Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

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




Cycle   Listen
noun
Cycle  n.  
1.
An imaginary circle or orbit in the heavens; one of the celestial spheres.
2.
An interval of time in which a certain succession of events or phenomena is completed, and then returns again and again, uniformly and continually in the same order; a periodical space of time marked by the recurrence of something peculiar; as, the cycle of the seasons, or of the year. "Wages... bear a full proportion... to the medium of provision during the last bad cycle of twenty years."
3.
An age; a long period of time. "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay."
4.
An orderly list for a given time; a calendar. (Obs.) "We... present our gardeners with a complete cycle of what is requisite to be done throughout every month of the year."
5.
The circle of subjects connected with the exploits of the hero or heroes of some particular period which have served as a popular theme for poetry, as the legend of Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, and that of Charlemagne and his paladins.
6.
(Bot.) One entire round in a circle or a spire; as, a cycle or set of leaves.
7.
A bicycle or tricycle, or other light velocipede.
8.
A motorcycle.
9.
(Thermodynamics) A series of operations in which heat is imparted to (or taken away from) a working substance which by its expansion gives up a part of its internal energy in the form of mechanical work (or being compressed increases its internal energy) and is again brought back to its original state.
10.
(Technology) A complete positive and negative, or forward and reverse, action of any periodic process, such as a vibration, an electric field oscillation, or a current alternation; one period. Hence: (Elec.) A complete positive and negative wave of an alternating current. The number of cycles (per second) is a measure of the frequency of an alternating current.
Calippic cycle, a period of 76 years, or four Metonic cycles; so called from Calippus, who proposed it as an improvement on the Metonic cycle.
Cycle of eclipses, a period of about 6,586 days, the time of revolution of the moon's node; called Saros by the Chaldeans.
Cycle of indiction, a period of 15 years, employed in Roman and ecclesiastical chronology, not founded on any astronomical period, but having reference to certain judicial acts which took place at stated epochs under the Greek emperors.
Cycle of the moon, or Metonic cycle, a period of 19 years, after the lapse of which the new and full moon returns to the same day of the year; so called from Meton, who first proposed it.
Cycle of the sun, Solar cycle, a period of 28 years, at the end of which time the days of the month return to the same days of the week. The dominical or Sunday letter follows the same order; hence the solar cycle is also called the cycle of the Sunday letter. In the Gregorian calendar the solar cycle is in general interrupted at the end of the century.






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





"Cycle" Quotes from Famous Books



... cyclists, and storing the cycles of those travellers who decided that they had better return by train. Her first customers were four young men who left their cycles in her charge while they explored the neighborhood. For each cycle she gave them a ticket with a number ...
— Best Short Stories • Various

... Mr. Stowe has just been wading through eight volumes of "La Mystique," by Goerres, professor for forty years past in the University of Munich, first of physiology and latterly of philosophy. He examines the whole cycle of abnormal psychic, spiritual facts, trances, ecstasy, clairvoyance, witchcraft, spiritualism, etc., etc., as shown in the Romish miracles and the ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... the shape of bravery, prowess, magnanimity, occupies the place of the previous despotic pomp goes through the same cycle of decline and subsidence. And this subsidence, therefore, is not really such; for through all this restless change no advance has been made. History passes at this point—and only outwardly, that is, without connection with the previous phase—to Central Asia. To ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... skin of a colour and texture like a ripe lo-quat. As he stands there, something in the outline of the vista stirs the retentive tablets of his mind: it was on this spot that he first encountered Hia, and from that involvement began the cycle of his unending ill. ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah

... was true, Bradley corrected his observations for aberration, but he found that there still remained a residuum which was evidently not a parallax, for it did not exhibit an annual cycle. He reverted to his early idea of a nutation of the earth's axis, and was rewarded by the discovery that the earth did possess such an osculation (see ASTRONOMY). Bradley recognized the fact that the experimental determination of the aberration constant gave the ratio ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... retarded the modernization program of General Electronics and much of their present equipment was obsolete in terms of current price factors. He was also told to anticipate that declining sales would lead to declining production, thereby perpetuating an unfortunate cycle. And finally he was warned that General Electronics was an example of the pitfalls involved in investing in the ...
— New Apples in the Garden • Kris Ottman Neville

