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Prodigally

adverb
1.
To a wasteful manner or to a wasteful degree.  Synonym: wastefully.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Prodigally" Quotes from Famous Books



... cows, they commonly remain there a twelvemonth or two years, without returning home. After the hunt is over, and the spoil divided, they commonly sail to Tortuga, to provide themselves with guns, powder, and shot, and other necessaries for another expedition; the rest of their gains they spend prodigally, giving themselves to all manner of vices and debauchery, particularly to drunkenness, which they practise mostly with brandy: this they drink as liberally as the Spaniards do water. Sometimes they buy together a pipe of wine; this they stave at one end, and never cease drinking till it is out. Thus ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin

... embowered in evergreens, was again filled with the aromatic breath of the forest, for Roger had commissioned a friend in the country to send so large a supply to Belle that she was embarrassed with riches of hemlock, laurel, and pine, which, although given away prodigally, left enough to transform their rooms into the aspect of bowers. Since they had not money for toys, they could make the Christmas-tide a time of wonder and delight to Fred and Minnie in this inexpensive way, and Mildred, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... Hugo, though he is no such careful artist in language: he seldom closes with such tremendous subjects as that adventurous writer attempts; but he has all the sharp antithesis, the pungent epigram of the other, and in his freest flight, though he peppers us as prodigally with colons, he never becomes absurd, which the other is constantly on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... is reached at which the soil will stop if the old husbandry continues. In this final state the soil is often not fertile enough to allow of the profitable raising of crops; it is now starving for want of those very nutrients that were so prodigally dissipated in the first days of its cultivation, and the cultivator starves with it or ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley

... salary. Mr. Pepys has recorded in his diary how scandalously Charles left his officers unpaid. The king, he says, could not walk in his own house without meeting at every hand men whom he was ruining, while at the same time he was spending money prodigally upon his pleasures. Pepys himself fell into poverty in his old age, accounting the king to be in debt to him in the ...
— William Penn • George Hodges

... of these great men, many would have been irretrievably lost in the many revolutions and contentions that followed; and, had such been the case, the monks, of course, would have received the odium, and on their heads the spleen of the disappointed student would have been prodigally showered. ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... the delicate trees and the little blue-eyed lakes; at the fairy-fountains and the winding, pebbled paths. Star-flowers shed their multicolored radiance everywhere, and starlight poured prodigally down from the sky. He chose a path at random and walked along it in the twofold radiance till he came to ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young

... summers and two winters wheeled away into the past; and in the change, imperceptible from day to day, but glorious at last, wrought on Lucy's nature by communication with one so prodigally endowed, scarcely could her parents believe it was their same child, except that she was dutiful as before, as affectionate, and as fond of all the familiar objects, dead or living, round and about her birthplace. She had now grown to woman's stature—tall, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... of the forc'd Homage he pays to Truth, is his blaming the Slavish Disposition of the Senate and People of Rome, by which the Eloquence of the Age was wholly turn'd into Panegyrick. Now considering how many Pages he has prodigally bestow'd upon it, in the very Letter I am taking cognizance of is it not very odd he should call Panegyrick a Slavish Disposition, and worse still that he should term it the most barren of all Subjects; what if I could prove, that above ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon

... War's deep waters o'er him rolled As he beheld Young England giving Life prodigally, while the old Lived on without the cause for living; And yet he never heaved a sigh Although his heart was inly riven; He only craved one boon—to die In harness, and the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various

... then his band of brothers Who took their cue, with pencil and with pen, From the gay courage of our fighting men. Theirs be the praise, not his, who here supplies Merely the editorial hooks and eyes And, rich by proxy, prodigally spends The largess of his colleagues ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch

... I never received one of their letters without feeling a certain terror as I opened it, and which was but too well justified by the contents. I thought being treated like a child by persons younger than myself, and who, of themselves, stood in great need of the advice they so prodigally bestowed on me, was too much: "Love me," said I to them, "as I love you, but, in every other respect, let my affairs be as indifferent to you, as yours are to me: this is all I ask." If they granted me one of these two requests, it was not ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... leveling of the sea-bottom, and that the soil, degenerated, as it has been said, into a metallic dust of unrecognized composition, bore no trace of the sponges, sea-anemones, star-fish, sea-nettles, hydrophytes, and shells with which the submarine rocks of the Mediterranean had hitherto been prodigally clothed. ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne

... His conscience permitted him to connive at schemes for kidnapping the King of Scots or assassinating his ministers, and his honour permitted him to encourage his own servants in a course of action for which he had subsequently no hesitation in sending them to the block. He could give, prodigally; but what he gave had generally been taken from some one else. He could protest against the cruel burden of the annates, and then absorb them himself. And with all this, it is not difficult to suppose that he constantly persuaded himself that ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... I note, not only in these mysomousoi poet-haters, but in all that kind of people, who seek a praise by dispraising others, that they do prodigally spend a great many wandering words, in quips, and scoffs; carping and taunting at each thing, which, by stirring the spleen, may stay the brain from a through beholding the ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... regained,—no matter how mortgaged,—for the moment still his own, legally his own, yielding for the present what would suffice for competence to one of few wants, and freeing his name from that title of Adventurer, which is so prodigally given in rich old countries to those who have no estates but their brains. He thought of Violante but as the civilized trader thinks of a trifling coin, of a glass bead, which he exchanges with some barbarian for gold dust; ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... chiefly by the negligence in levying it, had proved, he said, much inferior to the public charges. Notwithstanding the price of Dunkirk, his debts, he complained, amounted to a considerable sum; and to satisfy the commons that the money formerly granted him had not been prodigally expended, he offered to lay before them the whole account of his disbursements. It is, however, agreed on all hands, that the king, though during his banishment he had managed his small and precarious income with great ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume

... he was able, and had given frequent experiments thereof, to toss his sinewy piece of generation in the act of carnal concupiscence above three score and ten times in the space of four-and-twenty hours. Of that I believe nothing, the number is supposititious, and too prodigally foisted in. Give no faith unto it, I beseech thee, but prithee trust me in this, and thy credulity therein shall not be wronged, for it is true, and probatum est, that my pioneer of nature—the sacred ithyphallian ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... intrinsic value, as desirable not simply in their possession, but in their use. In this view, he holds himself to be responsible for that share of them which he enjoys, and, to continue the figure, as bound not to let them lie by him unemployed, this were hoarding; not to lavish them prodigally, this would be waste; not imprudently to misapply them, this were folly and caprice: but as under an obligation to regard them as conferred upon him that they might be brought into action, and as what therefore he may by no means throw away, though ready, ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce

... frequent the tower after that, and did not go up to it again until the morning of the day on which he was to make his vows. By this time his soul had spent itself so prodigally in prayer that he had almost begun to regard himself as one already in another world. The morning was clear and frosty, and he could see that something unusual was taking place on the earth below. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... had written to him. What need had he of letters? He thought he would have his sister always with him: that dear fount of tenderness seemed inexhaustible: he thought that he would always be able to quench his thirst of lips and heart at it: he had most prodigally squandered the love he had received, and now he was eager to gather up the smallest drops.... What was his emotion when, as he skimmed through one of Antoinette's books, he found these words written in pencil on a ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... she fully understood the enchantment of green, quite realised how happy a choice was made on that day of Creation when it was showered prodigally over the world. But now, as she walked secretly over the yellow sand between the rills, following the floating green robe of Smain, she rested her eyes, and her soul, on countless mingling shades of the delicious colour; rough, furry green of ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... breeze hath laid, And all is still. On every plain How green the sward, or rich the grain! In jungle wild and garden trim, And open lawn and covert dim, What glorious shrubs and flowerets gay, Bright buds, and lordly beasts of prey! How prodigally Gunga pours Her wealth of waves through verdant shores O'er which the sacred peepul bends, And oft its skeleton lines extends Of twisted root, well laved and bare, Half ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson

... arrival heightened this first impression. It was mid-May and the lilacs were prodigally in bloom; but the bright sunlight was chill and unnatural, and there was a west wind that laid the grass flat and moaned through the house, and continued as steadily as if it must never stop from year's end to year's end. It seemed a spectral land, a place of supernatural beauty. Warm, still, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... any succour which can be given to hunger, misery, nakedness, or other numerous corporal afflictions. In this way the money which might be spent in wiping the tears from the cheek of the widow and the orphan, and be applied to the erection of useful human institutions, is prodigally spent in a mysterious and incomprehensible operation, which, after all, is a purely human invention, and which, by its practical results, and the great amount of wealth it draws to the Roman Catholic Church, bears a greater affinity ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous

... of the abundance of their supply of rabbits, however, Mr Meldrum would not allow them to be prodigally wasted. ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson

... disorders, that all attempts towards method, prudence, and frugality will be perfectly vain, whilst a system of confusion remains, which is not only alien, but adverse to all economy; a system which is not only prodigal in its very essence, but causes everything else which belongs to it to be prodigally conducted. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... thinking what a pity it was that during all these years your gifts have been so prodigally wasted. You have, I think, the greatest gift ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs

... remained standing, was a slim replica of her mother, with an apple-cheeked face and opaque blue eyes. Her small head was prodigally laden with braids of dull fair hair, and she might have had a kind of transient prettiness but for the sullen droop of her round mouth. It was hard to say whether her expression implied ill-temper or apathy; ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... in the stumpy little round jacket she had made out of a cast-off garment of his father's that her bosom heaved, and the fountains of her grief sprang from the stony soil. She wept copiously, and found resignation. Soon she was sufficiently herself to scold a prodigally-minded spinster relative who had proposed that Little Dierck should be coffined in his new ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... day of her birth for Love, she spends herself prodigally in the endless effort to find it, little guessing, sometimes, that it is not the most obvious thing Man has to offer. With colour and scent and silken sheen, she makes a lure of her body; with cunning artifice she makes temptation ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... could finish the sentence, the marchioness herself appeared, wrapped in a delicate, rose-colored robe-de-chambre, prodigally adorned ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... the loft by an outside ladder, the Inhabitant speaking very reverently in a whisper, evidently feeling sure that there was an angel down-stairs. They went down again after a while, and the Inhabitant piled on wood so prodigally that the room became too warm; he boiled a pot of coffee, fried some salt-pork, baked some biscuit, a little yellow and a little too short, but to the hungry travelers very palatable. Even Charlton found it easy to forego his Grahamism and eat ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston

... To retain for my family only what will provide modestly for them all. I do not wish to leave much property for my relatives to use prodigally, or to quarrel over. ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton

... are easily seen, and may be briefly enumerated. Destitute of the highest imagination, and perhaps of constructive power—(he has produced many brilliant parts, and many little, but no large wholes)—he is otherwise prodigally endowed. He has a keen, strong, clear intellect, which, if it seldom reaches sublimity, never fails to eliminate sense. He has wit of a polished and vigorous kind—less easy, indeed, than Addison's, the very curl of whose lip was crucifixion to his foe. ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... allowed to remain intact. The only sign of animate life was visible in a pair of lively gold-finches, which with merry notes were fluttering from thistle to thistle, picking the down from each ripened flower-head and prodigally scattering the seeds upon the weed-grown soil where once had bloomed the odorous Roses of Paestum that ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... goodly number of slaves, though they were sure his affections would be shared by some of the best-looking of the females amongst them, and his conduct towards the remainder that of a very demon." These sentiments I very soon ascertained to be in no way libellous. A southern wife, if she is prodigally furnished with dollars to "go shopping," apparently considers it no drawback to her happiness if some brilliant mulatto or quadroon woman ensnares her husband. Of course there are exceptions, but the patriarchal usage is so engrafted in society there, that it elicits little notice or comment. ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell

... ahead, he caught his first glimpse of the ranch houses marking the Bruce West holdings. From the heights his eye ran down into valley lands that stretched wide and far away, rolling, grassy, with occasional clumps of trees where there were water holes. A valley by no means so prodigally watered as Zoraida's, but none the less an estate to put a sparkle into a man's eyes. It was large, it was sufficiently level and fertile; above aught else it was remote. It gave the impression of a great, calm aloofness from the outside world of traffic and congestion; it lay, mile after mile, sufficient ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory

... teachings, perhaps the most precious is the inspiration to live our lives thoughtfully, in no haphazard and hand-to-mouth way, and to live always for the idea and the spirit, making all things else subservient. He does not dazzle us with extraordinary power prodigally spent, but he was a good steward of natural gifts, high, though below the highest. His life of forethought and reason may be profitably compared with a life spoiled by passion and animalism like that of Byron or of Burns. ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... the banner to which they had been so long accustomed; and, though ultimately baffled, they were able to place in jeopardy, and in some measure to fling away the advantages which the blood and treasure of England had been prodigally lavished to obtain. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various

