Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

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




Hurdy-gurdy   Listen
noun
Hurdy-gurdy  n.  
1.
A stringled instrument, lutelike in shape, in which the sound is produced by the friction of a wheel turned by a crank at the end, instead of by a bow, two of the strings being tuned as drones, while two or more, tuned in unison, are modulated by keys.
2.
In California, a water wheel with radial buckets, driven by the impact of a jet.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Hurdy-gurdy" Quotes from Famous Books



... contrivances rocked the cradle, fanned away the flies, and played a lullaby to the baby. He sold the patent in Connecticut to a Yankee peddler for a horse and wagon, and the peddler's stock, including a hurdy-gurdy. Another invention was a machine for mowing grass, constructed on the principle of his ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond

... instances they had it brought right home to Piccadilly and the Strand. With a band of young Canadians on pass, I assisted once in giving Nelson's Monument in Trafalgar Square the "once over" with a monocle in my left eye. A few hours later this same crowd commandeered a dago's hurdy-gurdy, and it was sure funny to see three Canadian Highlanders turning this ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat

... pleasurably the unaccustomed asphalt, the fresh damp of the river and the watered bridle path. The starched ties at the back of her white pinafore fairly took the breeze, as she swung along to the thrilling clangor of the monster hurdy-gurdy. Miss Honey, urban and blase, balanced herself with dignity upon her roller-skates and watched with patronizing interest the mysterious jumping of young persons with whom she was unacquainted through complicated diagrams ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... hand on Flibbertigibbet's shoulder, had asked her what favor she wanted for the good work of that week, the little girl answered promptly enough that she would like to sit with Freckles in the dormitory window and look out on the street, for maybe there might be a hurdy-gurdy with ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... off in our coach-houses—there was dinner in one, dancing in the other. The splendor was such as you may imagine; three tallow candle-ends by way of illumination, lots of home-made wine for refreshment; the orchestra consisting of a bagpipe and a hurdy-gurdy, the noisiest and, therefore, the best appreciated in the country side. We invited some friends over from La Chatre, and made fools of ourselves in a hundred thousand ways; as, for instance, dressing up as peasants in the evening and disguising ourselves so well as not to recognize each other. ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... wheeled and rumbled, omnibuses whose upper seats were packed with thinly clad passengers, but otherwise there was little life and movement abroad. A searchlight fanned the sky, fell and wavered upward again. A hurdy-gurdy, in the side street, poured forth the notes of ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris

... came from her saying she had come to London on purpose to meet her lord and master, and she would await him at a seat just east of the fountain in Crystal Palace at a certain hour. Disraeli read the missive with impatience—the idea of his meeting an unknown woman in this fishmonger manner at a hurdy-gurdy show! He tossed the letter into the fire. The next day another letter came, expressing much regret that he had not kept the appointment, but saying she would await him at the same place the following day, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... were street cars still clanging for right of way, pedestrians weaving in and out the great tapestry of a city day, factory whistles splitting asunder with terrific cleavage the fore—from the afternoon. There was a hurdy-gurdy rattling tinnily through the morning that must have played on uninterruptedly through this strange ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... burgle, As "row" me forcibly out of my money. The Teuton tootler, being tipped, is "sloping," Patting his pocket with a smile complacent. The Gallic blower, for like treatment hoping, Grins at the Portuguese who grinds adjacent. What a charivari! Oh, I must stop it! I say, you rascal with the hurdy-gurdy, More than enough of that vile shindy; drop it! And you, my brazen, blatant, would-be VERDI, Hush that confounded horn, or go and blow it At—Jericho. My walls you will not tumble By windy shindy, and you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 2, 1890. • Various

... and made them lose ground. Ambrosio, the Spanish servant whom Cinq-Mars had saved, had taken charge of the captain of the pikemen, and, disguised as a Catalonian musician, had commenced a dispute with him, pretending to be determined not to cease playing the hurdy-gurdy. ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny

... reddish Juggernaut, you know, whose wheels cease not: so we should be prying into it, provided we be not now too hide-bound: for that's the trouble—that our thoughts grow to revolve in stodgy grooves of use-and-wont, and shun to soar beyond. Look at our Parliament—a hurdy-gurdy turning out, age after age, a sing-song of pigmy regulations, accompanied for grum kettledrum by a musketry of suicides, and for pibroch by a European bleating of little children. We are still a million miles from civilization! For what is a civilized ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel

... blackguards!' and began rubbing it with the cuff of his coat, his cheek still wet with tears. For even our grief is volatile; or, rather, it is two tunes that are in our ears together, the requiem of the organ, and, with it, the faint hurdy-gurdy jig of our vulgar daily life; and now and ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... head and saw a little Savoyard, about ten years of age, coming up the path and singing, his hurdy-gurdy on his hip, and his marmot-box ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... books are scattered about in cases in different parts of a double sitting-room, where the cats carouse on one side, and the hurdy-gurdy man girds up his loins on the other. A friend of Boethius had a library lined with slabs of ivory and pale green marble. I like to think of that when I am jealous of Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson, as the peasant thinks of the White ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... no great accomplishment. Like playing a hurdy-gurdy, if you turn round often enough you cannot fail to make a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various

... a couple o' rooms, wi' a corner in an outhouse where we can keep the bear. Bambo an' Bruno, wi' the little un on his back fixed up in tinsel an' spangles, an' her yeller curls flyin', ought to bring home a tidy penny every night—a heap o' coppers, I tell you! Tonio will take to the hurdy-gurdy again; him an' Puck should win money too. An' as for you," he continued, "you can make yer livin' any day by yer black eyes an' slippery tongue. My, Moll, you are a cute un, ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur

... shouted Billy dramatically. Around a bend in the road came a galloping white horse, old and lean, dragging at its heels a reeling hurdy-gurdy cart. ...
— The Boy Scouts on Picket Duty • Robert Shaler



Words linked to "Hurdy-gurdy" :   hand organ, music, hurdy gurdy, instrument, barrel organ



Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org