- giddy
- giddy, dizzy, vertiginous, swimming, dazzled are comparable when meaning affected by or producing a sensation of being whirled about or around and consequently confused. Giddy and dizzy are often used interchangeably with one another but giddy is sometimes preferred for stressing the mental confusion which results and dizzy for emphasizing the physical quality of the sensation{
I am giddy; expectation whirls me round. The imaginary relish is so sweet that it enchants my sense— Shak.
}{this universe of astronomical whirligigs makes me a little giddy— L. P. Smith
}{how fearful and dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low! The crows and choughs that wing the midway air show scarce so gross as beetles— Shak.
}{with my heart beating and my head quite dizzy— J. W. Carlyle
}Both giddy and dizzy are also used in an extended sense implying a lack of balance in persons or in things and, usually, an undue lack of steadiness or seriousness{giddy girls
}{I got a bifocal slant on this world which was now making me giddy with names, dates, legends— Henry Miller
}{prices rising at a dizzy rate
}{the dizzy multitude— Milton
}Vertiginous retains in its extended uses much of the connotation implicit in its basic relation to vertigo; it may come close to dizzy in its suggestion of lack of steadfastness and constancy{inconstant they are in all their actions, vertiginous, restless, unapt to resolve of any business— Burton
}{his vertiginous, and apparently unconscious, changes of subject make heavy going after a few pages— Corke
}or may attribute a dizzying effect to the thing qualified{events occur at vertiginous speed, whole civilizations are summed up in a few words, and long processes are reduced to a paragraph if not to a sentence— Krutch
}{the delicious vertiginous sense of human destinies hanging by slender threads— R. W. Brown
}or it may stress a confusing effect like that of vertigo{that vertiginous bewilderment which comes to creatures of mere routine when they face the unfamiliar— Cohen
}{the reader ... is inspired with the conviction that of these writers only Austin Dobson, James Russell Lowell, and Miss Godden were really sane, that the rest of them were either actually mendacious or possibly vertiginous— Yale Review
}Swimming is applied especially to the head, brain, or eyes of a person suffering from dizziness; when so used, it suggests the physical sensations of swift, unimpeded, yet uncontrollable movement{my head is swimming
}{and slowly by his swimming eyes was seen a lovely female face— Byron
}{she yielded, and was borne with swimming brain and airy joy, along the mountainside— Bridges
}Dazzled applies to the physical, mental, or spiritual vision when overpowered and confused by or as if by a blinding light; it connotes, therefore, an effect suggestive of dizziness but without the sensation of being about to fall{the sun's rays tapered into a luminous cone ... a hypnotizing focal point for dazzled eyes— Beebe
}{one knew that the sun-dazzled summer world would soon open about one again— Edmund Wilson
}{the solicitations of the dazzled swains of Cambria for the honor of the two first dances— Peacock
}{dazzled by the prospect of a brilliant future
}
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
