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Dumpy   Listen
adjective
Dumpy  adj.  (compar. dumpier; superl. dumpiest)  
1.
Short and thick; of low stature and disproportionately stout.
2.
Sullen or discontented. See 2nd dump 1. (Prov. Eng.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Dumpy" Quotes from Famous Books



... Peignerie and La Forge, with the thin blue smoke of gorse fires floating down from every dumpy chimney and adding a flavour to the sweetest air in the world,—with a morning greeting from everyone they met—over the heights and down the zigzag path to the sloping ledges, and in they went, all three, into the clearest ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham

... unceremoniously come to disturb the quietude of their island home. They looked excessively funny, waddling about awkwardly on their short legs and flapping their wings as if grumbling at the intrusion, much resembling a lot of little dumpy old women with grey tippets on; and Maurice Negus and Florry Meldrum went into fits of laughter at ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson

... a troubled breath. She, too, felt the family responsibility for Julietta—dear Julietta, with her dumpy figure and ugly face. Julietta was nineteen and now that Lucia was betrothed it was ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley

... thin-bladed saw, and he rapidly cut out the old hard bough, close down to the place where it branched from the dumpy trunk, and then, handing me the tool, he knelt down on a pad of carpet he carried ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn

... portrait of the boy, as it now exists at Wyllys-Roof; the arms and hands are long, the fingers slender, nails elongated; as you well know, Mr. Clapp's client is the very reverse of this—his hands are short and thick, his fingers what, in common parlance, would be called dumpy. I was struck with the fact when I first saw him in the street. Now, what stronger evidence could we have? A slender lad of seventeen may become a heavy, corpulent man of forty, but to change the formation of hands, fingers, and nails, is beyond the reach ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... and she had a mean smile and a dishonest voice that often irritated me. She was ruddy-faced and bursting with health, taller than Mrs. Dienstog, yet too short for her great breadth of shoulder and the enormous bulk of her bust. I thought she looked absurdly dumpy. What I particularly hated in her was her laughter, which sounded for all the world like the ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... those of some big monkeys; farther away, at the end of the wine store, a long row of tow-headed individuals, their chins covered with white hair like the end of an artichoke, reading, through a microscope, the tiny roman type of an English newspaper; opposite him, a sort of American commodore, dumpy and thick-set, with smoked skin and bulbous nose, was sleeping, a cigar planted in the hairy aperture of his mouth. Opposite were frames hanging on the wall enclosing advertisements of Champagne, the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... bears, Fatty (who was the one who had been sucking his paws) and Dumpy, were delighted to have a new playmate, and they told him he might come over and slide down their hill, but the third one, Sprawley, scowled and grumbled. "Another one to be eating up our meat," he said. "Just as if there ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle

... can scarcely realize the extreme simplicity of a poor man's kitchen. A Dutch oven, a kettle, a gridiron, a saucepan, two or three dumpy cooking-pots, and a frying-pan—that was all. All the crockery in the place, white and brown earthenware together, was not worth more than twelve francs. Dinner was served on the kitchen table, which, with a couple of chairs and a couple of stools, ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac

... Jawn's dumpy little engine was blowing off on a siding. Jawn was oiling. He was a short man, filling out his wide overalls with an in-'em-to-stay appearance. His beard was brushy, his eyes were lost in a gray tangle of brows and lashes, and he chewed the stem of ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster

... provocative fashion. This, of course, was not far removed from exhibitionism. As a result, bourgeois opinion was outraged. The wives of the petty officials shopping in the Marienplatz shuddered, and clutched their ample skirts when they saw her; anxious mothers instructed dumpy Fraeuleins "not to look like the foreign woman." There is no authoritative record that any ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... heavy fist tightened. Then he drew himself up to his full dumpy height. "Dr. Pietro," he said stiffly, "I am as responsible to my duties as any man here—and my duties involve protecting the life of every man and woman on board; if you wish to return, I shall be most happy to submit this to a formal board ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey

... weighed a pound, and in each was found a little over a tea-spoonful of jam. Verily, we began to think our hopes and expectations had been raised to too high a pitch. Three bottles of curry were next produced—but who cares for curry? Another box was opened, and out tumbled a fat dumpy Dutch cheese, hard as a brick, but sound and good; though it is bad for the liver in Unyamwezi. Then another cheese was seen, but this was all eaten up—it was hollow and a fraud. The third box contained ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... to haul en, An' then they vound 'twer best to have en boun', Vor if they hadden, 'twould a-tumbl'd down; An' after that I zeed en all but vallen, An' trigg'd en up wi' woone o'm's pitchen pick, To zee if I could meaeke en ride to rick; An' when they had the dumpy heap unboun', He vell to pieces ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes

... Flingin-tree, a piece of timber hung by way of partition between two horses in a stable; a flail. Fliskit, fretted, capered. Flit, to shift. Flittering, fluttering. Flyte, scold. Fock, focks, folk. Fodgel, dumpy. Foor, fared (i. e., went). Foorsday, Thursday. Forbears, forebears, forefathers. Forby, forbye, besides. Forfairn, worn out; forlorn. Forfoughten, exhausted. Forgather, to meet with. Forgie, to forgive. Forjesket, jaded. Forrit, forward. Fother, fodder. Fou, fow, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... you a pretty little green parasol; and I love you, oh! so dearly! you precious little roly-poly tweedle-de diamond-darling! What do you think of that for a love name? you sweet little humpy-dumpy tweedle-dum rosebud robin! there's another; from ...
— The Little Nightcap Letters. • Frances Elizabeth Barrow

... same innocent and childlike way, also took his leave. But this bird appeared to feel insulted, and in a few minutes stole back, and took revenge in a most peculiar way; he hovered under the twig on which the three were sitting, their dumpy tails hanging down in a row, and actually twitched the feathers of those tails! Even that did not frighten the little ones; they leaned far over and stared at their assailant, but nothing more. I looked ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller

... the few things economic conditions couldn't affect. There was Kurt Fawzi, the center of a group to whom he was declaiming earnestly; there was his mother, and Flora, and Flora's fiance, who was the uncomfortable lone man in an excited feminine flock. And there was Senta herself, short and dumpy, in one of her preposterous red and purple dresses, bubbling happily one moment and screaming invective at ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper

... be delivered to her messenger. Every thing was done as she had desired, and, in five minutes, I was going up Broadway as fast as Honor O'Flagherty's (for such was the name of the messenger) little dumpy legs could ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper

... peace, and from that time forth he suffered no persecution at school. Master Herbert soon after went back to his city home, wondering how it was that a small, dumpy lad, four years younger than he, was able to vanquish him so completely when all the science was on the side ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis

... as their maid is crimping their miserable ringlets with hot tongs, tearing Miss Emmy's hair out by the roots, or scrubbing Miss Polly's dumpy nose with mottled soap till the little wretch screams herself into fits. The young males of the family are employed, as we have stated, in ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and again too, the canny Scotch lad, with his gun on his shoulder and his retriever at his heel, would walk through a Saulteux settlement. The girls here were still shyer than their Cree cousins, but they were not a whit less lovely. They were not dumpy like so many Indian girls, but were slight of build, and willowy of motion. Their hair was long and black, but it was as fine as silk, and shone like the plumage of a blackbird. There was not that oily swarthiness in the complexion, which makes so many Indian women hideous in the eyes of a ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins

... should like to possess a really good piano—not one of those dumpy vertical instruments, but a big flat one with a long tail. For a long time I hesitated between a Rolls Royce, a Yost, a Veuve Cliquot, and a Thurston. At last I put the problem to a musical friend. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various

... admirable green; numbers of little children are playing in this road (the place is so clean that they may roll in it all day without soiling their pinafores), and on the other side of the trees are little old-fashioned, dumpy, whitewashed, red-tiled houses. A poorer landscape to draw never was known, nor a pleasanter to see—the children especially, who are inordinately fat and rosy. Let it be remembered, too, that here we are out of the country of ugly women: the expression of the ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray

