Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Wordy   /wˈərdi/   Listen
Wordy

adjective
(compar. wordier; superl. wordiest)
1.
Using or containing too many words.  Synonyms: long-winded, tedious, verbose, windy.  "Verbose and ineffective instructional methods" , "Newspapers of the day printed long wordy editorials" , "Proceedings were delayed by wordy disputes"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Wordy" Quotes from Famous Books



... wordy quarrel, Mr. Brown showing his temper in anything but a dignified manner. He wanted his son and Nappy released, and threatened all sorts of things, but all to no purpose. Mr. Powell was obdurate, and the Rovers kept themselves in readiness to use their ...
— The Rover Boys on Snowshoe Island - or, The Old Lumberman's Treasure Box • Edward Stratemeyer

... will see what Schuyler will make of it. His wordy proclamation will have its living sequel now. A young and innocent girl, seeking the protection of our camp, is inhumanly murdered by Indians in our pay. A single tale like this is enough to undo at a blow all that we have accomplished here. With ten thousand wild aggravations, it will ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon

... spent the day at the polls; his party had won an easy victory; and, though not on the ticket, he was now awaiting a telegraphic summons to the state capital. His fortunes were growing. Yet that was not a thing to be wordy about, and now, when the murmur of his voice continued so long and steadily that it found even the dulled ear of the aged father in the upper room, that father knew what the topic must be. On all other matters the ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable

... property rights had not been as well attended to as the methods of attack and defence in the chase and on the war path. By some, not strange, personal argument, he concluded to appropriate the six valuable horses above mentioned, in the law wordy vocabulary of civilization, "to his own, use, benefit and behoof, without asking the consent, good-will, approbation, permission and personal, directions of the said owner, to ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... inordinate admiration for the French pseudo-classical school. Florian, Richardson, Sterne, Rousseau, and Bernardin de St. Pierre found first translators, and then imitators, and soon the loud-sounding declamation and wordy ecstatic despair of the stage heroes were drowned in the deep-drawn sighs and plaintive wailings of amorous swains and peasant-maids forsaken. The mania seems to have been in Russia even more severe than in the countries where ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... newly-discovered poet a long dream of ecstasy, with the exception of one incident which, though somewhat painful, it is necessary to retail in order to illustrate what havoc habit can work on even the brightest psychologies. Earl Bowles (a descendant of Senator Didcot Bowles—beloved by all) in his rather wordy dissertation on "Intellects of the Hour" presents to us perhaps the most ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward

... child. That is by living a life that has real meaning to him now, a normal natural life, putting forth those activities that spring from within, not merely sitting behind a narrow desk trying to memorize wordy descriptions of complicated facts thought to be useful to him later on. And when we go out and see what they are doing on the firing line we shall see just ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... verses became less direct, and, to his mind, rather wordy and purposeless, though he never failed of joy in the mere verbal music of them when Clytie read, with sometimes a kind of warm tremble in ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson

... a singularly ill chosen medium for rendering the terza rima; and his diction was as wordy and vague as Dante's is concise and sharp of edge. A single ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... siege our advance lines and those of the Boers used to be less than 100 yards apart, and when the wily snipers of both sides saw nothing to snipe at, they used to exchange pleasantries at the expense of one another, from the safety of their entrenchments. Sometimes these wordy compliments made the opponents decidedly "chummy", to borrow a trench phrase. In that mood, they would now and again wax derisive or become amusing, bespeaking the fates of one another or the eventual outcome of the war. Whoever got the worst of the argument used to ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... easy life of the Big House went on in its frictionless way. Dick worked. Graham worked. Paula maintained her seclusion. The sages from the madrono grove strayed in for wordy dinners—and wordy evenings, except when Paula played for them. Automobile parties, from Sacramento, Wickenberg, and other valley towns, continued to drop in unexpectedly, but never to the confusion of Oh Joy and the house boys, whom Graham saw, on occasion, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... the brothers Mahon and Brian found that they could not successfully face in open field the hosts of their invaders. So these two "stout, able, valiant pillars," these two "fierce, lacerating, magnificent heroes," as the brothers are called in the curious and wordy old Irish record, left their mud-walled fortress-palace by the Shannon, and with "all their people and all their chattels" went deep into the forests of Cratloe and the rocky fastnesses of the County Clare; ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks

... translated into character and action. Words have always been the bane of religion as well as its vehicle. Religious emotion has enormous motive force, but it is the easiest thing in the world for it to sizzle away in high professions and wordy prayers. In that case it is a substitute and counterfeit, and a damage to the Reign ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch

... according to the catalogue, under the auspices of Marcus Tullius Cicero; but why or wherefore the world who read the quotation mottoes of catalogues, must ever be at a loss to discover. "I think," said the wordy Roman, "that no one will ever become a highly distinguished orator, unless he shall have obtained a knowledge of all great things and arts." Therefore, you, the British public, are requested to walk in and see ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... women, indifferent women, friendly women, merry women. Fine women in fine clothes; rich women in fine clothes; poor women in fine clothes. Worldly old women, reclining befurred in electric landaulettes; wordy old women hoydenishly trundling carts full of flowers. Wonderful automobile women quick-glimpsed, in multiple veils of white and brown and sea-green. Women in rags and tags, and women draped, coifed, and befrilled in the delirium of maddened poet-milliners and ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington

... is to be a force which makes for co-operation in place of conflict, she must not be divided against herself. She must leave behind forever the separations and snobberies, the misunderstandings, the wordy battles beloved of pedants and politicians. The smoke and dust of controversy obscures her vision, and she needs all her energies to tackle the great task which confronts her. In this regard nothing is so full of promise for the future as the new sense of ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... masters and scholars were ranged against each other as antagonists, they were quiet as statues. There was much said on both sides, reasonings, entreaties, expostulations, and even jocularity passed, between the adverse, but yet quiescent ranks. In this wordy warfare the boys had the best of it, and I'm sure the ushers had no stomach for the fray—if they fought, they must fight, in some measure, with their hands tied; for their own judgment told them that they could not be justified ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... replied, "but we'll be whipped in this wordy battle. And even a small defeat were an unpropitious ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller

