Dictionary

underpulse en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (US) audio

Etymology

From under- + pulse.

Meanings

1. An underlying pulse, flow, or impulse.
   • The music seems to have no particular sense of beginning or end: it doesn't drive toward a cadence; it simply elaborates the big waves with little waves, underpulses, in the way that the surge of surf on a beach falls into long rhythms of tide and medium rhythms of regular wave fall and short rhythms of little splashes at the end of the regular wave fall. 2015, Daniel Albright, Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and Painting, 1872–1927, →ISBN, page 70:
   • What was missing from the experience, though, was the driving, knife-sharp underpulse of fear. 2011, Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald, The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds, →ISBN:
   • He did nothing, as yet, which was really the reverse ; he did not make her his evident object, —it seems to me that this is always a high and delicate test of gentlemanhood, — and yet, to me, who felt an underpulse in all these things, there was a plain perception, that as it had been she from whom he went away, it was to her now that he was come back. 1883, Adeline Dutton Train Whitney, Sights and Insights: Patience Strong's Story of Over the Way, page 18:
   • He began lightly, but her unforeseen surrender gave to the next words an underpulse of feeling that quite spoiled his response as comedy. 1894, Edgar Fawcett, Outrageous Fortune, page 126:

Forms