Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

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




Baldness   Listen
noun
Baldness  n.  The state or condition of being bald; as, baldness of the head; baldness of style. "This gives to their syntax a peculiar character of simplicity and baldness."






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 |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Baldness" Quotes from Famous Books



... a lady with crimped hair and a large baby; but the arrival of Lucius Harney had long since banished Mr. Miles from Charity's dreams, and as he walked up the path at Harney's side she saw him as he really was: a fat middle-aged man with a baldness showing under his clerical hat, and spectacles on his Grecian nose. She wondered what had called him to North Dormer on a weekday, and felt a little hurt that Harney should have brought him to ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton

... by the destruction by the affronted populace of the straw hats of those who have had the temerity or the thoughtlessness to wear them. Coloured men in livery stables, however, sometimes wear straw hats the year round. To the habit generally of wearing a hat baldness is attributed by some. And the luxuriant hair of Indians and of the cave-man is pointed to as illustrating the beneficent result of not wearing a hat. And now and then somebody turns up with the idea in his head that he doesn't need a hat on it. There is a white garbed gentleman ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday

... mention of a Country Gentlewoman, whom he knows nothing of, (no one can imagine why) he will lay his Life she is some awkward ill-fashioned Country Toad, who not having above four Dozen of Hairs on her Head, has adorned her Baldness with a large white Fruz, that she may look Sparkishly in the Forefront of the King's Box at an old Play. Unnatural Mixture ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... their earliest years to the baldness of axiom and formula, the youths who leave the Ecole have lost the sense of elegance and ornament; a column seems to them useless; they return to the point where art begins, and ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... my old-time evening-school instructor. I had not seen him for more than three years, during which time he had developed a pronounced tendency to baldness, though his apple face had lost none of its roseate freshness. He looked spruce as ever, his clothes spick and span, his "four-in-hand" tastefully tied, his collar and cuffs immaculate. His hazel eyes, however, had a worn and wistful ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... vanished suddenly in 1930 and were replaced by tights or shapes. Boots made way for Elizabethan slippers. Hats had long since gone the way of the superannuated. Taught by the Darwinian theory, society discovered whence its tendency to baldness originated. They had recourse by degrees to ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... altogether Spanish physiognomy; the Virgin has dark hair; and the Padre Eterno, with a long beard, has a bald head,—a gross fault in taste and propriety; because, though the loose beard and flowing white hair may serve to typify the "Ancient of Days," baldness expresses not merely age, ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson

... Puritan conception of dignity upon masculine dress had long since passed away. The hair of the men, too, though it was rarely worn long, was commonly curled in a manner that suggested the barber, and baldness had vanished from the earth. Frizzy straight-cut masses that would have charmed Rossetti abounded, and one gentleman, who was pointed out to Graham under the mysterious title of an "amorist," wore his hair in two becoming plaits a la ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells

... conversation had naturally turned on that mystery and afterward on earlier memories of Fisher's life and the way in which he was led to study such problems as those of Prince Michael. Horne Fisher was fifteen years older; his thin hair had faded to frontal baldness, and his long, thin hands dropped less with affectation and more with fatigue. And he told the story of the Irish adventure of his youth, because it recorded the first occasion on which he had ever come in contact ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton

... old beau, uncle to Victoria. "He affects the misdemeanors of a youth, hides his baldness with amber locks, and complains of toothache, to make people believe that his teeth are not false ones." Don Sancho "loves in the style of Roderigo I."—Mrs. Cowley, A Bold Stroke for ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... numerous tin-lined circles of flaring gas-jets arranged on the ceiling, fell full upon a thousand uplifted faces—some framed in bonnets or juvenile curls, others bearded or crowned with shining baldness—but all alike under the spell of a dominant emotion which held features in abstracted suspense and focussed every eye ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... reality. As my only choice of a dinner dress lay between a suit of paint and this costume, out of consideration for your prejudices I chose this. My head-gear may be unique, but it is at least warm and it is also the only covering I can at present bestow upon my baldness. It is true I might have worn feathers, but unfortunately feathers suggest to me only very recent and unpleasant associations. As for my tub, I shall consider it a personal favor, gentlemen, if you will never again mention that ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore

... style of "Paradise Regained" is a fertile theme for the critics. It is, indeed, carried to the verge of baldness; frigidity, used by Pattison, is too strong a word. This does not seem to be any token of a decay of poetical power. As writers advance in life their characteristics usually grow upon them, and develop into mannerisms. In "Paradise Regained," and yet more markedly in "Samson ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett

... himself possessed of a hatred for all that is unjust and ungirt and vulgar. There is always a largeness and gravity and chastity in his gesture. The coldness is most often simply the apparent coldness of restraint; the baldness, the laconism of a spirit that abhorred loose, ungainly manners of speech. Even the frenetic and orgiastic finales of the "Harold" and "Fantastic" symphonies are tempered by an athletic steeliness and irony, are pervaded, after all, by the good dry light of the intellect. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... the glowing charcoal, and to the general astonishment they were consumed without any visible effect: the heavens still smiled, no peal of thunder was heard, and no unpleasant odour diffused itself through the room. Barre feeling that the baldness of this act of destruction had had a bad effect, predicted that the morrow would bring forth wondrous things; that the chief devil would speak more distinctly than hitherto; that he would leave the body of the superior, giving such clear signs of his passage that no one would dare ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... clear your mind of any preconceptions in that respect. The Owner of the Voice you must figure to yourself as a whitish plump man, a little under the middle size and age, with such blue eyes as many Irishmen have, and agile in his movements and with a slight tonsorial baldness—a penny might cover it—of the crown. His front is convex. He droops at times like most of us, but for the greater part he bears himself as valiantly as a sparrow. Occasionally his hand flies out with a fluttering gesture of illustration. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... opposition. (See ante, p. 127.) According to one of the aphorisms of Hippocrates, repeated by Buffon, eunuchs do not become bald, and Aristotle seems to have believed that sexual intercourse is a cause of baldness in men. (Laycock, Nervous Diseases ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... his chair, in his consular purple, wearing a wreath of bay, wrought in gold. The honor of the wreath was the only distinction which he had accepted from the Senate with pleasure. He retained a remnant of youthful vanity, and the twisted leaves concealed his baldness. Antony, his colleague in the consulship, approached with a tiara, and placed it on Caesar's head, saying, "The people give you this by my hand." That Antony had no sinister purpose is obvious. He perhaps spoke for the army;[19] or it may be that Caesar himself suggested Antony's ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude

... come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in a clear day: and I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; and I will bring up sack-cloth upon all loins, and baldness upon every head; and I will make it as the mourning of an only son, and the end thereof as ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks

... to, and Miss T. to look at; and I am proud to say that though repeatedly assured that another in the same party was the She, I fixed upon the right one from the first. A resemblance to Mrs. L. was my guide. She is not so pretty as I expected; her face has the same defect of baldness as her sister's, and her features not so handsome; she was highly rouged, and looked rather quietly and contentedly ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh

... any other variety of the dog,[162] and, judging from analogy, more than in the aboriginal parent-species. The peculiar colour called tortoise-shell is very rarely seen in a male cat; the males of this variety being of a rusty tint. A tendency to baldness in man before the advent of old age is certainly inherited; and in the European, or at least in the {74} Englishman, is an attribute of the male sex, and may almost be ranked as an incipient secondary ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... careless hearts: 'Because the daughters of Sion are haughty, and walk with stretched-forth necks and wanton eyes, the Lord will smite with a sore the crown of their head, and discover their shame: instead of well-set hair, there shall be baldness, and burning ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen

... for a man with a bald head to conceal his baldness from the general public by a well-constructed wig. It would likewise be proper for him to wear a wig in order to guard his shining pate against flies while at church in July, or against danger from pneumonia in January, even ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull

... replied, quickly; "I am sure, if you had seen the man, with one or two side-locks of hair combed over his baldness, as if he were ashamed of it, and his eyes that never looked at you, and his way of eating with his knife when he thought he was not observed—oh, and numbers of things!—you ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell

... person was a man of height unusual to Italians of his day; his cheeks were pale and a little sunken; his dark eyes were warm, penetrating; his mouth and chin mobile and even affable, but not a line suggested weakness. The forehead was high, massive, and was exaggerated by a semi-baldness which was only partially concealed by combing the dark, grey-streaked hair forward. He was reclining; if he had arisen he would have displayed a frame at once to be called soldierly, though spare and hardly powerful. ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... on this battle-field at the moment when his sister bethought herself of filling the empty spaces on either side of the fireplace with benches from the antechamber, disregarding the baldness of their velvet covers which had done ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac

... misunderstanding. The man you have sent us is not Fosco. Of Fosco he has only the baldness, the air benevolent, and the girth. The brand on his right arm is no more than the mark of vaccination. Brought before the Commissary of Police, the prisoner, who has not one word of French, was heard through an interpreter. He gives himself the ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang

... the scalp by a tight-fitting hat interferes with the local circulation, and may cause headaches, neuralgia, or baldness, the nutrition of the hair-follicles being diminished by the impaired circulation. The compression of the chest and abdomen by a tight belt and various binders interferes with the action of the diaphragm,—the ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... under the control of the thyroid. Thus in cretins reconstructed by thyroid feeding, the straight, rather animal hair becomes lustrous and fine, silken and curly. In the thyroid deficiency of adults, a prominent phenomenon often is the falling out of the hair in handfuls. Baldness is frequently associated with a progressive decrease of the concentration of thyroid in the blood. At the same time, there tends to be a thinning of the eyebrows, especially ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... spitefully prefers to me is a mis-shapen, meagre varlet; more like a skeleton than a man! Then he dresses—you never saw a devil so bedizened! Hardly a coat to his back, nor a shoe to his foot. A bald-pated villain, yet grudges to buy a peruke to his baldness: for he is as covetous as hell, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson

... could have back the fancies, I would be willing to have the mosquitoes with them. He looked the poetry he lived: his eyes were the blue of sunlit fjords; his brown silken hair was thick on the crown which it later abandoned to a scholarly baldness; his soft, red lips half hid a boyish pout in the youthful beard and mustache. He was short of stature, but of a stalwart breadth of frame, and his voice was of a peculiar and endearing quality, indescribably mellow and tender when ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... Eesa are distinguished from other Somal by blackness, ugliness of feature, and premature baldness of the temples; they also shave, or rather scrape off with their daggers, the hair high up the nape of the neck. The locks are dyed dun, frizzled, and greased; the Widads or learned men remove them, and none but paupers leave them in their ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton

... well kept beard of mixed gray hung low upon his immaculate shirt front. His head classic and perfectly fashioned, set well poised upon shoulders as perfectly proportioned as an Apollo. His gray hair parted upon the side of his head, was carefully brushed over his forehead to hide its baldness, and from beneath abundant shaggy eyebrows, looked forth a pair of cold gray eyes. Though past sixty, he was erect, and his step was as firm as a man of thirty. This was "The Colonel," typical Southern gentleman of the old school, ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton

... hard names in all my life. I proved to be the subject of a long catalogue of diseases, and what maladies I was not manifestly guilty of I was at least suspected of harboring. I was handed along all the way from alopecia, which used to be called baldness, to zoster, which used to be known as shingles. I was the patient of more than a dozen specialists. Very pleasant persons, many of them, but what a fuss they made about my trifling incommodities! 'Please look at that photograph. See if there is a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... look to me like Josiah Allen's baldness; and he didn't have a mite of that smart, straight-forward way of Blaine, or the perfect courtesy and kindness of Allen Arthur. No. I sort o' despised him ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... That appearance was prepossessing: a frank and even benevolent expression played upon his intelligent and handsome countenance: his once rich brown hair, still long though very thin, was so arranged as naturally to conceal his baldness; he was dressed with great simplicity, but with remarkable taste and care: nor did the repose and suavity of his manner and the hushed tone of his voice detract from the favourable effect that he always ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli

... essential way, beside which any mere acknowledgment or vow seemed chiefly decorative, like the capital of a pillar firmly rooted. There may be an appearance that she took a good deal for granted; but if there is, I fear that in the baldness of this history it has not been evident how much and how variously Arnold depended on her, in how many places her colour and her vitality patched out the monkish garment of his soul—this with her enthusiasm ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... from [Greek: alopex], a fox, foxes often having bald patches on their coats), the result of loss of hair, particularly on the human scalp. So far as remediable alopecia is concerned, two forms may be distinguished: one the premature baldness so commonly seen in young men, due to alopecia seborrhoica, the other alopecia areata, now ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... very simple. My hair had been shaved off, all over my ears, leaving only a little above the back of the neck, to give an appearance of far-reaching baldness, and on my head was painted, in ah! so ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington

... have a bad habit which is to be comminated in my theory of letters. Same page, two lines lower: "But the vulture's track" is surely as fine to the ear as "But vulture's track," and this latter version has a dreadful baldness. The reader goes on with a sense of impoverishment, of unnecessary sacrifice; he has been robbed by footpads, and goes scouting for his lost article! Again, in the second Epode, these fine verses would surely sound much finer if they began, "As a hardy ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Lot are due in a large measure to the nudity of the causses and the Cevennes, where these mountains turn northward and cross the Lozere to meet the Auvergne range. The French Government nurses the hope that it will be able some day to cover much of the baldness of this extensive region with magnificent pine-forests, and planting actually goes on in places; but what with the nibbling flocks, and the increasing seventy of the winters, the measure of success already obtained by such laudable efforts ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... crown which was voted to him after his last campaigns—a beautiful and conspicuous memorial to every eye of his great public acts, and at the same time an overshadowing veil of his one sole personal defect. This laurel diadem at once proclaimed his civic grandeur, and concealed his baldness, a defect which was more mortifying to a Roman than it would be to ourselves, from the peculiar theory which then prevailed as to its probable origin. A gratitude of the same mixed quality must naturally have been felt by the Second Csar for his title of Augustus, which, whilst it illustrated ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... that Macaulay had not the poetic sense he was really showing that he himself had not the dramatic sense. The baldness of the idea and of the language had evidently offended him. But this is exactly where the true merit lies. Macaulay is giving the rough, blunt words with which a simple-minded soldier appeals to two comrades to help him in a deed of valour. Any high-flown ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... first instinct with such a young man as those of whom I have spoken teaches him, the moment he has committed himself, to begin to consider how he can get out of the scrape. It is not much of a scrape, for when an older man comes this way, a man verging toward baldness, with a good professional income, our little friend is forgotten and he is passed by without a word. But Harry had now a conviction,—on that one special night,—that he never would be forgotten and never would forget. He was filled at once with an unwonted pride. All the world was now at his feet, ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope

... by one Camurius, a soldier of the fifteenth legion. Some name Terentius, others Lecanius; and there are others that say it was Fabius Falulus, who, it is reported, cut off the head and carried it away in the skirt of his coat, the baldness making it a difficult thing to take hold of. But those that were with him would not allow him to keep it covered up, but bade him let everyone see the brave deed he had done; so that after a while he stuck upon the lance the head of the aged man that had ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... work which he could do contradicted at nearly every point the expectations of his people. How could he succeed in the face of such opposition? His long meditation during forty days doubtless showed him the difficulty of his task in all its baldness, yet it did not shake his certainty that the call had come to him from God, nor his faith that what God had called him ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees

... comes that pleasant saying of Bion, that the foolish king in his sorrow tore away the hairs of his head, imagining that his grief would be alleviated by baldness. But men do all these things from being persuaded that they ought to do so. And thus AEschines inveighs against Demosthenes for sacrificing within seven days after the death of his daughter. But with what eloquence, with what fluency does he attack him! ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... two the room seemed to be empty, until Mrs. Batty said 'Charles!' in a tone of timid authority and Henrietta discovered that a fair young man, already showing a tendency to baldness, was sitting at the piano, apparently studying a sheet of music. This, then, was one of the cubs, and Henrietta, feeling herself marvellously at ease in this house, awaited his approach with some amusement and a little irritation at his obvious ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG

... Baldness among men is undoubtedly on the increase, and various reasons have been assigned for its appearance in an exacerbated form. In particular the stress and strain of the War have been mooted, and the argument is reinforced by such words as Chauvinism, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various

... process is commenced at the right time, the result will be fewer cases of baldness in men and ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens

... it appears that he is nothing more than a great theological rhetorician, and that his only definite and appreciable meaning is that of wedding the gospel to some form of philosophy, if so to conceal its baldness. But Paul of Tarsus many ages ago forbade the banns.' In a second letter he says that there does not seem to be much real difference between Fitzjames's creed and his own. 'It seems to me quite easy to have ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... ushered him, without speaking a syllable. The monk then found himself in the presence of two personages, seated at a table covered with books and papers. One was in military undress, with an air about him of habitual command, a fair-complexioned man of middle age, inclining to baldness, rather stout, with a large blue eye, regular features, and a mouse-coloured beard. The other was in the velvet cloak and grave habiliments of a civil functionary, apparently sixty years of age, with a massive features, and a shaggy beard. The soldier was Maurice of Nassau, the statesman ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... Briggs, of North Dedham, writes: 'I was terribly afflicted with baldness, so that, for months, I was little more than an outcast from society, and an object of pity to my most familiar friends. I tried every remedy in vain. At length I heard of your wonderful restorative. After a week's application, my hair had already begun to grow in what seemed the most miraculous ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various

... So seen, a decided baldness, which she had not much noticed before, became evident, but there was a certain distinction in the man's general air which this rather seemed to heighten. His manner of delicate solicitude for her was the perfection of good-breeding, and when she answered him reassuringly, and walked by ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder

... rang, and while he answered it, she watched his broad, slouching back, his swelling paunch overflowing now above the stays he wore to reduce it, the coarsened flesh of his neck, bulging above the edge of his collar, and the shining, baldness on the top of his head, which gave an appearance of commanding intellect to his empurpled forehead. How hideous he was, how revolting, and yet what a power! A face like his on a woman would have condemned her to isolation and misery, but, so far ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... ship, and it is wonderful what can be managed in the way of dalliance if one is shut up on one long enough; and the Misses Twinkler, in spite of their loutishness, their apparent baldness, and their constant round-eyed solemnity, would no doubt have been the objects of advances before New York was reached if it hadn't been for Mr. Twist. There wasn't a girl under forty in the second class on that voyage, the young men resentfully pointed out to each other, except these ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

