BROKEN-BACKED • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Broken-backed

"Broken-backed" Quotes from Famous Books

... vast, working by steam on a limited space, has been fatal to beauty: Hillsborough, though built on one of the loveliest sites in England, is perhaps the most hideous town in creation. All ups and down and back slums. Not one of its wriggling, broken-backed streets has handsome shops in an unbroken row. Houses seem to have battled in the air, and stuck wherever they tumbled down dead out of the melee. But worst of all, the city is pockmarked with public-houses, and bristles with high round chimneys. These are not confined to a locality, but ...

— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade

... pieces. Mend and rebind your books the minute they seem to need it. Delay is the extravagant thing in this case. If you are slow in this matter, leaves and sections will be lost, and the wear the broken-backed volume is getting will soon remove a part of the fold at the back of the several sections, and make the whole book a ...

— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana

... BROKEN-BACKED. The state of a ship so loosened in her frame, either by age, weakness, or some great strain from grounding amidships, as to droop at each end, causing the lines of her sheer to be interrupted, and termed hogged. It may result from fault of construction, in the midship portions having more buoyancy, ...

— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... rescue, when suddenly Opata stopped still in his tracks and shuddered. He went gray in the fire-light, and—he was a brave man who knew his death when he had met it—from beside his foot he lifted up the broken-backed snake on his spear-point. Even as he held it up for all of them to see, his limbs ...

— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al

Words linked to "Broken-backed" : unfit, hogged, bulging, ship