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Rub-a-dub   /rəb-ə-dəb/   Listen
Rub-a-dub

noun
1.
The sound made by beating a drum.  Synonyms: drumbeat, rataplan.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Rub-a-dub" Quotes from Famous Books



... would like a doll cook-stove And a little toy wash tub; Some would prefer a little drum, For a noisy rub-a-dub; Some would wish for a story book, And some for a set of blocks; Some would be wild with ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate

... advanced, beating no measured martial tune, but a kind of rub-a-dub-dub, like that with which the fire-drum startles the slumbering artizans of a Scotch burgh. It is the object of this history to do justice to all men; I must therefore record, in justice to the drummer, that he protested he could beat any known march or point of war ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... the nervous anxiety of a little high-pressure tug boat. It affords endless amusement to listen to their endless variety of complaint; some are restless, some spiteful, and some angry, while others sound as merrily as a teakettle, or beat a jolly 'rub-a-dub,' 'rataplan,' that makes a man's soul merry to hear. In fact, there is a little retreat just out of the canon, styled the Devil's Kitchen, where the pot and the saucepan, the gridiron and the teakettle are visible to men gifted with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... latest books indicate the range of his gifts and his excellences. In Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub, which he calls A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life, he undertook to expound his general philosophy and produced the most negligible of all his works. He has no faculty for sustained argument. Like Byron, as soon as he begins to reason he is ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... measured martial tune, but a kind of rub-a-dub-dub, like that with which the fire-drum startles the slumbering artizans of a Scotch burgh. It is the object of this history to do justice to all men; I must therefore record, in justice to the drummer, that he protested he could beat any known march or point of war known in the British ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott



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