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Read The Picture of Dorian Gray in English — and understand every line.

Read “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde in English. Tap any word for its meaning, hear how it sounds, and save it to a memory-driven review schedule.

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Author
Oscar Wilde
Level
B2
Chapters
20
Length
~80k words
Reading time
~7 h
Translation
Built-in dictionary
read.langorbit.com / se-wilde-dorian-gray
The Picture of Dorian GrayOscar Wilde · B2
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DICTIONARY

cherish
verb

TRANSLATION

дорожить, лелеять

to feel warm affection for; to hold something dear.

She cherishes the memory of her grandmother.
Она дорожит памятью о своей бабушке.

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The opening

How “The Picture of Dorian Gray” begins

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

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About the book

Why The Picture of Dorian Gray is a great book to read in English

A beautiful young man wishes his portrait would age instead of him — and gets exactly what he asked for. Wilde's only novel (1890) glitters with epigrams; the dialogue is some of the most quotable English ever written, and the dark story underneath keeps the pages turning.

On LangOrbit you read “The Picture of Dorian Gray” with a safety net: the translation is one tap away when a sentence runs long, every word opens its meaning in context and can be saved for spaced-repetition review, and the grammar behind the trickier lines is explained right where you meet it.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Read “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde in English. Tap any word for its meaning, hear how it sounds, and save it to a memory-driven review schedule.

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