... Against such baldness of philosophy not only might the cultivated Japanese intellect revolt and react, but as yet the common people of Japan, despite the modern priestly boast of the care of the imperial rulers for what the bonzes still love to call "the people's religion," were but ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... kinsman's words "a long-backed Scotchman." He was so intensely Scottish that he made his brother look and sound the same, whereas ordinarily neither air nor accent would have shown the colonel's nation, and there was no definable likeness between them, except, perhaps, the baldness of the forehead, but the remains of Lord Keith's hair were silvered red, whereas Colin's thick beard and scanty locks were dark brown, and with a far larger admixture of hoar-frost, though he was the younger by twenty years, and his brother's appearance gave the impression of a ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... one cannot tell; And John, who at the Palace fell A victim to the Blondin Belle, Is wedded to another; And I, my intimates allow, Have lost the taste for bull's-eyes now, And baldness decorates the brow Of Bill, our ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne

... shoulders, the powerful arms and coarse rough hands, the legs bowed from incessant riding, showed a frame fashioned to an extraordinary strength. His head was large and round; his hair red, close-cut for fear of baldness; his fiery face much freckled; his voice harsh and cracked. Those about him saw something "lion-like" in his face; his gray eyes, clear and soft in his peaceful moments, shone like fire when he was moved, and few men were brave enough to confront ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green

... off his hat and put it on the seat; his dark smooth-shaven face reminded me of a Romish priest, but he had no tonsure; instead of that he had thick closely-cropped hair without a hint or suspicion of baldness, was strongly built and very broad, and looked like a ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... demonstrative manners than his quiet partner. He who entered second was shorter and stronger-built, and had evidently seen a longer term of life. His hair, plentifully streaked with grey, was thinned to slight baldness on the summit of the head; his features, otherwise rather strong and harsh, wore an expression of benevolence which redeemed them; his eyes, dark grey, were sharp and piercing. When he took off his hat, he carefully drew forth and put on a black skull-cap, which gave him a semi-priestly appearance. ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt

... caucus, I heard TRISTAM BURGESS,—"The old bald Eagle!" His baldness increases the fine effect of his appearance, for it seems as if the locks had retreated, that the contour of his very strongly marked head might be revealed to every eye. His personnel, as well as I could see, was fitted to command respect ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... days, therefore, Jahveh, without pity for His people, called them to "weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth: and behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall die. And the Lord of hosts revealed Himself in mine ears, Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... only effective remedy for imperfection at the roots of the hair, falling hair, or baldness. It will cause natural ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry

... She was hiding her right hand, all right, she had the long sleeve pulled down over it so just the hook stuck out. I asked myself if the hand were perhaps covered with radiation scars or sores or otherwise disfigured. We Deathlanders have our vanities. I'm sensitive about my baldness. ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... they all wept, and tore their hair. 'Tis the common practise of affliction. And the philosopher Bion said pleasantly of the king, who by handfuls pull'd his hair off his head for sorrow, "Does this man think that baldness is a remedy for grief?" Who has not seen peevish gamesters worry the cards with their teeth, and swallow whole bales of dice in revenge for the loss of their money? Xerxes whipt the sea, and wrote a challenge to Mount Athos; Cyrus employ'd a whole army several days at work, to revenge ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various

... was a foreman—a man whose bony frame, clad in a white shirt and a pair of white trousers, looked always as though it were ready-attired for death. Moreover, he wore no cap to conceal the yellow patch of baldness which covered most of his head, and, in addition, his nose was squat and grey, his neck and face had over them skin of a porous, pumice-like consistency, his eyes were green and dim, and upon his features there was stamped a dead and disagreeable expression. ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky

... champion, in front of the same room, on the floor of the house. The shame of baldness is on him. White as mountain cotton-grass is each hair that grows through his head. Earrings of gold around his ears. A mantle speckled, coloured, he wore. Nine swords in his hand, and nine silvern shields, ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various

... The baldness of the heads of the Babylonians was owing to the pressure of their helmets; and their peeled shoulders to their carrying baskets of earth, and large pieces of timber, to join Tyre to the continent. Baldness was itself a badge of slavery; and joined ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... to be frankly conceded, and, if necessary, firmly maintained, that the profitable use of our Lord's parables does not depend on rare and difficult erudition. If a deficiency in this department infers the risk of baldness in the exposition, a redundance supplies a temptation to pedantic display. It is one thing to place some ancient eastern custom in such a position that a ray of light from its surface shall pleasantly illumine a feature of the parable ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... it is certain that even tyranny itself may find some specious color, and appear as a more severe and rigid execution of justice. Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety. Conquest may cover its baldness with its own laurels, and the ambition of the conqueror may be hid in the secrets of his own heart under a veil of benevolence, and make him imagine he is bringing temporary desolation upon a country only to promote its ultimate advantage ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... pleasure to know that learning was so handsomely housed; and as for the little rabble who could not be trusted in the presence of the sex, we forgave them heartily, knowing that soberer manners would one day come upon them, as inevitably as baldness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... the hair grow, and no chemical preparation can dye it without peril to the seat of intelligence. Science has recently made known the fact that hair is a dead substance, and that no agent can prevent it from falling off or whitening. To prevent Baldness and Dandruff, it is necessary to protect the bulb from which the hair issues from all deteriorating atmospheric influences, and to maintain the temperature of the head at its right medium. CEPHALIC OIL, based upon ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac

... knot of pale green Liberty silk. His long hair, of a faded, dusty brown, was brushed straight back from his forehead, and plastered down upon his scalp, in such wise as to lend him a misleading effect of baldness. He wore a drooping brown moustache, and a lustreless brown beard, trimmed to an Elizabethan point. His skin was sallow; his eyes were big, wide apart, of an untransparent buttony brilliancy, and in colour dully blue. Taken for all in all, his face, ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland

... not be induced to lie as desired, or from extreme modesty objected to such an elevated position, and, in consequence, stopped half-way, as if undecided whether to lie flat or remain erect, producing the effect that would have been presented had he been decorated with a pair of horns. His baldness might have given an air of benevolence to his face, but for the shaggy eyebrows that over-shadowed his cunning-looking grey eyes. His cheekbones were high, and the cadaverous skin was so tightly drawn across them, as to give it a very parchment-like appearance. Around ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb

... salutation from a pair of broad, brown shoulders that showed above the water, I was not always able to recognize my acquaintance, deprived of his factitious identity of clothes. But I always knew a certain stately consul-general by a vast expanse of baldness upon the top of his head; and it must be owned, I think, that this form of social assembly was, with all its disadvantages, a novel and vivacious spectacle. The Venetian ladies, when they bathed, went to the Lido, or else to the bath-houses ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... or baldness. Only worry about the location of your gray hair or baldness. If they get on the inside of the head, worry. Do you know why corporations sometimes say they do not want to employ gray-headed men? They have found that so many of them have ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette

... miraculous in the common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... of Corporal Dowdall were encouraged at seeing a man who looked like a gentleman and bore none of the traditional marks of the prize-fighter. His head was not cropped to the point of bristly baldness, his nose was unbroken, his eyes well opened and unblackened, his ears unthickened, his body untattooed. He had the white skin, small trim moustache, high-bred features, small extremities, and general appearance ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... face, if such it can be called, where all portraits failed, was the hair. It was so fine that there would not have been much of it had it been thick, and as it was quite thin there was only a shadow between it and baldness. Even its color was elusive—a cross between brown and dove color. Only those who knew Field before he came to Chicago have any impression as to the color of the thatch upon that head which never during our acquaintance stooped to a slouch hat. This typical ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... even arguing seriously against the supposition that this was Buffon's real opinion. The very sweepingness of the assertion, the baldness, and I might say brutality with which it is made, are convincing in their suggestiveness of one who is laughing ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... myself, and then came back to the cabin and looked at the other man. His posture has been already described. He made a very burly figure in his coat, and if his weight did not exceed the other's it was not likely to be less. Nothing of his head was visible but the baldness on the top and the growth of hair that ringed it, and the fluffing up of his beard about his arms in which his face was sunk. I touched his beard with a shuddering finger, and noted that the frost ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... self-styled over-age Romeos, people whose niche in society depends upon their looks. But not scientists or technicians. In fact Harry couldn't remember ever having known one such person who shunned his baldness in this manner. That didn't mean they had no right. But it ...
— The Observers • G. L. Vandenburg

... most plain, first hand, almost austere naturalness. His expression may often be called bald, as, for instance, in the poem of Resolution and Independence; but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness which is full of grandeur. . . Wherever we meet with the successful balance, in Wordsworth, of profound truth of subject with profound truth of ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... his fist at William's window. But William had discreetly retired. He hid the pea-shooter, assumed his famous expression of innocence, and felt distinctly cheered. The question as to what exactly would happen when the pea met the baldness was now for ever solved. The gardener retired grumbling to the potting shed, so, for the present, all was well. Later in the day the gardener might lay his formal complaint before authority, but later in the day was later ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton

... it was only redeemed from being so by a smile; a good-humoured smile, and pleasant in itself, but rendered pitiable by being constantly there. A great white cap, with a quantity of opaque frilling that was always flapping about, apologised for Maggy's baldness, and made it so very difficult for her old black bonnet to retain its place upon her head, that it held on round her neck like a gipsy's baby. A commission of haberdashers could alone have reported what the rest of her poor ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... baldness of his narration. Almost any man would have made some effort at description. Dunne had made none whatever. He had confined himself to the barest ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm

... contorting myself under Peter's guidance to the proper angle for its appreciation. But histrionically it must be confessed that things dragged a little. Perhaps this was due to a certain severity, not to say baldness, in the dialogue as spoken. Not having read the script, I have a feeling that it might be unfair to judge the unknown author by the lines as rendered by Peter, who was often pre-occupied with other anxieties. As, for example, the scene in the Baronial Castle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various