... the justice of what has been said as to the duty and importance of improving these people. We have sometimes tried; but the want of real gratitude which, in them, is associated with such warm and wordy expressions of regard, with their incorrigible habits of falsehood and evasion, have baffled and discouraged us. You say their children ought to be educated; but how can this be effected when the all ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... love-letters, foolish, as the age of the writer rendered natural, yet with touches here and there which I thought were borrowed from a more experienced source. Some of them struck me as singularly odd compounds of ardour and flatness; commencing in strong feeling, and concluding in the affected, wordy style that a schoolboy might use to a fancied, incorporeal sweetheart. Whether they satisfied Cathy I don't know; but they appeared very worthless trash to me. After turning over as many as I thought proper, ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte

... enterprise under a formal contract with the crown, and had received a regular commission, constituting him Adelantado. This must be matter of record, and he insisted loudly, that the books of the department should be consulted. The wordy strife at length attracted the attention of an old, gray-headed clerk, who sat perched on a high stool, at a high desk, with iron-rimmed spectacles on the top of a thin, pinched nose, copying records into an enormous folio. He had ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving

... on at the rectory in the same regular course, Mr Syme's pupils working pretty hard, and there being a cessation of the wordy warfare that used to take place with Distin, Macey, and Gilmore, and their encounters, in which Vane joined, bantering and being bantered unmercifully; but Distin was completely changed. The sharp bitterness seemed to have gone ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn

... of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have no genius or talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufacturers and agriculture. If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations. For eighteen ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... latter basis that he secured a prize, in the person of the Reverend George Bland, ex-revivalist, ex-author of pious stories for the young, skilled dealer in truisms, in wordy platitudes couched largely in plagiarized language from the poets and essayists, in all the pseudo-religious slickeries wherewith men's souls are so easily lulled into self-satisfaction. The Good, the True, the Beautiful; these were his texts, but the real god of his worship was Success. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... suddenly, after speaking to Mary, he found that he was the object of the same inquiring scrutiny that he had been on the porch. In lulls he caught the old man's face in repose. It had sadness, then, the sadness of wreckage; sadness against which he seemed to fence in his wordy feints ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... what thou doest, neither selfish nor unadvised nor obstinate; let not over-refinement deck out thy thought; be not wordy nor a busybody. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... and its inmates had altogether a bad name. Tom's wife was a tall termagant, fierce of temper, loud of tongue, and strong of arm. Her voice was often heard in wordy warfare with her husband; and his face sometimes showed signs that their conflicts were not confined to words. No one ventured, however, to interfere between them; the lonely wayfarer shrunk within himself at the horrid clamor and clapper-clawing; ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... wife in the hall who won. She had her meals outside with the kitchen maid and her niece, who helped in the Post Office, and she always tried to take part in the conversation from a distance thus. She plunged into a wordy description of a lengthy dream that had to do with clouds, three ravens, and a mysterious face. All listened, most of them in mere politeness, for as cook she was a very important personage who could furnish special dishes on occasion—but her sister listened as to an oracle. She nodded ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... enjoy either a ridotto or a fast; can utter lively, merry things in his sermons, and does not object sometimes to recognise the wisdom of Shakspere. Mr. Adams is a good platform speaker, and he can give straight shots as a preacher. Sometimes his discourses are only common-place, wordy, and featherless; but in the general run he is much above the average of sermonisers. He has good action, can put out considerable canvas when very warm, smacks the pulpit sides with his hands when, particularly earnest, and occasionally makes a direct aim at the Bible before him, and ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... or less far off on different sides, to indicate, in the course of time, for what target we are aiming, and after an hour's talk, back and forward to convey the purport of a single principle or a single thought. And yet while the curt, pithy speaker misses the point entirely, a wordy, prolegomenous babbler will often add three new offences in the process of excusing one. It is really a most delicate affair. The world was made before the English language, and seemingly upon a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the rope-walkers and calkers on the other. Bloody collisions, it is said, occurred between them. The latter held meetings in the calkers' hall in the lower part of the city, at which resolutions were adopted and speeches made denouncing the soldiers, who, on their part deriding the wordy war offered, sneeringly snubbed their opponents "The Calkers," which by an easy corruption became "the caucus," and finally a term ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various

... like bold argument (continued) And wordy wars with Parliament; He made things lively ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison

... was busy in the square as we rattled through. From behind their battlemented wares the country mice waged wordy war with the town mice over the price of merchandise. But on this occasion we were too engrossed to notice a scene whose picturesque humour usually fascinated us, for as the carriage jogged over the rough roads the poor little arbre de Noel palpitated ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd

... returning from a visit to the sick students when he heard a noise in the hallway on the second floor. He looked down the stairs and saw Tom and Tad Sobber near a landing, having a wordy quarrel. Nick Pell was approaching and so were ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)

... connection between man and woman is bound to produce on the future life of both. People do not see that a first impression so vivid as that of love, or the liking which takes the place of love, produces lasting effects whose influence continues till death. Works on education are crammed with wordy and unnecessary accounts of the imaginary duties of children; but there is not a word about the most important and most difficult part of their education, the crisis which forms the bridge between the ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... Canalis; "he is wordy; he's long-winded, a plodder in argument, and a good logician; but he doesn't understand the higher logic, that of events and circumstances; consequently he has never had, and never will have, the ear ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac

... is this,—Be short. It is amazing the way in which good men lose themselves on Sunday mornings in the lapse of their own language; and most rarely are we confronted from the pulpit with an opinion which would not bear stripping of wordy shifts, and be all the more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... affairs. The people who afterwards became known as Jeffersonian Republicans numbered in their ranks the extremists who had been active as the founders of Democratic societies in the French interest, and they were ferocious in their wordy hostility to Great Britain; but they were not dangerous foes to any foreign government which did not fear words. Had they possessed the foresight and intelligence to strengthen the Federal Government the Jay treaty ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt

... "The long wordy discussions by which he tries to reason us into admiration of his poetry, speak very little in his favor: they are full of such assertions as this (I have opened one of his volumes at random)—'Of genius the only proof is the act of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before;'—indeed? ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... custom of the time, but in many details of their contents they show that the civilisation of Western Asia had for centuries been based on a Babylonian foundation. With the lack of exact information so frequently to be deplored in Egyptian accounts, the wordy narratives of the campaigns of Thutmosis III. scarcely enable us to determine exactly from which of the greater powers he had succeeded in wresting districts of Syria and Palestine. As regards the political situation there, even at the beginning of the Kassite Dynasty—a change probably ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr

... than done, on this corner of the estate. I tell you, Abiram, there is need of moving, for more reasons than one. You know I'm a man that very seldom enters into a bargain, but who always fulfils his agreements better than your dealers in wordy contracts written on rags of paper. If there's one mile, there ar' a hundred still needed to make up the distance for which you have ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... Mark was gone, Mrs. Banker turned intuitively to Helen, finding greater comfort in her quiet sympathy than in the more wordy condolence offered by Juno, who as she heard nothing from the letter, began to lose her fears of detection and even suffer her friends to rally her upon the absence of Mark Ray and the anxiety she must feel on his account. Moments there ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... lookout for the Hargreaves party, and came forward and had a talk with them before they started across the open spot. He had quite recovered from Nelly's attack upon his dignity as a man and a naval officer, and the pair as usual had a wordy spar. Dick was, however, rather serious at the prospect of the danger they were ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty

... woman was in some provinces yoked side by side with an ass to the plough or the harrow; and M. Simond protests that it excited no horror to see the driver distributing his lashes impartially between the woman and her brute yoke-fellow. So much for the wordy pomps of French gallantry. In England, we trust, and we believe, that any man, caught in such a situation, and in such an abuse of his power, (supposing the case, otherwise a possible one,) would be killed ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... that if it be steeped in curiosity as to science it has no room for merely personal considerations. All day amid that incessant and mysterious menace our two Professors watched every bird upon the wing, and every shrub upon the bank, with many a sharp wordy contention, when the snarl of Summerlee came quick upon the deep growl of Challenger, but with no more sense of danger and no more reference to drum-beating Indians than if they were seated together in the smoking-room of ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... were those principles, that truth, those professions, if after all she would listen to a marquis and would not listen to a groom? To suppose such a thing was to wrong her grievously. To herald his suit with his rank would be to insult her, declaring that he regarded her theories of humanity as wordy froth. And what a chance of proving her truth would he not deprive her of, if, as he approached her, he called on the marquis to supplement the man!—But what then was the man, fisherman or marquis, to dare even himself to such a glory as the Lady ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... earth trembled, as the smoke Of his revenge ascended up to Heaven, Blotting the constellations: and the cries Of millions, butchered in sweet confidence, And unsuspecting peace, even when the bonds Of safety were confirmed by wordy oaths, ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts

... the wordy civility of D'Artagnan, smiled like a man who understands perfectly the reasons given him, ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... in the very minutest points, by the men who had accompanied him, even though cross-questioned with unusual particularity by Father Francis. Old Pedro's statement, though less circumstantial, was, to the soldiers and citizens especially, quite as convincing. He gave a wordy narrative of Senor Stanley's unnatural state of excitement from the very evening he had become his lodger—that he had frequently heard him muttering to himself such words as "blood" and "vengeance." He constantly appeared longing for something; never ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar

... porch one day, and found her sitting on the steps, with her hat tilted over her eyes, and a generally woe-begone look in her whole attitude; and they had just had a wordy battle ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving

... fellow, after all, is no villain; he has no kind of connexion with the horrid rascal SIR EMERSOM TENNENT alludes to—with the blackguard. That he is a boaster, a talker, an idiot, a nincompoop; that he scatters "words, words, words," as Polonius did of old; that he is bombastic, wordy, prosy, nonsensical, and a fool, no one will deny. But he is no rogue, though he utters rogueries and drolleries. No one is justified in ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various

... on fire to imitate him; for for this very end had he related it. But when he had subjoined also, how in the days of the Emperor Julian a law was made, whereby Christians were forbidden to teach the liberal sciences or oratory; and how he, obeying this law, chose rather to give over the wordy school than Thy Word, by which Thou makest eloquent the tongues of the dumb; he seemed to me not more resolute than blessed, in having thus found opportunity to wait on Thee only. Which thing I was sighing for, bound as I was, not with another's irons, but by ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine

... its due. The narrower total seems to suit the few, The wider total suits the common run; Each obvious in its sphere like moon or sun; Both provable by me, and both by you. Befogged and witless, in a wordy maze A groping stroll perhaps may do us good; If cloyed we are with much we have understood, If tired of half our dusty world and ways, If sick of fasting, and if sick of food;— And how about these long ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti

... cultivated a bitter sectional enmity, amounting to contempt, for the people of the north, growing partly out of the subserviency of large portions of the north to the dictation of the south, but chiefly out of the wordy violence and disregard of constitutional obligation by the Abolitionists of the north. They believed in the doctrine of an irrepressible conflict long before it ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... as he too checked his horse. He was not a wordy thinker, and this explosive phrase stood for mixed impressions which eloquent interpreters might have expanded into some sentences full of an irritated sense that he was being mystified, and a determination that ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... he walked over early to Great Beeding. His aunt would have received the pamphlet by the first post and he wished to seize the first fine careless rapture of her comments. But he found her in a mood of distress rather than of wordy impatience. ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason

... dementat," he said, meaning by quos the persons responsible for this appointment. He was not so much annoyed that he had not received the post, that he had been conspicuously passed over; but it was incomprehensible, amazing to him that they did not see that the wordy phrase-monger Stremov was the last man fit for it. How could they fail to see how they were ruining themselves, lowering their prestige by ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... wasted on the most unimportant questions. A member, one of those afflicted with the morbid rage of debate, of an ardent mind, prompt imagination, and copious flow of words, who heard with impatience any logic which was not his own, sitting near me on some occasion of a trifling but wordy debate, asked me how I could sit in silence, hearing so much false reasoning, which a word should refute? I observed to him, that to refute indeed was easy, but to silence impossible; that in measures brought forward by myself, I took the laboring oar, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... a second and then looked rather sheepish. I had heard of a certain wordy battle between him and a Territorial Sergeant whom he had set out to teach. Marigold encountered a cannonade of blasphemous profanity, new, up-to-date, scientific, against which the time-worn expletives in use during ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... however, are not quite so harmonious in their utterance, and when excited upon any subject, would work themselves up into a sort of wordy paroxysm, during which all descriptions of rough-sided sounds were projected from their mouths, with a force and ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... It is an easy, but not a satisfactory method of criticism to declare what is not to one's liking to be invention and romance, and it has until late years been difficult to combat such an argument. The battle has raged round wordy disputes, the merits of which are governed by the abilities of the respective disputants; that this is no longer possible is due to the fact that there have entered into the fray the methods and results of folklore which ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... candle from the minister's reluctant hands and put it right. Then he returned to his seat, not apparently puffed up, yet perhaps satisfied with himself; while Mr. Dishart, glaring after him to see if he was carrying his head high, resumed his wordy way. ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie

... death the backs of his metaphysics blinked at him emptily. What signified their endless pages about dualism and monism, about phenomenon and noumenon? His mother was dead. And she had died embittered against him because he had read and had been bewildered by these empty, wordy volumes. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... give me patience! By the help of Juno the protectress it was this brain and this arm that—But I will not justify myself by imitating the Athenian fashion of wordy boasting. Pass ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton

... sentences, and each sentence begins 'and'—'and'—'and,' like a schoolboy's narrative. It's as if a number of impressions had seized the writer's mind, which he jotted down hurriedly, lest they should escape him. But, just because it's so little wordy, it gets the effect of the thing—faith, sirs, it's right on to the end of it every time! The writing of some folk is nothing but a froth of words—lucky if it glistens without, like a blobber of iridescent foam. But in this sketch there's a perception at the back of every sentence. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... often parted with a canvas for a few francs. When Tanguy was hard up he would go to some discerning amateur and sell for two hundred francs pictures that to-day bring twenty thousand francs. Tanguy hated to sell, especially his Cezannes. Artists came to see them. His shop was the scene of many a wordy critical battle. Gauguin uttered the paradox, "Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece," and the novelist Elemir Bourges cried, "This is the painting of a vintager!" Alfred Stevens roared in the presence of the Cezannes, Anquetin admired; but, as ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... have to make on this wordy jumble is, that it seems highly presumptuous on the part of weak men to defend the character of "Almighty God." Surely they might leave him to protect himself. Omnipotence is able to punish those who offend it, and Omniscience knows when to punish. Man's interference is grossly ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote

... bull, I have found it necessary to simplify the phraseology considerably, while carefully preserving the sense. The passage in question, while not hard to understand in Latin, would be, if translated literally, almost unintelligible in English—a long, wordy repetition of revocatory and annulling clauses, for many of which there is no precise and brief equivalent in English. Nor is the Latin itself elegant; and a few words and phrases can only be guessed ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various

... quilts, one of the transients thoughtfully cautioning me to put my moccasins under my pillow, as these articles were the object of almost universal covetousness during the evening. No sooner am I comfortably settled down, than a wordy warfare breaks out in my immediate vicinity, and an ancient female makes a determined dash at my coverlet, with the object of taking forcible possession; but she is seized and unceremoniously hustled away by the men who assigned me my quarters. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... which the "children" were sure. John's forceful assertion that God could raise up, from the stones on the river bank, children to Abraham, meant to those who heard that even the lowest of the human family might be preferred before themselves unless they repented and reformed.[283] Their time of wordy profession had passed; fruits were demanded, not barren though leafy profusion; the ax was ready, aye, at the very root of the tree; and every tree that produced not good fruit was to be hewn down and cast into ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... stood out distinctly as he leisurely strolled toward the incoming wagon-train without looking backward. Flashing after him a glance that boded wordy trouble in the future, she ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey

... holding the wordy letter in his hand, and paced the room. Of his own ability to render effective help, were he allowed freedom of action, Iglesias entertained little doubt—always supposing that the situation did not prove even worse than he had ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... represented had in view the erection of a sawmill some two miles back in the woods, close beside the bayou and at a convenient distance from the lake. He was not wordy, nor was he eager in urging his plans; only in a quiet way insistent in showing points to be considered in her own favor which she would be likely ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin

... toil and traffic, working with their hands, or shipping freights of figs or valonea; as for the Schnorrers, the beggars who lived by other people's wits, they were even more hard-headed than the workers. Hence constant excitements and wordy wars, till at last the authorities banished the already outlawed Sabbatai from Smyrna. When he heard the decree he said, "Is Israel not in exile?" He took farewell of his brothers and of his father, now grown decrepit in his body ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... delegation of one-eyed would greet me as a comrade and present me with a petition. In this petition I was asked and urged to betake myself to the hospital library, to probe the depths of the encyclopaedias and from their wordy innards tear out one name for the organisation of the one-eyed. This was to be our life long club, they said, and the insistence was that the name above all should be a "classy" name. So it came to pass that after much research and debate one name was accepted and ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons

... bartering village gossip, for the Hindu is by nature staid. After a while, at the second bottle perhaps, cheerfulness will supervene, then mirth and garrulity, ending, as the night closes round, with wordy contention and a general brawl. But nothing serious will happen, for toddy, though decidedly heady, is at the worst a thin potation. A strong and very pure spirit is distilled from it, which has its devotees, but the rustic, as a rule, prefers ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... comprehend nothing about tragedy or Shakespeare, and it is a failure. I said so; and by so saying produced a blank silence—a mute consternation. I was, indeed, obliged to dissent on many occasions, and to offend by dissenting. It seems now very much the custom to admire a certain wordy, intricate, obscure style of poetry, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes. Some pieces were referred to about which Currer Bell was expected to be very rapturous, and failing in ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... in wordy commonplaces vociferated with emphasis; the Quotidienne was comparatively Laodicean in its loyalty, and Louis XVIII. a Jacobin. The women, for the most part, were awkward, silly, insipid, and ill dressed; there was always something amiss that spoiled ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... irrefutable facts, believed and doubted all. Lost in thought, a prey to an awful and involuntary incredulity, which was combated by the instincts of his own pure love and his faith in Natalie, he read and re-read that wordy letter, unable to decide the question which it raised either for or against his wife. Love is sometimes as great and true when smothered in words as it is ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac

... obliged to acknowledge that the Major's counsel was wise, and to refrain from either argument or sarcasm; but the effort required to check his natural tendency to wordy conflict was almost too great for him, and when not engaged in his own special duties he spent hours in one of the angles of the terrace keenly watching every tree and bush within range, and firing vengefully whenever he caught sight of a lurking native. So ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty

... He stifled a wordy protest which rose to his lips, and lay still; and shortly afterwards he had the pleasure of seeing the undesirable strangers hump their "swags" and retrace their ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace

... when in their progress through the United States history they came to pages descriptive of Indian wars and the Revolutionary struggle, since they found their lessons then more easily remembered than the wordy disputes and little understood decisions of statesmen. The first skating on the pond was an event which far transcended in importance anything related between the green covers of the old history book, while to Albert Nichol the privilege of strapping skates on the feet of little Helen Kemble, ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe

... returned a wordy and diffuse reply, commenting that "having for many years past left off all metaphysical studies," she was "not a competent judge of any work on subjects of that nature," yet insisting that she doubted if contemporary readers would like it. It was obvious that ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds

... some time and wanted to get back to Dawson City. Ben West did not think he owed Adams anything, as Adams had not found the mine, but for some reason Adams thought he ought to have an interest in what West found; so they had some wordy trouble. After many hot words, Ben West agreed to give Adams two thousand dollars, which offer Adams accepted and then returned to Dawson City to see and enjoy more fun as he called it. Two weeks later an agent representing the North American Mining Syndicate bought Ben West's claim for ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge

... though never known to read or study, are ever ready to debate,—not "grubs" or "reading men," only "wordy men."—Williams Quarterly, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... writing any sort of letter if first the trouble be taken to set out the exact object of the letter. A letter always has an object—otherwise why write it? But somehow, and particularly in the dictated letter, the object frequently gets lost in the words. A handwritten letter is not so apt to be wordy—it is too much trouble to write. But a man dictating may, especially if he be interrupted by telephone calls, ramble all around what he wants to say and in the end have used two pages for what ought to have been said in three lines. On the other ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther

... contrast, therefore, between the reports of the debates in Council and those which fill the multitudinous pages of Hansard. The speeches, instead of being wordy appeals to constituents, are (so far as one can judge from the condensed official Reports) brief logical expositions of the leading principles involved, packing the essential arguments into the briefest possible space. When a body such ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... a sudden and terrific kick; the wordy quarrel ceased; hurried steps retreated along the corridor; a pass key rattled in the lock, and the door was ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... I did the talking, and it would have amazed me beyond measure if any one had told me that mine was not the greater intelligence in these wordy encounters. Parload was a quiet youth, and stiff and restrained in all things, while I had that supreme gift for young men and democracies, the gift of copious expression. Parload I diagnosed in my secret heart as a trifle dull; he posed as pregnant quiet, I ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... Alack! the wordy strife will have no end, Beauty and Truth will ever be at variance, A schism still the ranks of man will rend Into two camps, the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... moral tone provoked laughter. The Revolution in Sweden, in fact, was shown to suffer from the ineradicable faults which Congreve had gently but justly suggested. It was very long, and very dull, and very wordy, and we could scarcely find a more deadly specimen of virtuous and didactic tragedy. Catharine was dreadfully disappointed, nor was she completely consoled by being styled—by no less a person than Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Prussia—"The Sappho of Scotland." She ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... This was evidently a wordy tourney of which the participants hardly knew the purpose. Nekhludoff tried to get ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy

... windy, wordy controversy on "compelling" and "acquiring." Seeing no prospect of a conclusion we withdrew. The good auntie who had invited us followed us out in deep humiliation. I said, we are sorry to go without contributing something to the interest of the meeting, but this is such ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 06, June, 1884 • Various

... the following, it must be explained that the first draft of the first part of the Amateur Emigrant, when it reached me about Christmas, had seemed to me, compared to his previous travel papers, a somewhat wordy and spiritless record of squalid experiences, little likely to advance his still only half-established reputation; and I had written to him to that effect, inopportunely enough, with a fuller measure even than usual of the frankness which always ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... several ponderous things. On different lines of action, and the pulling of different strings; Upon some equivocal doings, and some unequivocal duns; On how few of his numerous patrons were quietly prompt-paying ones; On friends who subscribed "just to help him," and wordy encouragement lent, And had given him plenty of counsel, but never had paid him a cent; On vinegar, kind-hearted people were feeding him every hour, Who saw not the work they were doing, but wondered that "printers are sour:" On ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton

... doubted whether Frau Manske had any real sympathy with her plan. Her inquisitiveness was unquestionable; but Anna felt that opening her heart to the parson and opening it to his wife were two different things. Though he was wordy, he was certainly enthusiastic; his wife, on the other hand, appeared to be chiefly interested in the question of cost. "The cost will be colossal," she said, surveying Anna from head to foot. "But the gracious ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp

... upon a far more solid basis than merely that of having written the most readable and tender of humorous romances. He reformed literature. He tilted at windmills as truly as ever his hero did, and overthrew the false taste for wordy pomp and emptiness which was characteristic of his times. It was not only Spanish literature that felt the impulse of his warm, frank honesty and insight into life. All Europe was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various