... cheek all purple with the beam of youth, Mounting, at times, to a transparent glow, As if her veins ran lightning; she, in sooth, Possessed an air and grace by no means common: Her stature tall—I hate a dumpy woman. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... children, drawing a little fat man toward the tree. He seated himself under it, and said: "Now we are in the shade, and the Tree can listen, too. But I shall tell only one story. Now which will you have: that about Ivedy-Avedy, or about Klumpy-Dumpy who tumbled downstairs, and yet after all came to the throne and married ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various

... same act of spoliation. True, the eggs were not speckled and small, but of a very pretty white, and quite a handful for the juvenile fingers. But the bereaved "parient" was not slender and active,—in fact, was rather a tame, confiding, dumpy and dull, pepper-and-salt-colored dame. Her complaints were not touching, but rather ludicrous,—so much so, indeed, as to suggest to the human hen-bird that "Biddy was laughing to think what a nice breakfast little Carrie would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... invariably begins by collecting the wrong things. In novels and essays you read of "priceless Elzevirs," and "Aldines worth their weight in gold." Fired with hope, you hang about all the stalls, where you find myriads of Elzevirs, dumpy, dirty little tomes, in small illegible type, and legions of Aldines, books quite as dirty, if not so dumpy, and equally illegible, for they are printed in italics. You think you are in luck, invest largely, and begin to give yourself the airs of an amateur ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 13, 1892 • Various

... poor little Dumpy looks! Wants some one to cheer her up, or she'll be dumped and frumped and grumped all in one. Now, darling, I'm going to put my arm round your waist. I am going to feel your little heart go pit-a-pat. You shall lean against me. Isn't that snug? Doesn't dear old Nancy count for something ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade

... odd spectacle to see such a vehicle trudging along at such an hour, where no carriage had ever passed before. The two young men were odd characters; the horses were oddly matched, one being a little dumpy black pony, and the other a noble white steed; and it was an odd whim which induced Glenn to abandon his comfortable home in Philadelphia, and traverse such inclement wilds. But love can play the "wild" with any young man. Yet we will not spoil our narrative by introducing any of it here. ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones

... a callin', and w'en he gun fer ter laugh 'bout Brer Rabbit, Miss Meadows en de gals, dey ups en tells 'im 'bout w'at Brer Rabbit Say. Den Brer Fox grit his tushes sho' nuff, he did, en he look mighty dumpy, but w'en he riz fer ter go he ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris

... the town, which I dare say you know, and therefore shan't describe. We saw some good studies of fishwomen with bare legs, and remarked that the soldiers were very dumpy and small. We were glad when the time came to set off by the diligence; and having the coupe to ourselves, made a very comfortable journey to Paris. It was jolly to hear the postillions crying to their horses, and the bells of the team, and to feel ourselves really in France. We took in provender ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... when she was betrothed to the heir to the French throne, she was a dumpy, mean-looking little creature, with no distinction whatever, and with only her bright golden hair to make amends for her many blemishes. At fifteen she was married and joined the ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... and the Albertus-Magnus were lying at hand; Pendleton ignored the dumpy, stained little Latin volume; its strong-smelling leather binding and faded text had no attractions for him. But he took up the Poe and ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre

... no monument to Penn, save the hazy figure of a dumpy nobody surmounted by an enormous hat, all lost in the incense of commerce upon the topmost pinnacle of the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... that hue, and lighted up by a contented, sunshiny expression, which truly indicated the normal state of her mind. A brilliant, yellow turban sat well upon her woolly locks and a blue and red chintz dress, striped perpendicularly, somewhat elongated the effect of her stout dumpy figure. She had taken care of John during his babyhood and early boyhood, and he remained to this day ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage

... work, afterwards enlarged by the Romans. In spite of her disdain of other nations, Carthage had awkwardly borrowed this novel invention from them, just as Rome herself had built Punic galleys; and five rows of superposed arches, of a dumpy kind of architecture, with buttresses at their foot and lions' heads at the top, reached to the western part of the Acropolis, where they sank beneath the town to incline what was nearly a river into the ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert

... a good while. He had found his lordship getting up, and had had to stay to help him dress. At length he came, excusing himself that his lordship's temper at such times—that was, in his dumpy fits—was not of the evenest, and required a gentle hand. But his lordship would see him—and could Mr. Grant find the way himself, for his old bones ached with running up and down those endless stone steps? Donal answered he knew the way, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... recollection went, they were strangers. One was short and dumpy, the other was tall and thin. They wore slouchy, wrinkled, cheap suits. There was no hint of threat in their faces. On the contrary, both of the men displayed expressions of mingled triumph and mischief. Then, as if they had a mutual ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day

... the happiest girl under heaven! My Thomas is an angel! not a tall grenadier-like looking fellow, such as I always vowed I would marry:—on the contrary, he is what the world would call dumpy, and I hesitate not to confess, that his eyes have a cast in them. But what then? when one of his eyes is fixed on me, and one on my babe, they are lighted up with an affection which my pen cannot describe, and which, certainly, was never bestowed upon ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray

... brushing the filth from my eyes, leaned both arms on the chimney-pot while I scanned the roofs around for a glimpse between them, down to the street and Mr. Trapp. I did so at ease, for a flue entered the main shaft immediately below the stack, which was a decidedly dumpy one—in fact, less than five feet tall; so that I supported myself not by the arms alone but by resting my toes on the ridge where ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... nose, grinding of the teeth, a whitish paleness around the mouth, restless sleep; sometimes convulsions, or presence of worms in the stool. Bad health, cross, peevish, irritable and dumpy, when the child ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... of his sister, tall and broad of figure, with an aquiline nose and a commanding eye, thoroughly good-natured withal, and a man whom everybody loved. Mrs. Wendover was a dumpy little woman, who had brought dumpiness and a handsome fortune into the family. She had been very pretty in girlhood, and was pretty still, with a round-faced innocent prettiness which made her look almost as young as her eldest daughter. Her husband loved her with a fondly protecting and ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... I write, I recall the misery of the hours I have spent, while awaiting sentence, in the little chamber with the honeysuckle wall-paper and steel engravings of happy but dumpy children romping in the fields and groves. On this particular March afternoon the weather had become morne, as the French say; and I looked down sadly into the grey back yard which the wind of the morning had strewn with chips ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... took out a dumpy Bible, which, sure enough, bore on the flyleaf the inscription: 'To Matthew Fell, from his Loving Godmother, ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James

... word, and let married people have fallen ever so wide asunder, the thought, "my child's mother," "my baby's father," must in some degree bridge the gulf between them. When Peter Ascott was seen stooping, awkwardly enough, over his son's cradle, poking his dumpy fingers into each tiny cheek in a half-alarmed, half-investigating manner, as if he wondered how it had all come about, but, on the whole, was rather pleased than otherwise—the good angel of the household might have ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)

... hand, which, upon the musket going off as he rammed down, had gone off too. He was invalided and sent home during Jack's absence, and another had been appointed, whose name was Tallboys. Mr Tallboys was a stout dumpy man, with red face, and still redder hands; he had red hair and red whiskers, and he had read a great deal—for Mr Tallboys considered that the gunner was the most important personage in the ship. He had once been a captain's clerk, and having ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat

... Sloane Schuyler, leader of the smallest and most exclusive of Society's many sets—a handsome woman with well-arched eyebrows; and Mrs. Fredericks, of the same group; sallow, with great black eyes, talking with tremendous animation; and Mrs. Terry—of the newly rich; Mr. Bellmer's aunt; dumpy, diamonded and ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark

... was a short, dumpy female with a face which had been described by Zach Bloomer as resembling a "pan of dough with a couple of cranberries dropped into it." She wore a blue hat with a red bow and a profusion of small objects—red cherries and purple grapes—bobbing on wires above it. The general ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln

... was ready Mrs. Ede, remembering she had to make peace with her son, seized the tray and went upstairs. And the moment she was gone Kate seated herself wearily on the red, calico-covered sofa. Like an elongated armchair, it looked quaint, neat, and dumpy, pushed up against the wall between the black fireplace on the right and the little window shaded with the muslin blinds, under which a pot of greenstuff bloomed freshly. She lay back thinking vaguely, her cup of hot tea uppermost in her mind, hoping that Mrs. Ede ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... wide, dumpy-built old girl, and dressed sort of freaky. Also her line of talk is a kind of purry, throaty gush that's almost too soothin' to be true. But anybody who makes only half a bluff at being interested in our garden wins us. And not until she's inspected our first string-beans through her gold lorgnette, ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford

... of men for the mean reason that he could no longer appear in dignity as laird of Glashruach and chairman of a grand company; while he felt as if something must have gone wrong with the laws of nature that it had become possible for Thomas Galbraith, of Glashruach, Esq., to live in a dumpy cottage. He had thought seriously of resuming his patronymic of Durrant, but reflected that he was too well known to don that cloak of transparent darkness without giving currency to the idea that he had soiled the other past longer wearing. It would be imagined, he said, picking out one dishonesty ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... came into Mary's eyes, and Jenny, throwing a stick at her brother, exclaimed, "For shame, Henry Lincoln! You always was the meanest boy. Her feet ain't any bigger than mine. See," and she stuck up her little dumpy foot, about twice as ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes

... was fat and dumpy, and stood very much in awe of her sister. She was really the better-natured person of the two, but she never disobeyed Miss Minchin. She went ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... buzzes again, and Helma shows in a dumpy little woman with partly gray hair and Baldwin apple cheeks—evidently a friend of Auntie's by the way they go ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford

... every tree," as many raw recruits have believed. Mr. Esquemeling's account of these matters may be purchased, with a great deal else that is instructive and entertaining, in "The History of the Buccaneers in America." My edition (of 1810) is a dumpy little book, in very small type, and quite a crowd of publishers took part in the venture. The older editions are difficult to procure if your pockets are not stuffed with pieces-of-eight. You do not often find even this volume, but "when found make a note of," ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... every topic, human and divine. From her earliest youth she is broken into an inviolable charm of manner incomprehensible to the finest European, yet she is almost invariably a blossom of the lower classes, with dumpy claws, and squat, ugly nails. Her education, physical and moral, is far harder than that of the ballerina, and her success is achieved only after years of struggle and a bitter agony of torture.... And the geisha's social position may be compared with that ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... have I ever appeared as anything else but a servant of God, who has simply followed the leadings of his hand. My views of what is missionary duty are not so contracted as those whose ideal is a dumpy sort of man with a Bible under his arm. I have labored in bricks and mortar, at the forge and carpenter's bench, as well as in preaching and medical practice. I feel that I am 'not my own.' I am serving Christ when shooting a buffalo for my men, or taking an astronomical ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... about a Chinese wedding we had the other day at our house. The bridegroom was Akiat, a carpenter, about six feet two inches high. He was dressed in whity-brown silk, which made him look like a tall spectre; and the bride was Quey Ginn, a fat, dumpy little girl of sixteen, the Chinese deacon's daughter, and one of my scholars. She did not choose her old husband of fifty years, but her parents arranged it, and Akiat paid one hundred dollars for his wife. I went to see her the day before the wedding, ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall

... in slow time, and the step being fully thirty-six inches the fat little dumpy officers nearly upset themselves in their efforts to keep time, and at the same time prevent their slippers from deserting on the line of march; while, in bringing their swords to the salute, they ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... positively ugly or grotesquely out of taste. The costumes were as good as the customs, and I have already celebrated the manners of this crowd. I believe I must except the costumes of the bicyclesses, who were unfailingly dumpy in effect when dismounted, and who were all the more lamentable for tottering about, in their short skirts, upon the tips of their narrow little, sharp-pointed, silly high-heeled shoes. How severe I am! But those high heels seemed to take all honesty from their daring in the wholesome exercise ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... the room with a silver jug. He had just been to the cellar, and was in full dress too; that is, he had taken his gaiters off, and showed his little dumpy legs in black worsted stockings. The sideboard was covered with glistening old plate—old cups, both gold and silver; old salvers and cruet-stands, like Rundell and Bridge's shop. Everything on the table was in silver too, and two footmen, with red hair and canary-coloured liveries, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... wore no hat or bonnet. This token of her being an inmate of the castle, and not a visitor, rather damped his expectations: but he persisted in believing her look towards the chapel must have a meaning in it, till she suddenly stood erect, and revealed herself as short in stature—almost dumpy—at the same time giving him a distinct view of her profile. She was not at all like the heroine of the chapel. He saw the dinted nose of the De Stancys outlined with Holbein shadowlessness against the ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... war. There is nothing prettier than this beach during the morning bathing hour. It is small, shaped like a horseshoe, framed by high while cliffs, which are pierced by strange holes called the 'Portes,' one stretching out into the ocean like the leg of a giant, the other short and dumpy. The women gather on the narrow strip of sand in this frame of high rocks, which they make into a gorgeous garden of beautiful gowns. The sun beats down on the shores, on the multicolored parasols, on the blue-green sea; and all ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... in the morning, senseless, apparently dying. A policeman stood by, looking anxiously up the street and consulting his watch. At intervals he shook her to make sure she was not dead. The drift of the Bowery that was borne that way eddied about, intent upon what was going on. A dumpy little man edged through the crowd and peered into ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... motherly, dumpy little woman in a large shawl, a wrapping gown, a clean, trim nightcap, and shod with the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.

... invent stories, for which, being extremely talented, she also drew and coloured the pictures. Among these stories LITTLE BLACK SAMBO, which was made up on a long railway journey, was the favourite; and it has been put into a DUMPY BOOK, and the pictures copies as exactly as possible, in the hope that you will like it as much as the ...
— The Story of Little Black Sambo, and The Story of Little Black Mingo • Helen Bannerman

... made her, working from some obscure instinct for roundness; an instinct which would have achieved perfection in the moulding of Rose's body if Rose had only grown two inches taller. Not that the purest reason could think of Rose as dumpy. Her figure, defying nature, passed for perfect. It was her face that baffled you. It had a round chin that was a shade too large for it; an absurd little nose with a round end, tilted; grey eyes a thought too round, and eyebrows too thick by a hair's-breadth. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair

... Seventeenth Century Tracts, "The Man Mouse baited and trapped for nibbling the margins of Eugenius Philalethes, being an assault on Henry Moore." It was bound up with, "The Second Wash, or the Moore scoured again," and a dozen others. A dumpy octavo, in brown leather, he had found it propping a beer barrel in ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit

... successive egg a fresh carpet of twig or leaves is spread. A rare nest was composed of fresh leaves of the Moreton Bay ash, with the petioles towards the centre, forming a complex green star. No doubt the arrangement of the leaves was accidental, but the white dumpy egg as a pearl-like focus completed a quaint device. Another egg reposed carelessly at the base of a vigorous plant of DENDOBRIUM UNDULATUM, the old-gold plumes of ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... scene gripped Carley. She looked from near to far, trying to grasp the illusive something. Wild lonely Arizona land! She saw ragged dumpy cedars of gray and green, lines of red earth, and a round space of water, gleaming pale under the lowering clouds; and in the distance isolated hills, strangely curved, wandering away to a black uplift of earth obscured in ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... a dapper, dumpy thing, With nought decisive on him graven But smiles, like footlights flickering ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 4, 1891 • Various

... was originally published as part of a series, "The Dumpy Books for Children." Other titles include Little Yellow Wang-lo and Little Black Sambo. The publisher's list has been moved to the end of the e-text. Punctuation and capitalization ...
— Little White Barbara • Eleanor S. March

