbara Baynton), St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, published 1980, page 185:

     Were she but the daring equestrienne jumping through the flaming hoops, little it would matter to her if her gauzy skirts did catch.

2. (figurative) light; giving the effect of haze
3. (figurative) vague or elusive
   • 2020, Barack Obama, A Promised Land, Crown:

     Or perhaps something darker—a raw hunger, a blind ambition wrapped in the gauzy language of service?

4. (figurative) tinged with tenderness and warmth; dewy-eyed, romantic
   • 2003: Although the books are scored in different keys—Clinton’s generally attempts to be gauzy and warm, Blumenthal’s is edgy and cold—their underlying refrain is the same. — The New Yorker, 14 July 2003