... of passion were visible in a scene I witnessed in a little street near San Samuele, where I found the neighborhood assembled at doors and windows in honor of a wordy battle between two poor women. One of these had been forced in-doors by her prudent husband, and the other upbraided her across the marital barrier. The assailant was washing, and twenty times she left her tub to revile the besieged, who thrust her long arms out over those of her husband, and ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... in all the cities of Europe. How much of the language of the book of Marco Polo's travels was Marco's, and how much was the worthy Rusticiano's, we are unable to decide. The facts in that famous book were duly vouched for by Marco. The opening chapter, or prologue, inflated and wordy, after the fashion of the times, was undoubtedly Rusticiano's. He began thus: "Great Princes, Emperors, and Kings, Dukes and Marquises, Counts, Knights, and Burgesses! and People of all degree who desire to get knowledge ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... A wordy war followed, lasting the best part of a half an hour. Through this it was learned that the hotel man had prepared for the spread, and so had the professor of music. Just after noon telephone messages had come in, calling the ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer

... you for pious jargon," said Varillo, beginning to lose temper, yet too physically weak to contend with the wordy vagaries of this singular personage who had evidently been told off to attend upon him. "I asked you who is the Head or Ruler of this community? Who gives you the daily rule of ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... threat with a defiance,—not wordy, but resolute. In Charleston, the stronghold and citadel of the South, with their leader absent, with the disruption of the party impending, they stood their ground. The majority should rule, or they ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... if the fiend still stays importunate, My blood is up. Ad lib., Till at the door the bailiff rattles And rude men reave me of my chattels, I shall prolong these wordy battles, And may the just cause prove the fortunate; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various

... threw down his tools; but possibly this was by request, for he had acquired a habit of engaging in much wordy argument and letting the work slide. He went out upon the streets to talk, and in the guise of a learner he got in close touch with all the wise men of Athens by stopping them and asking questions. In physique he was immensely strong—hard work had developed his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... Troops, troops, my lord, not wordy men of law, Are his sole need. Should God send angels there He'd choose but those who bear the flaming sword. ... Here, here, my lords! Look here! His guaranties, In his own hand set down! Here he vows faith ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan

... time is precious, and de hire is wordy ob de laborer. No, Missa Basset, if you want to go in de day time, you can go. Dere is nobody will hender you. But dis child you will please 'scuse. Beside, dere is a good reason I say noting about 'cause I don't ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... leaves. He experienced a grim satisfaction in the boy's complaints. What did these wordy friends of Job know of sorrow and despair? As though they were conditions that could be explained away! He turned almost to the end of the story, and there he paused. A new actor had entered the sorrowful drama. Out of the whirlwind ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith

... to tell every bit of your story by dramatic means and therefore face a long speech that may seem tiresomely wordy, break it up with natural movements which lend a feeling of homely reality to the scene. For instance, don't let the character who is delivering that long speech tell it all uninterruptedly from the ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... parliament were carrying on a wordy war, matters had assumed a more serious aspect in America. Committees had been appointed in nearly all the principal sea-ports of the colonies, to examine cargoes arriving from Great Britain, and to report ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... style: "What should I know of houses, a poor working man like me!" "Well," said the lady, "I thought you might have known of some to let, and you need not be so saucy and ill-tempered." Williamson roughly rejoined, and the lady replied, and thus they got to a complete wordy contest attracting the attention of the bystanders, who were highly amused to find that Williamson had met his match. The lady's sarcasms and gibes seemed to make Williamson doubly crusty. He at length asked the other lady—who, by the way, was becoming nervous and ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian

... usual wordy disagreement over some petty subject in which he was no nearer wrong nor I any nearer right than we had been many times before; but for some reason I found it harder to pardon him. Perhaps some purely physical cause ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green

... industry and fury of interference. She carried her thwarted ardours into housework, she washed floors with her empty heart. If she could not win the love of one with love, she must dominate all by her temper. Hasty, wordy, and wrathful, she had a drawn quarrel with most of her neighbours, and with the others not much more than armed neutrality. The grieve's wife had been "sneisty"; the sister of the gardener who kept house for him had shown herself "upsitten"; and she wrote ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the inventor of speech, and resorts to raillery: speaking against his opponent Eunomius, he says that, "passing in silence his base and abject garrulity," he will "note a few things which are thrown into the midst of his useless or wordy discourse, where he represents God teaching words and names to our first parents, sitting before them like some pedagogue or grammar master." But, naturally, the great authority of Origen, Jerome, and Augustine prevailed; the view suggested ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... people who were shovelling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee, calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball—better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest—laughing heartily if it went right, and not less heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various

... leaped to the ground closely followed from the cab by John Berwick, leaving the two drivers to themselves, and only a few yards apart. These worthies taking no further interest in the performance of their recent fares, engaged in a wordy altercation as to the rival merits of their steeds, and each had a different answer to the problem of "who won the race?" The outcome of this led to blows; as to the result, that belongs to another chronicle ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt

... other kinds. The advantages of the short sentence are mainly those of clearness, directness, emphasis. Its dangers are monotony, bareness, over-compactness. The advantages of the long—that is, quite long—sentence, are rather difficult to comprehend. A wordy sentence is likely to defeat its own purpose. Instead of guiding it will lose its hearer. Somewhat long sentences—as already said—will serve in general discussions, in rapidly moving descriptive and ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton

... the sound Of human voices echoes in our ears; And some commotion dire hath roused The female ranks. Let's pause and learn The drift of all this wordy war ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton

... for breakfast, Denman had listened to an angry and wordy argument between the two cooks, in which Daniels had voiced his opinion of Billings for waking him from his watch ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson

... Frank," said Miss Pimpernell, trying to stop our wordy warfare. I got them; but I had my return blow at the curate all ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson

... tax-payer who derived neither enlightenment nor comfort from the wordy war about a "Graduated Income-Tax" between Mr. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various