... right side lay a sword, of which the tip was broken off; on the left side lay a Bible. On glowing summer afternoons wagonettes came full of Americans and cultured suburbans to see the sepulchre; but even then they felt the vast forest land with its one dumpy dome of churchyard and church as a place oddly dumb and neglected. In this freezing darkness of mid-winter one would think he might be left alone with the stars. Nevertheless, in the stillness of those stiff woods a wooden gate ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... busy blanching and pounding almonds; not only the two servants, but Rose and Clara, the young work-women who were so often staying in the house, and who, indeed, at one time seemed to form part of the establishment. The old cook herself, a stout and dumpy person, was worth looking at, as she stood surrounded by these young women, who did very little but watch her operations; and the whole formed quite an animated picture of a foreign menage, which one rarely has the ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... Elgood, he was certainly not imposing, so far as looks were concerned. A dumpy little man, of forty years or more, dressed in a baggy suit of grey tweed, with carpet slippers on his dumpy little feet. He had evidently started out of the inn to enjoy a smoke in the open air, sublimely unconscious of the scrutiny that was levelled upon him the while. His uncovered ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... disparagement of the clumsy animal which my uncle called "a great, awkward plow-horse;" and then he would fling out some of his proud nonsense about "poor white people who were obliged to groom their own old dumpy ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward

... tracks heavily, slowly with a dumpy sort of a gait to the door, stepped heavily down the one step there was out of the shelter and bore due left. While he was in the act of getting his bearings Mr Bloom who noticed when he stood up that he had two flasks of presumably ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... but one, were very carefully selected material, out of which to form, as soon as practicable, skilled engineer soldiers. The one exception was a short, fat, dumpy, Long Island Dutchman—a good cook, specially enlisted by Captain Swift to cook for the men. He was given the pay and rank of artificer of engineers. The men looked upon him more as a servant of theirs than as a fellow soldier. He was well satisfied with his position, prided himself ...
— Company 'A', corps of engineers, U.S.A., 1846-'48, in the Mexican war • Gustavus Woodson Smith

... her hand on his scarf-pin. He took it out and gave it to her. She stood on tip-toe, for she was dumpy, put her arms round his neck, and gave him a ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... E. mamillosus (nipple-bearing).—A short, dumpy plant, with numerous tubercled ridges, bearing bunches of dark brown hair-like spines, which form a close network about the stem. The flowers are developed on the top of the stem, and are about 4 in. in diameter, with a thick tube; the petals are spreading, bright ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson

... same instant of his confession, though, Mr. Lobel bounded out of his chair, magically changing from a dumpy static figure of woe into the dynamo of energy and resourcefulness the glassed-in studios and the out-of-door ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... that all the elements of a book be honest, sincere, enduring; otherwise the clumsy royal octavos of Leslie Stephen's edition of Fielding would be as attractive as "the dear and dumpy twelves" of the original editions. Royal octavo, indeed, seems to be the pitfall of the book designer, though there is no inherent objection to it. Where in the whole range of reference books will be found a more attractive ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman

... wife, chose ten only of the best of the city who appeared to him most capable and eloquent. These were Bushy-haired Zeza, Bandy-legged Cecca, Wen-necked Meneca, Long-nosed Tolla, Humph-backed Popa, Bearded Antonella, Dumpy Ciulla, Blear-eyed Paola, Bald-headed Civonmetella, and Square-shouldered Jacova. Their names he wrote down on a sheet of paper; and then, dismissing the others, he arose with the Slave from under the canopy, ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile

... was a rather short, dumpy woman and inclined to be stout and short of breath. She had iron-gray hair, near-sighted dark eyes and very pretty, very plump small hands. She exclaimed over her room when she saw it, said that everything was lovely and insisted ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence



Words linked to "Dumpy" :   chunky, roly-poly, little, fat, dump, low-set, short, tubby, stumpy, dumpiness, Dumpy level, squatty, pudgy, squat, podgy



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