... you think of Miss Dunstable?" said Mrs. Gresham to her uncle, as they sat together over their coffee. She added nothing to the question, but asked it in all its baldness. ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope

... grief expressed in a primitive way among the Hebrews. 'Ye shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead' (Deut. xiv. 1). 'Neither shall men lament for them, nor cut themselves, nor make themselves bald for them; neither shall men tear themselves for them in mourning, to comfort them for the dead' (by way of counter-irritant to grief); 'neither shall men give ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... and the hat with the high red plume was lying on the ground beside him. He was very pale, and had dark blotches under his eyes, but otherwise he was as he had ever been, with the keen, hungry nose, the wiry moustache, and the close-cropped head thinning away to baldness upon the top. His eyelids had always drooped, but now one could hardly see the glint of his eyes ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... accompaniments of the disease. Among the less common complications are: laryngitis, pneumonia, diseases of the heart, insanity, paralysis, various skin eruptions, inflammation of the joints and of the eyes and ears, and baldness. ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various

... descriptive work. Among modern writers, Mrs. Alice Meynell has a style unsurpassed in simplicity, fineness, and strength. Nevertheless I hesitate to name her as a model, lest the student, in trying to attain her succinct perfection, should fall into mere baldness. On the whole, my inclination turns towards Huxley's Essays. Here you have a style which, though by no means great, possesses every good quality, and has besides no tricks to lead the beginner astray; nothing more adorably fitted to the uses of newspaper work could be conceived. To ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett

... repression and prohibition had continued their existence, and kept their faith however mixed and clouded. Theoretically, ancient belief was re-established, yet it was both physically and morally impossible to return wholly to the baldness and austere simplicity of those early ages, in which art and literature were unknown. For a while it seemed as though the miracle would be performed, of turning back the dial of the ages and of plunging Japan into the fountain of her own youth. Propaganda was instituted, and the attempts ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... not going to describe the wedding in this Journal. A civil ceremony is not interesting in its baldness. I had literally no emotions, and Alathea looked as pale as her white frock. She wore a little sable toque and a big sable cloak I had sent her the night before, by Nelson. The ring was the new diamond hoop set in platinum. No more ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn

... the color of the hair; To have elegant hair; Wild Rose curling fluid; To cause the hair to grow very thick; Lola Montez hair coloring; Hair Restorative; For bald heads; Excellent hair wash; To cure baldness; Stimulants for the hair; The golden hair secret; For keeping the hair crimped or curled in summer; To bleach the hair; For improving the hair; Pomade for preserving the hair; To make the hair grow and to prevent it from ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous

... Bassett's swivel chair and swung round once or twice as though testing it, meanwhile eyeing the map. Then he tipped himself back comfortably and dropped his hat into his lap. His grayish brown hair was combed carefully from one side across the top in an unsuccessful attempt to conceal his baldness. ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... nature when not over-well instructed in her work,—with the forehead retreating like the roof of a house, and the skull coming to a dull point at the top, like the end of a gigantic cucumber, and glossy and yellow like that cucumber ripening for seed! The total baldness of the head was bad enough, under the circumstances (especially for thirty-two!) but the shape of that head!—oh father of that man, what right had you to visit your own sins upon a succeeding generation in ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... indifference, little read, and speedily forgotten: a small impression was slowly dispersed; the bookseller murmured, and the author (had his feelings been more exquisite) might have wept over the blunders and baldness of the English translation. The publication of my History fifteen years afterwards revived the memory of my first performance, and the Essay was eagerly sought in the shops. But I refused the permission which Becket solicited of reprinting it: the public curiosity was imperfectly ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon

... method, and the more satisfactory proof of purpose; but an equal degree of imperfection is found in both kinds when they are seen close; in the first, a bald execution of a perfect design; the second, a baldness of design with perfect execution. And in these very imperfections lies the admirableness of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... no longer came to seek her hand. She had more than once heard it said that opportunity is pictured as being bald, and firmly believed that Don Tiburcio was opportunity itself, for as a result of his misfortunes he suffered from premature baldness. And what woman is not prudent ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... have got relief." "I have got it indeed," he said, "but that the weakness of my head is troubling me." "The washing of Flann, daughter of Flidais, will be done for you now," she said, "and the head that washing is done for will never be troubled with pain, or baldness, or weakness of sight." So that cure was done to him for a while; and the people of the hill divided themselves into three parts; the one part of their best men and great nobles, and another of their young men, and another of their women and poets, to be visiting him and making mirth ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory

... can't make a first payment on me. Pa gets mad when I ask questions, and the minister thinks I am past redemption. Pa said yesterday that baldness was caused, in every case, by men's wearing plug hats, and when I asked him where the good Elisha, (whom the boys called 'go up old bald head,' and the bears had a free lunch on them,) got his plug hat, Pa said school was dismissed and I could ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck

... added: "To go no further than the very beginning, Monsieur should perceive that her choice has exactly fifty chances in the hundred of going wrong: lying, as it does, between a meagre, sallow-faced creature of a death-white baldness, and a fine big pattern of a man, strong and ruddy, with a close-clipped but abundant thatch on his head, and a moustache ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various

... the unadorned statement of facts as sworn to the next day in the Council by these riders, and their oath was attested by Edward Randolph, the "evil genius of New England." I present it in its legal baldness of detail. The two horsemen are no reminiscence of Mr. James's celebrated opening, but two substantial citizens of Boston, Captain Peter Bowden and Dr. Thomas Clarke; and the young man with somewhat original objurgatory ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various

... of brevity I omit, means pillaged, robbed, and also peeled, of which last sense the quotations above given seem only to be a figurative application. The difficulties which arise from these explanations are, first, if bald be the true meaning, why must we, with Todd, limit it to baldness, resulting from disease, or more especially (as Grose will have it) from ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various

... the dead to touch food with their hands would seem to have been universal in Polynesia. Thus in Samoa "those who attended the deceased were most careful not to handle food, and for days were fed by others as if they were helpless infants. Baldness and the loss of teeth were supposed to be the punishment inflicted by the household god if they violated the rule." Again, in Tonga, "no person can touch a dead chief without being taboo'd for ten lunar months, except chiefs, who are only taboo'd ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... waters,"—"as gleaning grapes when the vintage is done,"—"as a dream,"—"as the morning dew,"—"as"—but the whole book is a garden of similitudes; they are "like the sand upon the sea-shore for multitude." It is, however, too true, that often-times the baldness of translation deprives poetry, Eastern especially, of its fervour, its glow, its gush, and blush of beauty: to quote Aristotle's example, it too frequently converts the rosy-fingered Morn into the red-fisted; and so the poetry ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... scrutiny it was possible to detect the many grey hairs, the wrinkles on the forehead around the eyes. His face was pale. His broad forehead seemed very large—it was partly due to a narrow chin, lean cheeks, and baldness. ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... and there was something lugubrious in the baldness of the statement. "He found me. And it was the biggest stroke of luck that he did. I grow more and more lucky this morning, wouldn't you ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans

... all that she expected—that her eyes glistened with a sudden expression of indignation which was new to them in looking upon him. There was a glittering sarcasm in her glance, which showed the intensity of her feelings in the comment which they involuntarily made on the baldness and poverty of his. Displeasure, indeed! That such an epithet should be employed to describe the withering pang, the vulturous, gnawing torture in her bosom—and that fiery fang which thought, like some winged serpent, was ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... was thin and refined; clean-shaven and a trifle pale as if with the habit of study. A slight baldness by the temples gave the brow unusual height. His eyes I did not like at all: instead of soothing the terror in mine they seemed to be drinking it in ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... the spikes of my garden-fence, two or three scraggy trees, and beyond the fence the road, the fields, and beyond them a broad stretch of pine-wood. Often I admire a boy and girl, both flaxen-headed and ragged, who clamber on the fence and laugh at my baldness. In their shining little eyes I read, "Go up, go up, thou baldhead!" They are almost the only people who care nothing for my celebrity or ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... summer, had been like that of most women when first in Alaska, falling out so rapidly that I feared total baldness if something was not done to prevent. This was the only sure remedy for the trouble, as I knew from former experience, and as I again proved, for it entirely stopped coming out. Ricka soon followed my example, and we, with ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan

... not familiar. One was almost bald, with a wisp of sandy hair combed in a pitiful and useless attempt to conceal the baldness. He wore glasses with clear plastic frames. They sat on a nose that could have served as a golf-ball model. His lips were almost nonexistent, and his chin receded so far that Rick wondered why he didn't conceal it with a beard. He seemed like a complete non-entity. In contrast to the white-haired ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin

... perpetually in mourning, and this effect was heightened by a species of incipient palsy which had seized on his lower facial muscles, and caused his lips to tremble violently. He was bald in the front of the head but not on the top. The baldness over the temples had joined hands and left isolated over the centre of the forehead a small tuft of hair, which, with the playfulness of second childhood, ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson

... a tall, meagre, dry-featured man, dressed with the painful neatness of self-respecting poverty: the edges of his coat-sleeves were carefully darned; his black necktie and a skull-cap which covered his baldness were evidently of home manufacture. He smiled softly and timidly with blue, rheumy eyes. Two or three recent cuts on his chin and neck were the result of conscientious shaving with an ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing



Words linked to "Baldness" :   phalacrosis, hairlessness, alopecia, male pattern baldness



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com