... $733 million expenditures: $309 million note: the government passed a transitional budget to cover the latter half of 2007 and has moved the fiscal cycle to a calendar year, starting with the budget they ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... happened elsewhere. They will honestly believe that they themselves originally created and since then have upheld the easy life into which they were bought at so heavy a price. Then the demand will go up for 'extension of local government,' 'Soudan for the Soudanese,' and so on till the whole cycle has to be retrodden. It is a hard law but an old one—Rome died learning it, as our western civilisation may die—that if you give any man anything that he has not painfully earned for himself, you infallibly make him or his descendants ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... short time, while others are bright most of the time and die down only for a short time. Others become very bright, then sink a little bit, but not so low as at first; then they become bright again, and, lastly, go right down to the lowest point, and they keep on always through this regular cycle of changes. Some go through the whole of these changes in three days, and others take much longer. The periods, as the intervals between the complete round of changes are called, vary, in fact, between three days and six hundred! It may seem impossible that changes covering so long as six ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton

... him, of whom she is the complement. That which is rugged in him, is tempered by softness in her; that which is strong in him, is weak in her; that which is fierce in him is mild in her. Designed of God to complete the cycle of human life, and through a twofold being present a perfect Adam, she is thus no less different from man than essential to his perfection. Her nature at once introduces her into a peculiar sphere of action. Soon, maternal cares rest upon ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... true and unostentatious philosophy thou didst accommodate thyself to the greatest change thy quiet, harmless life had known since it had passed out of the brief, burning cycle of the passions! Lost was the home endeared to thee by so many noiseless victories of the mind, so many mute histories of the heart; for only the scholar knoweth how deep a charm lies in monotony, in the old associations, the old ways and habitual clockwork of peaceful ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... wheel, n. cycle; truckle, caster, roulette, rowel; gear, cogwheel, miter wheel; pulley, sheave (wheel of a pulley). Associated words: spoke, felly, hub, strake, tire, straddle, cog, sprocket, linchpin, arbor, axle, axletree, sprag, traction, trochilics, trochilic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... finally wore away, the second day and night were like the first, the third like the first and second and the fourth day like another "cycle of Cathay." These four days and nights were like solitary confinement to the prisoner, the grim monotony and lack of incident contributing to the cumulative effect and accentuating the sense of helplessness and isolation. There was nothing to relieve the situation. We were like an army lying ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober

... different from its parents. The same animal, indeed, may pass through different grades of development; but these changes affect only the individual, not the race. The progeny of this animal must begin at the same point where its parent did, and run precisely the same cycle. The tadpole becomes a frog, but the young of that frog are tadpoles; the worm becomes a winged insect, but the eggs of that insect are hatched into nothing but worms. These changes in the life of the individual, like ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen

... Despoina, were the men who were alive In the great age and the golden age when still the cycle ran On upward curve and easily, for them both maid and man And beast and tree and spirit in the green earth could thrive. But now one age is ending, and God calls home the stars And looses the wheel of the ages ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis

... epics form what is termed the Trojan Cycle, because all relate in some way to the War of Troy. Among them is the Cypria, in eleven books, by Stasimus of Cyprus (or by Arctinus of Miletus), wherein is related Jupiter's frustrated wooing of ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... Olympus outside the greater, I said, of Dionysus and his companions; he is the centre of a cycle, the hierarchy of the creatures of water and sunlight in many degrees; and that fantastic system of tree-worship places round him, not the fondly whispering spirits of the more graceful inhabitants of woodland only, the nymphs of the poplar ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time. Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward, let us range, Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change. Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day: Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... classics—were really well read by me, my ambition being not to be ignorant of anything which a literary man should know. Macaulay was then new, and I devoured not only his works, but a vast amount by him suggested. I realised at an early age that there was a certain cycle of knowledge common to all really cultivated minds, and this I was determined to master. I had, however, little indeed of the vanity of erudition, having been deeply convinced and constantly depressed or shamed by the reflection ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... paintings by women of Saxony, held in Dresden under the patronage of Queen Carola in the fall of 1892, this artist exhibited another decorative panel, done in the same manner, which seems to have been a great disappointment to those who had heard wonderful accounts of the earlier cycle of panels. It was too full of large-leaved flowers, and the latter were too brilliant to serve as a foreground to the Alhambra scenes, which were used as the ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement

... from far away, Came Santa Claus with the dawn of day; He rode on a cycle, as seasons do, With Christmas behind him a-tandem too; His pockets were bigger than sacks from the mill— The Soho Bazaar would not one of them fill, And the Lowther Arcade and the good things that stock it Would travel with ease in his tiniest pocket. ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... It used to be the fashion, when these Beast traditions were noticed, to point to Aesop as their original, but Grimm has sufficiently proved [Reinhart Fuchs, Introduction] that what we see in Aesop is only the remains of a great world-old cycle of such traditions which had already, in Aesop's day, been subjected by the Greek mind to that critical process which a late state of society brings to bear on popular traditions; that they were then already worn and washed ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... the tennis game is a natural logical one. There is a definite cycle of events that can be traced. The picture is clearest in America as the steps of advancements are more definitely defined. It is from America that I am going to analyse the growth ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D

... she had a personal interest in the matter. The moon, in fact, regulates the cycle of her years and her fast of Ramadan. She could not do less than give 1,372,640 piastres; and she gave them with an eagerness which denoted, however, some pressure on the ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... was that of the sexagenary cycle. This was operated after the manner of a clock having two concentric dials, the circumference of the larger dial being divided into ten equal parts, each marked with one of the ten "celestial signs," and the circumference of the smaller dial being divided into ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... things From earth to star; Thy cycle holds whatever is fate, and Over the border the bar. Though rank and fierce the mariner Sailing the seven seas, He prays, as he holds his glass to his ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson

... mentioned by the student of these matters without an expression of admiration and of gratitude; Mr A.H. Leahy, author of HEROIC ROMANCES OF IRELAND; Dr Whitly Stokes, Professor Kuno Meyer, and M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, whose invaluable CYCLE MYTHOLOGIQUE IRLANDAIS has been much in my hands, both in the original and in the excellent English translation of Mr R.I. Best. Particulars of the source of each story will be found in the Notes on the Sources at the end ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston

... inaugurated as a symbol of national unity, Belgium remains nevertheless under foreign tutelage. Her independence is bought at the price of neutrality; and it is only after the violation of this guaranteed neutrality by two of the foremost Powers which established it that the cycle of Belgium's trials comes to an end and that she is allowed to exert her sovereign rights in external as ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts

... to Fion (the Fingal of Mac-Pherson), there occurs, as in the primitive poetry of most nations, a cycle of heroes, each of whom has some distinguishing attribute: upon these qualities, and the adventures of those possessing them, many proverbs are formed which are still current in the Highlands. Among other characters, Conan is distinguished as in some respects a kind of Thersites, but brave and ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... ornamental panels, with beautifully scrolled historical borders. In these panels were painted, one in each, large maps of the States and Territories, which were drawn to uniform scale, minutely accurate, with every post office, post road, wagon road or cycle path plainly marked. In addition, at least twice the number of details usual to large maps showing counties and townships, were carefully noted. The effect of this unique educational system of ornamentation was as interesting as it was fascinating. In harmony with this ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... In this song-cycle of nine poems we are shown the death of a woman's heart. James Lee's wife sums up in herself, as it were, all those "troubles of love" which we have considered in the earlier monologues. The man has failed her—as De Lorge failed his lady, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... mystery; the long-past and the far-off future whispering together, under cover of the night, of those things which the stars remember from their youth, and to which they look forward in some remote cycle of their Shining. ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... periodicity, intermittence; beat; oscillation &c 314; pulse, pulsation; rhythm; alternation, alternateness, alternativeness, alternity^. bout, round, revolution, rotation, turn, say. anniversary, jubilee, centenary. catamenia^, courses, menses, menstrual flux. [Regularity of return] rota, cycle, period, stated time, routine; days of the week; Sunday, Monday &c; months of the year; January &c; feast, fast &c; Christmas, Easter, New Year's day &c; Allhallows^, Allhallowmas^, All Saints' Day; All Souls', All Souls' Day; Ash Wednesday, bicentennial, birthday, bissextile^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... scholar, the cavalier, the gentleman of leisure. This is done on a small scale with microscopic nicety, and really more in the historical than the genre spirit. Single figures and interiors were his preference, but he also painted a cycle of Napoleonic battle-pictures with much force. There is little or no sentiment about his work—little more than in that of Gerome. His success lay in exact technical accomplishment. He drew well, painted well, and at times ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke

... capita GDP. The economy depends heavily on exports, particularly in electronics and manufacturing. It was hard hit in 2001-03 by the global recession and the slump in the technology sector. The government hopes to establish a new growth path that will be less vulnerable to the external business cycle but is unlikely to abandon efforts to establish Singapore as Southeast Asia's financial and high-tech hub. Fiscal stimulus, low interest rates, and global economic recovery should lead to much improved growth ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... meet that situation is to fertilize heavily, especially with nitrogen, the season of the heavy crop so that you will have not only enough leaf growth to produce that crop, but to build up nutrients the following year. I believe that will help break the cycle and establish ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various