... We sprinkled Le Sars with bullets, and there I threw overboard the quotation from a great German poet, folded inside an empty Very's cartridge to which I had attached canvas streamers. If it was picked up, I trust the following lines were not regarded merely as wordy frightfulness: ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott

... wordy war went on between his good sense and his yearning heart, banishing every dear, cherished memory and postponing sleep till the ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins

... at a dead loss, these phrenological observations, the worthy German had lined his nose with a good pinch of snuff and was now beginning his tale. It would be difficult to reproduce it in his own language, with his frequent interruptions and wordy digressions. Therefore, I now write it down in my own way; leaving out the faults of the Nuremburger, and taking only what his tale may have had of interest and poesy with the coolness of writers who forget to ...
— The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac

... only about three weeks absent. His report dismayed the King, and those who penetrated it. Letters from the army soon showed the fault of which Villars had been guilty, and everybody revolted against this wordy bully. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... ruin, not to enslave, and ensnare, and doom new ages, and better races, with its futilities, but to be hung up with its immortal beacon-light, to shew the track of a new learning, to shew to the contrivers of the chart of new ages, the breakers of that old ignorance, that old arrogant wordy barren speculation. For these men were men who would not fish up the chart of a drowned world for the purpose of seeing how nearly they could conduct another under different conditions of time and races to the same conclusion. ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... absolutely merged in that of the landlady, whom he had so innocently provoked. He stared as the parties continued their wordy justification of this well-ruled household like one dreaming with his eyes open. No woman could have made more ado about her own character than Mrs. Oldtimes did respecting that of her house. But then, the one could be estimated in money, while the ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris

... and other prominent Englishmen opposed the passage of these resolutions, as calculated to do infinite harm, but they were carried by a very large French Canadian majority at the dictation of Mr. Papineau. Whatever may have been its effect for the moment, this wordy effusion has long since been assigned to the limbo where are buried other examples of the demagogism ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot

... his letter with the old story about "indications of spices" and gold "in incredible quantities," with a great deal of "moreover" and "besides," and a bold, pompous, pathetic "I will undertake"; and then he gets away from that subject by wordy deviations, so that to one reading his letter it really might seem as though the true business of the expedition was to provide Coronel, Mosen Pedro, Gaspar, Beltran, Gil Garcia, and the rest of them with work and wages. Everything ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... my good old aunt presently got to wordy wars with Frank; in which, as you may suppose, she had little chance of victory. But she called in Clifton, to be her auxiliary; and he fell into the same pettish, half-haughty, half-contemning ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft

... not wordy, and he tarried but a moment, yet he explained his paralysis. In the dreary monotone of a chronic sour temper he related that some Confederates, about a year before, had come here impressing horses, and their officer, on being called by him "no gentleman," had struck him behind ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable

... to ground that has been fiercely fought over in wordy war. Did Bonaparte originate the plan of attack? Or did he throw his weight and influence into a scheme that others beside him had designed? Or did he merely carry out orders as a subordinate? According to the Commissioner ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... a wordy and inverted prose: the profusion of metaphors clumsily tacked on to it in imitation of the lyricism of other nations produced an effect of utter falsity upon any sincere person. Christophe set no more store by these ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... accident. And yet when Richard's inward weakness appears to seek refuge in his despair, and his exhaustion counterfeits repose, the old habit of kingliness, the effect of flatterers from his infancy, is ever and anon producing in him a sort of wordy courage which only serves to betray more clearly his internal impotence. The second and third scenes of the third act combine and illustrate ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... in this wordy warfare between her mother and her future husband. It seemed almost as if she had not heard a word of it. No doubt her ears were trained by now no longer to heed these squabbles. She had drawn a low stool close to the invalid's chair, and sitting near him with her hand resting on ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... walk'd along. The next with new surprise my notice drew, Where'er he pass'd spontaneous flowerets grew, Fit emblems of his style; and close behind The great Athenian at his lot repined; Which doom'd him, like a secondary star, To yield precedence in the wordy war; Though like the bolts of Jove that shake the spheres, He lighten'd in their eyes, and thunder'd in their ears. The assembly felt the shock, the immortal sound, His Attic rival's fainter accents drown'd. But now so many candidates for fame In countless crowds ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... After this wordy declaration he never spoke to us again. He gave his short orders in low undertones, and the others, four stalwart blacks, in the prime of life, executed them in silence. Another night brought the unchanging stars to look at us in their multitudes, till ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... treatment; for not long after he declared, with a sarcasm directed against the prominent qualities of his fellow-citizens, "There is no better man at Rome than I. I seek nothing from any one. I am not wordy. I sit here ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... was but a small one and the explanation simple. Gabriel was not talking at that moment, it is true, but he was expecting to talk very soon, to talk a great deal. He had just come into possession of an item of news which would furnish his vocal machine gun with ammunition sufficient for wordy volley after volley. Gabriel was joyfully contemplating peppering all Orham with that bit of gossip. No wonder he was happy; no wonder he hurried along the main road like a battery galloping ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln

... she broke in, with the same repressed anger. "Cease vilifying the man I love. All your aspersions, your wordy accusations will not shake my faith in him. Mon Dieu," she cried, with an unsteady attempt at laughter, looking under her lashes and tilting her little white round chin at Mr. Hobson, who, now seated upon a large stone, and with an obtrusive quid of tobacco bulging in an imperfectly ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... recrimination (chiefly journalistic), rectification, intimidation, protestation, pacification, and many other wordy processes that have been employed in almost all countries with the avowed object of maintaining peace during the last four years is in striking contrast to the small progress actually made in regard to a final settlement of either of the two great international ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw

... period, one was the number of religious tournaments or disputations that were held all over the country. The details of one of these, between Fisher, a Jesuit, and Archbishop Laud, occupy a folio volume. In these wordy duels the Baptists and Quakers bore a prominent part. To write a history of them would occupy more space than our narrow limits will allow. Bunyan entered into one of these controversies with the Quakers at Bedford Market-cross,[207] and probably held others ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... altogether too wordy to be genuine. It told nothing, but it darkly hinted at dark events to come. The Commandant bethought him that the Democratic Convention would assemble on the fourth of July; that a vast multitude of people would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various