... not why you think yourselves my prisoners; This lady's freedom is a thing too precious To be disposed by any but herself: But value this small service as you please, Which you reward too prodigally, by Permitting me to pay ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott

... 25, pages 130 and 131, I give plans of a large private Turkish bath. It is such a building as would be a most desirable and pleasing addition to a country mansion; and considering the money prodigally lavished over the appurtenances of the modern mansion house, it is indeed surprising that more has not been attempted in the way of appending a feature that is at once a talisman of health, a cure for disease, and an untold luxury. ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop

... aptly, with a question. Wherefore have you, That since your husband's death have liv'd a strict And chaste nun's life, on the sudden given yourself To visits and entertainments? Think you, madam, 'Tis not grown public conference? or the favours Which you too prodigally have thrown on Wellborn, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various

... gesture loomed a yet larger one, the scale increasing strangely, till his thoughts climbed up them as up a ladder into the region where her ideas lay naked before casual interpretation clothed them. Those, he reflected, who are rich in ideas, but find words difficult, may reveal themselves prodigally in gesture. Expression of one kind or another there must be; yet lavish action, the language of big souls, seems a man's expression rather than a woman's.... He built up swiftly, surely, solidly his interpretation of this little foreign ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... which it will not procure, that is, the knowledge how to apply it properly. For man to have money, without the true secret how to enjoy it, is to possess the key of a commodious palace to which he is interdicted entrance; to lavish it, prodigally, is to throw the key into the river; to make a bad use of it, is only to make it the means of wounding himself. Give the most ample treasures to the enlightened man, he will not be overwhelmed with them; if he has a capacious mind, if he has a noble soul, he ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach

... any mischief which might arise from the licenses and indulgences so prodigally granted by Bobadilla, Columbus published by word and letter, that the powers assumed by him could not be valid, nor his licenses availing, as he himself held superior powers granted to him in perpetuity by the crown, which could no more be superseded ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving

... begun to compare her affianced with Haldane, and she found that the one was like a goblet of sweet, rich wine, that was already nearly exhausted and cloying to her taste; the other was like a mountain spring, whose waters are pure, ever new, unfailing, prodigally abundant, inspiring ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... of the nature of speculations. We have no security for our capital (which, fortunately, is seldom so large as we suppose), but the love of Nature is a sure investment, which she repays a thousand-fold, which she repays most prodigally when the heart is bankrupt and full of bitterness, as Ruth's heart was that day. For in Nature, as Wordsworth says, "there is no bitterness," that worst sting of human grief. And as Ruth walked among the quiet fields, and up the yellow aisles of the autumn ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley

... low over a notably unwashed face, watched the outside of the new works canteen of the Sir William Rumbold Ltd., Engineering Company. Perhaps because they were workers while he was a tramp, he had an air of compassionate cynicism as the audience assembled and thronged into the building, which, as prodigally advertised throughout Calderside, was to be opened that night by Sir ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various

... robust character. 'He was prepared for his work,' Bancroft says, 'by the severe discipline of life; and love without dissimulation formed the basis of his being. The sentiment of cheerful humanity was irrepressibly strong in his bosom; benevolence gushed prodigally from his ever overflowing heart; and when, in his late old age, his intellect was impaired and his reason prostrated, his sweetness of disposition rose serenely over the clouds of disease.' The winsomeness of his ways and the courtliness of his bearing survived for many months the collapse ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham

... as he and Odo drew aside to escape the mud from an emblazoned chariot, "at the gold-leaf on the panels of that coach and the gold-lace on the liveries of those lacqueys. Is there any other city in the world where gold is so prodigally used? Where the monks gild their relics, the nobility their servants, the apothecaries their pills, the very butchers their mutton? One might fancy their bright sun had set them the example! And how cold and grey ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... yellow-thighed, brown-coated bee Dives prodigally into those blue deeps Of glistening, odorless satin fair to see, And ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various



Words linked to "Prodigally" :   prodigal, wastefully



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