... but abroad it is popular: it has no tail and looks like a pig—when things are going well with it. This particular specimen, when I saw him, looked more like part of a doormat. The fox-terrier had seized it by the scruff of the neck and had rolled it over into the gutter just in front of a motor cycle. Its owner, a large lady, had darted out to save it, and had collided with the motor cyclist. The large lady had been thrown some half a dozen yards against an Italian boy carrying a tray ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome

... our arrival in Naples, we took the seven o'clock train, which leaves the Nineteenth Century for the first cycle of the Christian Era, and, skirting the waters of the Neapolitan bay almost the whole length of our journey, reached the railway station of Pompeii in an hour. As we rode along by that bluest sea, we saw the fishing-boats go out, and the foamy ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... come to Mawgan Porth, and a mile beyond this are the famous Bedruthan Steps. Both places, but especially the Steps, afford a very favourite excursion from Newquay, seven miles distant; and whether the journey is performed on foot, or by cycle, motor-car or carriage, it is full of interest and beauty. It is best to come during the ebb of a spring tide, when the coves and caves may safely be explored; at other times there is grave peril. The caverns at Mawgan Porth are remarkably fine, and the grandly wild stretch of ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... these volumes of German mysticism is a task both painful and disgusting — and happily not necessary. Enough has been stated to show how gross is the superstition even of the learned; and that errors, like comets, run in one eternal cycle — at their apogee in one age, at their perigee in the next, but returning in one phase or another ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... Mythology and the Nibelungenlied; Stories of King Arthur and the Round Table, and legends of Charlemagne; Stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey; Stories from Chaucer and Spenser; Stories from Shakespeare. At the end of the eight years the cycle is repeated. ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine

... believing that all learning was contained in the languages which they taught, and despising every other acquirement as superficial and useless, came to their task as to a sport! Passing from infancy to age, they dreamed away all their days as in a grammar-school. Revolving in a perpetual cycle of declensions, conjugations, syntaxes, and prosodies; renewing constantly the occupations which had charmed their studious childhood; rehearsing continually the part of the past; life must have slipped from them at last like one day. They were always in their first garden, reaping harvests ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... youthful adventure was written during the winter of 1908, ran as a serial in Putnam's Magazine the following year, and appeared as a book in 1910, five years before "The Song of Hugh Glass," the first piece of my Western Cycle. Many who have cared for my narrative poems, feeling the relation between those and this earlier avowal of an old love, have urged that "The ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt

... I was coming out of the chancery of the British Legation, a little cockney messenger in uniform came snorting into the court on a motor-cycle. As he got off he began describing his experiences, and wound up his story of triumphant progress—"And when I got to the Boulevards I ran down a blighter on a bicycle and the ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson

... your cycle, your great world-year, all will be completed, whether I exert myself or not (and the supposition is false,—but suppose it true), am I to be indifferent about it? Not so! I must beat my own pulse true in the heart of the world; for that is ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... figured on," responded Denver briefly, and as he cleaned out the rats' nests and began to make camp Old Bunk sat down in the doorway and began a new cycle of stories. ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge

... reverie, where warmth comes not from the sun but from the heart where man is more noticeable than nature—that chaste and vigorous world in which will plays a greater part than sensation and thought has more power than instinct—in short the whole romantic cycle of German and northern poetry, awoke little by little in my memory and laid claim upon my sympathy. It is a poetry of bracing quality, and acts upon one like a moral tonic. Strange charm of imagination! A twig of pine wood and a few spider-webs are enough to make countries, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... before the nuts fall, but most of them emerge from the nuts after they have fallen. The worms then enter the soil, where they build cells and remain until they change to pupae the following summer. This weevil has a one-year cycle, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various

... made that the recent success in dry-farming is due to the fact that we are now living in a cycle of wet years, but that as soon as the cycle of dry years strikes the country dry-farming will vanish as a dismal failure. Then, again, the theory is proposed that the climate is permanently changing toward wetness or dryness and the past has no meaning in reading ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe

... volunteer cycle companies of speakers from the towns, young working-men and women and students, to go out on summer evenings and hold meetings on the village greens. They were winning their way. But it was slow work. And Carleton was countering their efforts ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome

... begs him to beget are no children of flesh and blood, but more immortal children of undying fame. The whole cycle of the early sonnets is simply Shakespeare's invitation to Willie Hughes to go upon the stage and become a player. How barren and profitless a thing, he says, is this beauty of yours if it be ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde

... Greeks, Cleostratus, Harpalus, and others, to make their months agree better with the course of the Moon, in the times of the Persian Empire, varied the manner of intercaling the three months in the Octaeteris; and Meton found out the Cycle of intercaling seven months ...
— The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended • Isaac Newton

... hair-splitting definitions; the Brissots, Vergniauds, Condorcets, and Rolands, who could degrade, dethrone, and condemn a king to perpetual imprisonment, but were just too dainty of conscience to go the whole hog of murder. As history, like an old almanack, does but repeat itself within a given cycle of years, so the same round, cast, and change of characters and characteristics, with all the other paraphernalia of the great drama, Reform and Revolution, as performed in France, have been, and are in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... cheat and swindler. I went to beat her, and I stayed. The storm broke—it struck me down like the plague. I'm plague-stricken still, and I know that everything is over, that there will never be anything more for me. The cycle of the ages is accomplished. That's my position. And though I'm a beggar, as fate would have it, I had three thousand just then in my pocket. I drove with Grushenka to Mokroe, a place twenty-five versts from here. I got gypsies ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... So is the cycle complete: egg laid in early spring, mostly on the leaves; larva hatched in about one week, crawling to the young apple to feed, where it lives for perhaps a month; larva departed from the fruit to form a cocoon and to remain quiescent till it pupates the following ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey

... may be fragmentary, contradictory, unreliable, ambiguous, deceptive, or wrong. Intelligence is information that has been collected, integrated, evaluated, analyzed, and interpreted. Finished intelligence is the final product of the Intelligence Cycle ready to be delivered ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... along this front, I had left "Jip" at home and was using a Harley-Davidson cycle side-car Lieutenant Trainor of Headquarters had kindly loaned me—further giving me daring Corporal Plummer of Aurora, one of the most skillful of ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy

... warned not to talk to anyone, so he told Lizzie that he had been kept late to make repairs on a motor-cycle. And next morning he got up at the usual hour, to avoid exciting suspicion, and went and stared at the shop, which was locked up, with a policeman on guard. He bought a copy of the Leesville Herald, and read the thrilling story of the German plot which had ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... comes "The Queen of the Serpents" with the history of Janshah, famous on account of the wonderful Split Men—the creatures already referred to in this work, who used to separate longitudinally. The Sindbad cycle is followed by the melancholy "City of Brass," and a great collection of anecdotes illustrative of the craft and malice ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... variant readings which occur in each make it certain that the Egyptian scribes had difficulty in understanding what they were writing. It may be said that this version of the cosmogony is incomplete because it does not account for the origin of any of the gods except those who belong to the cycle of Osiris, and this objection is a valid one; but in this place we are only concerned to shew that R[a], the Sun-god, was evolved from the primeval abyss of water by the agency of the god Khepera, who brought this result about by pronouncing his own name. The ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge

... world's life when for a very long time together (10,500 years, to be quite precise) the northern hemisphere is warmer than the southern, or vice versa. Now, Dr. Croll has calculated that about 250,000 years ago this eccentricity of the earth's orbit was at its highest, so that a cycle of recurring cold and warm epochs in either hemisphere alternately then set in; and such cold spells it was that produced the Great Ice Age in Northern Europe. They went on till about 80,000 years ago, when they stopped short for the present, leaving the climate ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... world in itself; it has its own joys and sorrows, and complete cycle of events in the human lives lived here for a time by the will of God, who has His purposes of love in each and all. I have touched many of these joys and sorrows during my ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe

... four Idylls of the King were prepared for publication in the spring of 1859; while Tennyson was at work also on Pelleas and Ettarre, and the Tristram cycle. In autumn he went on a tour to Lisbon with Mr F. T. Palgrave and Mr Craufurd Grove. Returning, he fell eagerly to reading an early copy of Darwin's Origin of Species, the crown of his own early speculations on the theory of evolution. "Your theory does not make against Christianity?" ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... Once hardly in a cycle blossometh A flower-like soul ripe with the seeds of song, A spirit foreordained to cope with wrong, Whose divine thoughts are natural as breath, Who the old Darkness thickly scattereth With starry words, that shoot prevailing ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... and the rest of Christendom. This is proved, among other things, by their curious reckoning of Easter; which (as Gieseler shows, "Eccle. Hist.," ii., 164, English translation) was by no means identical with that of the Quarto-decimans. It was simply the survival of the use of an old cycle which had been elsewhere superseded by one more accurate ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... lips, the whole sweet appeal for safety from a frightened child to him, the strong man. He felt the clinging touch of those soft fingers laid upon his, the sweetness of those marvellously awakened emotions, so cruelly and drearily stifled through a cycle of years. The woman's passion by his side seemed suddenly tawdry and unreal, the seeking of her lips for his something horrible. His back was towards the door, and it was her cry of angry dismay which first apprised him of a welcome intruder. He swung around ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... scientific course at the Nebraska Normal College 1897; received the degree of Litt.D. from the University of Nebraska 1917. Declared Poet Laureate of Nebraska by a joint resolution of the Legislature, Apr. 1921, in recognition of the significance of the American epic cycle upon which he has been working for eight years. Winner of the prize of five hundred dollars offered by the Poetry Society of America for the best volume of poetry ("The Song of Three Friends") published by an American in 1919. Has been ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris

... of the Market Place, next to what is now Mr. Cammack's cycle depot, was the Queen's Head Inn, now gone; and at the north-east corner of the Market Place, one door removed from St. Lawrence Street, was the Nelson Inn, still existing; while at the south-east corner stood the large ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter

... 1900, was—like the Wrights—the owner of a small bicycle shop. It was at Hammondsport, New York. He was an enthusiastic cyclist, and speed was a mania with him. He evolved a motor cycle with which he broke all records for speed over the ground. He started a factory and achieved a reputation for excellent motors. He designed and made the engine for the dirigible of Captain Thomas S. Baldwin; and for the first United States ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson

... who partook of the succeeding stew discovered the lurking parsley and its overpowered progenitor, the celery, under the effectual disguise of summer savory. By an unforeseen circumstance the fragments remaining from this last stew did not continue the cycle and disappear in another pie. Had this been their fate, however, their presence could have been completely obscured by sage. This problem in perpetual progression or culinary homeopathy can be practiced in any kitchen. But hush, tell it not in ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains

... discovering that we are well on the way to Babylon or Bactria instead of to Corinth. Nor is it advisable to toss up, either, on the chance that we may hit upon the right way if we start upon any one at a venture. That is no impossibility; it may have come off once and again in a cycle; but I cannot think we ought to gamble recklessly with such high stakes, nor commit our hopes to a frail craft, like the wise men who went to sea in a bowl; we should have no fair complaint against Fortune, if her arrow or dart ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata

... when the cycle is completed, the child detaches himself from his internal concentration; refreshed and satisfied, he experiences the higher social impulses, such as desiring to make confidences and to hold ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... of outward existence, still, and by this very exclusion from all practical uses, becomes of paramount interest to the philosophic historian; indeed, it is only because the shadowy planets of the ancient cycle still repeat their revolutions in human thought, that the philosophy of history is at all possible. Philosophy, in its ideal pretensions, frequently forgets its material conditions: it claims for itself the power of constructing wholes in thought where only parts have been given ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... first, the Chaucerian period; but a Golden Age Chaucerian, simple and pure,—a time in which the Mysteries really ruled human life, and when to hymn the Gods was to participate in the wonder and freeddom of their being. Think, perhaps, as the cycle mounted to its hour of noon, esotericism opened its doors to pour forth an illumination yet stronger and more saving: mighty egos incarnated, and put in writing the marvelous revelations of the Upanishads: there may have been a descent towards matter, to call forth these ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... beset by the floes again after a short progress; and on the 7th of September the Fox was quite hemmed in, and had to remain where she then was until the 17th of April, 1858. Then ensued the terrible silence and darkness of the winter, and the monotonous, weary cycle of the days, while ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith

... within this casing; the main shaft drives, by means of a pinion, the differential gear that is mounted on the axle. It will be seen from the illustration that the builders do not rely wholly on the motor, but have provided the usual cycle pitched chain so that, in the event of a breakdown, the rider can propel his machine with the pedals. Indeed, this is always necessary in starting, though a few strokes with the pedals suffice, and as soon as the engine is started the pedal clutch is thrown out of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various