... philosophy or explanatory hypothesis owes its popularity to its apparent simplicity. Wrapped in its wordy envelope, the notion as formulated by Spencer needs no subtilty of apprehension, but only a dictionary. Nor is the Darwinian theory of ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... deal-table in similar case, they were crushed down, collapsed, and fell in. The stuff there was not good mahogany, or sufficient hard wood, but an unseasoned, soft, porous, deal-board, utterly unfit to sustain such pressure. An unblushing, wordy barrister may be very full of brass and words, and yet be no better than an unseasoned porous deal-board, even though he have ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... definition of the Russian writer has the effect of a vigorous blow from a pickaxe at the foundations of a shaky and too elaborate edifice. The wordy superstructure of aphorisms and paradox falls to the ground, disclosing fair “Truth,” so long a captive within the temple erected in her honor. As, however, the newly freed goddess smiles on the ignorant and the pedants alike, the result is that with one accord the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory

... mirrored partition of the New Era Drug Store and walk out smilingly to serve the New Era customers, patrons, the New Era called them. In five minutes he must be on duty, yet Peter felt that his very life depended upon bringing this wordy young man to ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower

... canoes went backwards and forwards, when, lo! another demand was made, with the usual clamour and fierce wordy dispute; this time for five khete for the man who guided us to the ferry, a shukka of cloth for a babbler, who had attached himself to the old-womanish Jumah, who did nothing but babble and increase the clamor. These demands were ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... go on indefinitely illustrating the boundaries of interests of various kinds. Some of them centered in the State House; others in the national Capitol; and many a wordy political battle was fought in the little country section over the question as to whether the protective tariff or the Democratic party was responsible for the hard times the farmers and others were suffering. There were even world interests ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt

... and the royal city soon Of Priam, with her wealth, should all be ours.[16] But me the son of Saturn, Jove supreme 450 Himself afflicts, who in contentious broils Involves me, and in altercation vain. Thence all that wordy tempest for a girl Achilles and myself between, and I The fierce aggressor. Be that breach but heal'd! 455 And Troy's reprieve thenceforth is at an end. Go—take refreshment now that we may march Forth to our enemies. ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... interruption to talk is poor table-service. There can be no good conversation at table where the talk is constantly interrupted by wordy instructions to servants. A hostess who takes pride in the table-talk of her guests assures herself in advance that the maid or the butler serving the table is well trained, in order that no questions of servants ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin

... motion alike wordy and absurd, praying the king to remove him [Peel] from the privy council as the author of the act for the re-establishment of the gold standard in 1819. The entire House was against him, except ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... else prevented, an earthquake or the crack of doom would certainly interfere before I need rise to speak. Yet here was the Mayor getting on inexorably,—and, indeed, I heartily wished that he might get on and on forever, and of his wordy wanderings ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... little man, he was soon in a passion, and once in a passion he soon boiled over. Summoning his council on the receipt of this news, he belabored the Swedes in the longest speech that had been heard in the colony since the wordy warfare of Ten Breeches and Tough Breeches. Having thus taken off the fire-edge of his valor, he resorted to his favorite measure of proclamation, and despatched a document of the kind, ordering the renegade Minnewits and his gang of Swedish vagabonds to leave the country immediately, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... a quality in the narration more intimate and particular than is general with Hugo; but it must be owned, on the other hand, that the book is wordy, and even, now and then, a little wearisome. Ursus and his wolf are pleasant enough companions; but the former is nearly as much an abstract type as the latter. There is a beginning, also, of an abuse of conventional ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Christianity differ from the religion founded by Christ it soon became among a certain set almost equivalent to a religious act to promulgate bits of personal scandal about him, flavored, of course, with wordy lamentations as to the views he entertained. Thus, under the name of defenders of religion, conventional Christians managed to appear very proper and orthodox, and at the same time to dispose comfortably of all their sense of responsibility. There was ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... Sir Henry Delme was disposed to consider Dr. Pormont, with his pomposity, and wordy arguments, as a mere superficial thinker; and he half laughed at himself, for having ever thought it necessary to consult him. This class of men influence less than they ought. Sensible persons are apt to set them down, as either fools or pedants. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... wordy memorial in 1843, complaining of having been kept out of employment for twelve years. The governorship of Ceylon had been vacant three times, the Ionian Islands four times; he had been Governor there ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... for the instant, so ludicrous to Richard that, in spite of the distressing situation, he had to choke back a laugh. Years afterwards, if he wished for any momentary revenge upon Marion (and he had a keen sense of wordy retaliation), he simply said: "Wo-won't you ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... a better delineation of the Israelitish character than all the wordy chronicles of the historians could depict," ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... frankness and candour, and would even criticise them with the closest severity. One day, having read over one of his Ramblers, Mr. Langton asked him, how he liked that paper; he shook his head, and answered, "too wordy." At another time, when one was reading his tragedy of Irene to a company at a house in the country, he left the room; and somebody having asked him the reason of this, he replied, "Sir, I thought it had ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... a short reply,"—which it may be was then thought such, but which now would assuredly be set down as long, wordy, ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt

... expand, inflate; launch out, branch out; rant. maunder, prose; harp upon &c. (repeat) 104; dwell on, insist upon. digress, ramble, battre la campagne[Fr][obs3], beat about the bush, perorate, spin a long yarn, protract; spin out, swell out, draw out; battologize[obs3]. Adj. diffuse, profuse; wordy, verbose, largiloquent|, copious, exuberant, pleonastic, lengthy; longsome[obs3], long-winded, longspun[obs3], long drawn out; spun out, protracted, prolix, prosing, maundering; circumlocutory, periphrastic, ambagious[obs3], roundabout; digressive; discursive, excursive; loose; rambling episodic; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget



Words linked to "Wordy" :   prolix, wordiness



Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org