... more than a mental attitude or manner. A magnificent intellectual force is latent within it. It is like the reminiscence of a forgotten culture that once adorned the mind; as if the mind of one philosophesas pote met' erotos, fallen into a new cycle, were beginning its spiritual progress over again, but with a certain power of anticipating its stages. It has the freshness without the shallowness of taste, the range and seriousness of culture without its strain and over-consciousness. Such a habit may be described as wistfulness ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... Geoffrey's history, as the paramour of Queen Guenever. In like manner the love-story of Tristan and Isolde was joined by other romancers to the Arthur-Saga. This came probably from Brittany or Cornwall. Thus there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a fixed shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a more artistic {24} handling by such modern English poets as Tennyson in his Idyls of the King, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... with the exception of Cuchullin, who appear in this volume, figure in the tales and poems of the Ossianic or Fian Cycle, which is common to Ireland and to Scotland. They have been neglected by our Scottish poets since Gavin Douglas and Barbour. In Ireland the Fians are a band of militia—the original Fenians. In Scotland the tales vary considerably, and belong to the hunting period before the introduction ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie

... made England great—but that cycle is over for all the world—and what we shall have to do is to stand steady and try to direct the new on-rush, so that it makes us greater and does not sweep civilisation into darkness, as when Rome ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn

... there ploughed through shrieking people, and a dozen stalwart men fought to keep the crowd from crushing the driver against his furnace—my brother emerged upon the Chalk Farm road, dodged across through a hurrying swarm of vehicles, and had the luck to be foremost in the sack of a cycle shop. The front tire of the machine he got was punctured in dragging it through the window, but he got up and off, notwithstanding, with no further injury than a cut wrist. The steep foot of Haverstock Hill ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... result of this conversation was that, the next Saturday being wet, Vava's opponent suddenly said to her chum, 'Amy, we can't cycle to-day; suppose we lunch at the Enterprise, and have some games with those two new ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin

... treatment, even in minute detail, of education, of art, of daily life, his very vocabulary, in which such pleasant or innocent words, as "manifold," "embroidered," "changeful," become the synonyms of what is evil. He, first, notes something like a fixed cycle of political change; but conceives it (being change) as, from the very first, backward towards decadence. The ideal city, again, will not be an art-less place: it is by irresistible influence of art, that he means to shape men anew; by a severely monotonous art however, such art ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... abolished here till the year 1752; when the Gregorian calendar, commonly called the New Style, was substituted by Act of Parliament for the Dionysian. This diversity of computation would alone occasion some confusion; but in addition to this, the INDICTION, or cycle of fifteen years, which is mentioned in the latter part of the "Saxon Chronicle", was carried back three years before the vulgar aera, and commenced in different places at four different periods of the year! But it is very remarkable ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown

... mortal's roof may I repair, I and my Muse, and find a welcome there? I and my Muse: for minstrels fare but ill, Reft of those maids, who know the mightiest's will. The cycle of the years, it flags not yet; In many a chariot many a steed shall sweat: And one, to manhood grown, my lays shall claim, Whose deeds shall rival great Achilles' fame, Who from stout Aias might have ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus

... "An age, a cycle, according to the use you make of them. In twenty-six minutes how much can be done! The weightiest questions of warfare, politics, morality, can be discussed, even decided, in twenty-six minutes. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... Tasso, Tancred would have been the hero of the Jerusalem. If, however, the Homeric ballads, as they are sometimes called, which related the wrath of Achilles, with all its direful consequences, were so far superior to the rest of the poetic cycle, as to admit no rivalry,—it is still surprising, that throughout the whole poem the callida junctura should never betray the workmanship of an Athenian hand; and that the national spirit of a race, who have at a later period not inaptly ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope

... permanently rooted and with heartiest reason for being—the copious cycle of Arthurian legends, or the almost equally copious Charlemagne cycle, or the poems of the Cid, or Scandinavian Eddas, or Nibelungen, or Chaucer, or Spenser, or bona fide Ossian, or Inferno—probably had their rise in the great historic perturbations, which they ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... people obedient to their king, the bull for strength, the ostrich feather with its equal filaments for truth, the lotus for Upper and the papyrus for Lower Egypt. To these we may add the bird, which denotes a cycle of time (in Coptic phanech), and about which such wild fables were received by the credulity of Herodotus and by that of the Fathers. But the greater part of the hieroglyphics are phonetic like our alphabet, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... and his face was serious again. "We can hasten the seeding of the plants a little, I think, by temperature and light-and-dark cycle manipulations. Unfortunately, these aren't sea-algae plants, or we'd be in comparatively little trouble. That was my fault in not converting. We can, however, step up their efficiency a bit. And I'm sure we can find some way to remove the ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey

... unbuild, contrive To save appearances, to gird the sphere With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er, Cycle and epicycle, orb ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various

... long movements have nothing like the unity of those of Beethoven. A beautiful variety prevails, and the main ideas are repeated a sufficient number of times; but it is for beauty rather than for completing a cycle of moods or a cycle of soul-experiences. Or if a cycle, then a cycle of pleasant and youthful experiences. In Beethoven this is not the case. When he is much in earnest he takes plenty of time for saying his say, and says it so thoroughly that you are quite sure of what he is at. This will be ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews

... Rebels have no three converter ships, she has to be one of ours. And since she's running at full output and only in Cth yellow, it means she's big, heavy, and awkward—which means a maintenance or an ammunition supply ship. There's an off phase beat in her number two converter that gives a twenty cycle pulse to her pattern. And the only heavy ship in the fleet with this pattern ...
— A Question of Courage • Jesse Franklin Bone

... convent garden, which on good authority is stated to have been planted by St Dominic nearly six hundred years ago. As to the amount of fruit yielded, the growers of Sorrento commonly aver that one good year, one bad year and one mediocre year constitute the general cycle in the prospects of orange farming. Two crops are gathered annually, the principle one in December and the other at Eastertide, the fruit produced by the later and smaller crop being far finer in ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... him, high hopes and fair promises of success were entertained by his young friends and relations. He was considered by the "Blues," as they are familiarly termed, one from whom they were to derive great immediate honour, which for a short period, however, was deferred. Individual genius has a cycle of its own, and moves only in that path, or by the powers influencing it. Genius has been properly defined 'prospective', talent on the contrary 'retrospective': genius is creative, and lives much in the future, and in its passage or progress ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman

... Offerings. They may be divided in several ways, among which the most instructive is as follows: (1) National Sacrifices, which include (a) Serial, such as daily, weekly, and monthly offerings, (b) Festal, as the Passover, Cycle of Months, etc., (c) for the service of the Holy Place, as holy oil, precious incense, twelve loaves, etc. (2) Official Sacrifices, which include (a) those for the priests, (b) those for princes and rulers, and (c) those for the holy women, Ex. 38:8; ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell

... add "it was that year of the Olympiad cycle in which Crocinas, a Thessalian, won the Stadium; when Endius was ephor at Sparta, and Pythodorus archon at Athens, though the Athenians indeed do not call the year by that archon's name, since he was elected during the oligarchy, but prefer to ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon

... to be as familiar with the Manuelian cycle of romance as is any person now alive) it has for some while appeared, I know, a not uncurious circumstance that in the Key to the Popular Tales of Poictesme there should have been included so little directly relative to Manuel himself. No reader of ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell

... is of opinion "that in the case of the Cypriote cylinders the attendant monsters and, to a certain extent, the symbolic column itself, are taken from an Egyptian solar cycle, and the inference has been drawn that the aniconic pillars among the Mycenaeans of Cyprus were identified with divinities having some points in common with the sun-gods Ra, or Horus, and Hathor, the Great Mother" (op. cit., pp. 63 ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... sky. The beautiful crystals all melt away, and the places where they lay are silently made ready to be submerged in new drifts of summer verdure. These also will be transmuted in their turn, and so the eternal cycle of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... the Aztec ceremonial of lighting a holy fire and communicating it to the multitude from the wounded breast of a human victim, celebrated every 52 years at the end of one cycle and the beginning of another—the constellation of the Pleiades being in the Zenith (Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter



Words linked to "Cycle" :   carbon cycle, safety bike, kick, round, foot pedal, ride, all-terrain bike, go across, cycling, cyclic, kc, backpedal, fixed-cycle operation, pedal, bicycle seat, bicycle wheel, Carnot's ideal cycle, go through, recur, kilocycle per second, time interval, splash guard, velocipede, nitrogen cycle, oscillation, mountain bike, handlebar, rhythm, sprocket wheel, mudguard, kilocycle, series, kilohertz, safety bicycle, bicycle-built-for-two, wheeled vehicle, citric acid cycle, pass, merry-go-round, cps, samsara, recycle, motorcycle, cycle of rebirth, rate, tandem bicycle, ordinary bicycle, Krebs cycle, Carnot cycle, business cycle, trade cycle, repetition, wheel, periodic event, treadle, cardiac cycle, cyclist, tricarboxylic acid cycle, hertz, cycle per second, unicycle, motorbike



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com