Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

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




Dirty   Listen
adjective
Dirty  adj.  (compar. dirtier; superl. dirtiest)  
1.
Defiled with dirt; foul; nasty; filthy; not clean or pure; serving to defile; as, dirty hands; dirty water; a dirty white.
2.
Sullied; clouded; applied to color.
3.
Sordid; base; groveling; as, a dirty fellow. "The creature's at his dirty work again."
4.
Sleety; gusty; stormy; as, dirty weather. "Storms of wind, clouds of dust, an angry, dirty sea."
Synonyms: Nasty; filthy; foul. See Nasty.






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





"Dirty" Quotes from Famous Books



... shadow in the clefts, and on the sides massed forests of scarlet and flame and crimson. Above, the sharp peaks of stone rose into the wan blue, wan and pale themselves, and wearing a certain air of fixed calm, the type of an eternal quiet. At the base of the hills lay the city, a dirty mass of bricks and smoke and dust, and at its far edge flowed the Wabash,—deep here, tinted with green, writhing and gurgling and curdling on the banks over shelving ledges of lichen and mud-covered rock. Beyond it yawned the opening to the great West,—the Prairies. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... contempt swept into the child's face. "Detectives is in business," he said, "for what they can get out of it. We're in it because the house we live in is dirty and full of rats, and we ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris

... to do this, but Miss Squeers was as good as her word; and poor Nicholas, in addition to bad food, dirty lodging, and the being compelled to witness one dull unvarying round of squalid misery, was treated with every special indignity that malice could suggest, or the most ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... dinner; by which time the Hottentot driver of the cart began to tune up lustily, but unmelodiously, on a bugle to inform intending passengers that it was time to start. Bessie was out of the room at the moment, and, with the exception of a peculiarly dirty-looking coolie ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard

... their whips. Boys, ragged and dirty, were waiting for the time when "checks" would circulate, and, in fact, were in much need of checks, but those of a different nature from those they ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams

... the corners, examining everything, emboldened by the fact that no one paid the slightest attention to her. The walls behind the huge canvas decorations were dirty, with their plaster broken off, and covered with sticky dampness. The floors, the moldings, the shabby furniture and decorations, that seemed to her like beggarly rags, were thick with dust and filth. The ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont

... are requisite of fulfilment before the soul can regain its original home. The soul on leaving this world is like a clean, white garment soaked in water. If the water is clean, it is easy to dry the garment, and it becomes even cleaner than it was before. But if the water is dirty, no amount of drying will ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik

... Lying so very close to the Italian frontier, the people are as much of that nationality as of France, and both languages are spoken. The old portion of the town is Roman in many of its characteristics, and here those former masters of the world had an important naval station in the days of Augustus. Dirty as this portion of Nice is, one lingers here a little to study the quaint architecture, and the aspects of humble life. The peculiarities of dress, habits, and general appearance of the people differ materially from ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou

... trip many hours hence. It scarcely promises to be as comfortable as our morning ride, for the weather has changed—it is blowing half a gale, and the rain comes down in sheets. Our train is timed to start in the small hours, and the night seems dirty and depressing enough as we make our way for a cup of coffee to the refreshment room, where a melancholy Italian sits in sad state eating Bath buns and drinking brandy. We walk past the train, laden with miserable sea-sick humanity, and step ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various

... "Dirty work!" shouted Alderman Crood. "Such as nobody but the likes o' you—Radicals and teetotallers and chapel folk!—'ud ever think o' doing. You say straight out before the town what's in your mind, Sam Epplewhite, and I'll see what the law has to say to you! I'm none going to have my character ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher

... posterior part of the cephalo- thorax is pure white, with the anterior part of a rich green, shading into dark brown; and it is remarkable that these colours are liable to change in the course of a few minutes—the white becoming dirty grey or even black, the green "losing much of its brilliancy." It deserves especial notice that the males do not acquire their bright colours until they become mature. They appear to be much more numerous than the females; they differ also ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... pimps.' It ought not to say that it can somehow find an excuse for calling upon them to desist from 'an experiment in living' from which it dissents. 'My feeling is that if society gets its grip on the collar of such a fellow, it should say to him, "You dirty fellow, it may be a question whether you should be suffered to remain in your native filth untouched, or whether my opinion should be printed by the lash on your bare back. That question will be determined without the smallest reference to your ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... another matter. An old woman in a blonde wig, a dirty hand covered with jewels, ostentation without dignity, rhetoric without cogency, all offend by an inner contradiction. To like such things we should have to surrender our better intuitions and suffer a kind of dishonour. Yet the elements offensively combined may ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... Jesus filling our cups as He passes by, and that is sin in one of its thousand forms. The Lord Jesus does not fill dirty cups. Anything that springs from self, however small it may be, is sin. Self-energy or self-complacency in service is sin. Self-pity in trials or difficulties, self-seeking in business or Christian work, self-indulgence in one's ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession

... under the wimples, the mothers look up, and in the vernacular modestly bespeak their trade: in the bottles "honey of grapes," in the jars "strong drink." Their entreaties are usually lost in the general uproar, and they fare illy against the many competitors: brawny fellows with bare legs, dirty tunics, and long beards, going about with bottles lashed to their backs, and shouting "Honey of wine! Grapes of En-Gedi!" When a customer halts one of them, round comes the bottle, and, upon lifting the thumb from the nozzle, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... added her bit to the talk of the older girls, "he forgets to put on any stockings and just has his dreadful old shoes on over his dirty, ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield

... solace and delight, as countless thousands have done, in his Ovid. The world of books and of reading is apt to seem stuffy, the favoured home of the moody spirit, a lair to which a dirty and ragged Magliabechi retreats, a palace where a Beckford gloats solitary over his treasures—a world whence we often desire to escape, since we know we can return to it when we will. For if good books shelter us from the realities of life, life itself ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... them the image has scarcely suffered any reduction of intensity at all. In most cases there has been a disagreeable change of color, but it is almost entirely confined to the whites and lighter tints, which are turned to a more or less dirty yellow. Even in the case of the prints toned by bath No. 10, where the image is quite red, it has suffered no appreciable ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various

... House the 22d of June last; whilst thus, as the Leaguer shrewdly anticipated, it might run uncontroverted for months to come until another session, and, through Anti-Corn-Law circulars and tracts of the League, do the dirty work of the time for which concocted, when no matter how consigned and forgotten afterwards among the numberless other lies of the day, fabricated by the League. Unluckily for the crafty combination, Blackwood was neither slow to detect, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... caught in the crowd he would be swept away into some unknown and terrible place. Waiting until the rush had a little subsided, he went across the street and on to the bridge to look at the river that flowed past the station. It was narrow and filled with ships, and the water looked gray and dirty. A pall of black smoke covered the sky. From all sides of him and even in the air above his head a great clatter and roar of ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson

... floor at his feet was a bit of dirty white paper. Mechanically, he picked it up and looked it over. On it was ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele

... Kshatriya, therefore, should seek the acquisition of power. He that is powerful is master of everything. Wealth leads to the possession of an army. He that is powerful[404] obtains intelligent advisers. He that is without wealth is truly fallen. A little (of anything in the world) is regarded as the dirty remnant of a feast.[405] If a strong man does even many bad acts, nobody, through fear, says or does anything (for censuring or checking him). If Righteousness and Power be associated with Truth, they can then rescue men from great ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... most wretched tavern. Meanwhile thieves had stolen all our belongings, and when we wanted to journey on we could get no horses, for the inhabitants feared the thieves and their vengeance should we accuse them. Amidst a troop of dirty, eagerly debating Syrians in a scorching hot street I stood at my father's side peering into his wan face, sallow and drawn from the illness, with glistening streaks of perspiration and an expression of deadly ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... replied, recalling an occasional article which had appeared in the newspapers regarding a dusty and dirty old house in that part of the Heights in Brooklyn whence all that is fashionable had not yet taken flight, a house of mystery, yet not more mysterious than its owner in his secretive comings and goings ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... am making progress and saying, He will return perfectly omniscient! I wish I could become omniscient before I return; but that would be very troublesome. No one sends me anything—the baths at Nicopolis are dirty; things are wretched at home and wretched here." And then they say, "Nobody is any the better for the School."—Who comes to the School with a sincere wish to learn: to submit his principles to correction and himself to ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus

... the captain, "here's the ould mare that can thravel up a frozen mountain, slide down a greased rainbow, and carry ould Captain Maguire where the very ould divil himsilf couldn't vinture his dirty ould body. Hoo-o-oo-oop! ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... was not very dirty," he said, with a good-humored smile; "probably there was nothing worse on it than a little ashes, which, diffused through so large a quantity of liquid, ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley

... the morning and on into the afternoon the long stream of men and guns flowed through the streets of Ladysmith, and all marvelled to see what manner of men these were—dirty, war-worn, travel-stained, tanned, their uniforms in tatters, their boots falling to pieces, their helmets dinted and broken, but nevertheless magnificent soldiers, striding along, deep-chested and broad-shouldered, with the light of triumph in their eyes and the blood of fighting ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill

... the stronger, and the wife's relations despised the German intruder. "Not long before the war I came upon two small boys fighting in a back street." The boy that was getting the worst of it was abusing the other, and Dr. Bucher caught the words—"dirty Prussian!" (sale Prussien!) The boy at whom this was hurled, stopped suddenly, with a troubled face, as though he were going to cry. "No—no!—not me!—not me! my father!" Strange, ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... this had almost led to a fight. Nappy Martell, as he was usually called by his cronies, was a pupil at the military academy, and soon he and his crony, a big, overgrown bully, named Slogwell Brown, did what they could to make life miserable for all of the Rovers. But in one of their dirty tricks they over-reached themselves, and as a consequence they had been exposed and sent away from the institution of ...
— The Rover Boys on Snowshoe Island - or, The Old Lumberman's Treasure Box • Edward Stratemeyer

... appeared, a little girl of about ten, dressed in a chemise and a linen petticoat, with dirty, bare legs and a timid and cunning look. She remained standing in the doorway, as if to ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various

... confirmation of my speculations, and the substance of my hopes. Here lingered the fragment of a happier past, or stretched out the first tremulous organic filament of a more fortunate future. Thus glowed the distant Mexico to the eyes of Sawin, as he looked through the dirty pane of the recruiting-office window, or speculated from the summit of that mirage-Pisgah which the imps of the bottle are so cunning to raise up. Already had my Alnaschar-fancy (even during that first half-believing glance) expended in various useful directions the funds to be ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... past the middle of the afternoon, and even so mean-looking, dirty a tramp as that had a perfect right to be walking along then and there. The sunshine and the fresh salt air from the bay were as much his as anybody's, and so was the water in the bay, and no one in all that ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various

... those mountains monstrous excrescences. Their deformity, he said, was such that the most sterile plains seemed lovely by comparison. Fine weather, he complained, only made bad worse; for, the clearer the day, the more disagreeably did those misshapen masses of gloomy brown and dirty purple affect the eye. What a contrast, he exclaimed, between these horrible prospects and the beauties of Richmond Hill! [318] Some persons may think that Burt was a man of vulgar and prosaical mind: but they will scarcely venture to pass a similar judgment ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... re-load; the poor man blessed him for it, and he blessed the poor man. Upon reaching his musical friends at Salisbury they were surprised to see him so soiled and discomposed; but he told them the occasion, and when one of the company said to him "He had disparaged himself by so dirty an employment," his answer was, "That the thought of what he had done would prove music to him at midnight; and that the omission of it would have upbraided and made discord in his conscience whenever he should pass by that place; 'for if I be bound to pray for ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart

... dishes, and some tools would exhaust the list.[139] The goods and chattels of a landless labourer in 1431 consisted of a dish, an adze, a brass pot, 2 plates, 2 augers, an axe, a three-legged stool, and a barrel.[140] Englishmen of all classes were hopelessly dirty in their habits; even till the sixteenth century they were noted above other countries for the profuseness of their diet and their unclean ways. Erasmus spoke of the floor of his house as inconceivably filthy. To save fuel, the labourer's family in the cold season ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler

... line of cypresses edging the plateau of the Palatine on the side of the Tiber; and in the delicate blue atmosphere the intense greenery of these trees showed like a black fringe. They alone attracted the eye; the slope, of a dusty, dirty grey, stretched out bare and devastated, dotted by a few bushes, among which peeped fragments of ancient walls. All was instinct with the ravaged, leprous sadness of a spot handed over to excavation, and where only men of learning ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... merry about a fire. As she approached she saw the villagers and their guests squatting in a large circle about the blaze before which a half-dozen naked warriors leaped and bent and stamped in some grotesque dance. Pots of food and gourds of drink were being passed about among the audience. Dirty hands were plunged into the food pots and the captured portions devoured so greedily that one might have thought the entire community had been upon the point of starvation. The gourds they held to their lips until the beer ran down their chins and ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... to Rome, halfway between Ficulle and Viterbo, is the town of Orvieto. Travellers often pass it in the night-time. Few stop there, for the place is old and dirty, and its inns are said to be indifferent. But none who see it even from a distance can fail to be struck with its imposing aspect, as it rises from the level plain upon that mass of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... us, indeed! That's a notion! Look at my hands. D'ye see how dirty they are? And they smell of muck, and of pitch—but yours, see, are white. And what do they ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev

... who openly sought employers. His services were in great request among a certain set of people, and he had little idle time on his hands. His name was painted in dirty white letters on the black door of his dingy chambers on a fourth story. On this door he called himself, ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... very difficult to restrain my friend's ardor, and to induce him to defer his invasion of England to a more fitting occasion, so that at last he was fain to content himself with a sneering commentary on all around him; and in this amiable spirit we descended into a very dirty cellar to eat our first dinner ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... dirty children were playing in the street. Lack of food and pure air, together with unsanitary surroundings, had set its mark upon them. The deathly pallor that was in Peter's face was characteristic of most of ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House

... They were looking at me. Their faces were strange. They were dirty. They were clothed alike. I closed my eyes. I tried ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson

... then run about naked in a room under the impulse given by the tingling glow of reaction. If a play is made of the bath the habit will be formed for life, and in this way, one of the mother's chief struggles, to make the children clean themselves, will be abolished. It is natural for a child to get dirty, and therefore it should be made as habitual an impulse for them ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller

... hard to be sure whether jackets were dirty gray or faded blue. As the Union soldier had a not unfounded belief that the Virginia woods were swarming with bushwhackers (Confederate guerillas), the haste of a few men left behind to rejoin the column ...
— Rebel Raider • H. Beam Piper

... who goes out to do any kind of odd and dirty work; hence the term char-woman in our polished dialect; but ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings

... maid of Donna Isidora. I knew her at Toledo, and for years kept her company. During my absence,—Saint Petronila strike him with the leprosy!—a certain Lopez, a dirty, shuffling, addle-pated knave, stepped in between us, and married her. She took the poor fool purely through pique, because I did not write to her; and the holy saint knows ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat

... arrangement and fitting of these pegs and holes depend the secrecy and security of the lock. It is no easy matter at times to unlock these locks, and requires a very practised hand. The floors are covered with a thick layer of sand, even many of the sleeping rooms, which sand is clean or dirty according to the quality and cleanliness ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... vehicle, though a few of the principal ones would permit the passage of two; and the pavements consisted of huge stones, not remarkable either for evenness or smoothness. A channel ran down the middle of the street, into which every housewife emptied her slops from the window, and along which dirty water, sewerage, straw, drowned rats, and mud, floated in profuse and odoriferous mezee. Margery found it desirable to make considerable use of her pomander, a ball of various mixed drugs inclosed in a gold network, and emitting a pleasant fragrance when carried in the warm hand. As she proceeded ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt

... disgrace of humanity." "Why, dear sir," said I, "how odd you are! you have often said the lad was not capable of receiving further instruction." "He was," replied the Doctor, "like a corked bottle, with a drop of dirty water in it, to be sure; one might pump upon it for ever without the smallest effect; but when every method to open and clean it had been tried, you would not have me grieve that the bottle ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... and thinkin' before we spends a penny, no, nor before we spends a pound neither. Now, old Louis Krause's wife, she's a close one, worst kind you see, she wouldn't give a crittur that much! Her old man died o' rage because he lost a dirty little two-thousand, playin' cards. No, we ain't that kind. You see that sideboard over there. That cost me two hundred crowns, not countin' the freight even. Baron Klinkow hisself couldn't have ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... with his sordid gangs of Eastsiders nudging each other on a dirty bench, can't deny it," ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... French soldiers, and they were soon telling me their experience of the hard fighting in which they had been engaged. They were dirty, unshaven, dusty from head to foot, scorched by the August sun, in tattered uniforms and broken boots; but they were beautiful men for all their dirt, and the laughing courage, quiet confidence, and unbragging simplicity ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various

... most unqualified claim of liberty and equality for all men and proceeded, in the Constitution, to give nineteen years' grace to "that most detestable sum of all villainies," as Wesley called it, the African slave trade, and to impose on the States which thought slavery wrong the dirty work of restoring escaped slaves to captivity. "Why," Dr. Johnson had asked, "do the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of slaves?" We are forced to recognise, upon any study of the facts, that they could not really have made the Union otherwise ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... adherent to diaphragm and costal pleura, near the spine. Base of lung hardened, containing a cyst with a large lump, of the size of a two-quart measure, floating in pus; outside of the lump was of a dirty yellow-white, irregular, brittle, and cheesy; the inside mottled, or divided into irregular squares; red like muscle, and breaking under the finger, like liver. Costal pleura smooth, shining; adhesions where there was motion; card-like and polished; no serum; lung ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings

... day The dirty clothes to rub Upon the washboard, when she dived Headforemosht o'er the tub; She lit upon her back an' yelled, As she was lying flat: "Go git your goon an' kill the bashte." O'Grady's ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various

... stop at some station, and a shabby and dirty-looking man entered the car. There was but one seat vacant, the ...
— Mark Mason's Victory • Horatio Alger

... than father's arm. His tail was small. It did not seem to be as long as one of his tusks. His legs were larger around than the trunk of the biggest apple tree in our orchard. His skin was something like a hog's skin, only thicker, and he had no hair. His whole body was a dirty, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education

... laughed. "Him, your honour—him no more! Isn't he the man of whom the black folk say: "Lucky buckra—morning, lucky new-comer!" If that's his reputation, and the coming of his hounds just when the island most needed them is good proof of it, do you think he'll be killed by a lot of dirty Maroons! Ah, Calhoun's a man with the luck of the devil, your honour! He has the pull—as sure as heaven's above he'll make success. If you command your staff to have this posted as a proclamation throughout the island, it will do as much good as a thousand ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... CONDUCT OF CHARLES.—The year 1665 was marked as the year of the Great Plague in London, where the narrow and dirty streets admitted little fresh air. It was estimated that not less than one hundred thousand people perished. In less than a year after the plague ceased, there occurred the Great Fire in London (Sept., 1666), which burned for three days, and laid London in ashes from the Tower to the Temple, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... well. One evening, after a sail northwards as fine as the voyage down was dirty, they came up gently within forty miles of Boston, and then, because there was nothing else to do, went idling up and down all night, keeping watch. The next morning there was a mist in the air, which might become ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... climbed it, and fallen from it, and torn and bruised myself on it uncountable numbers of times? and I gave it such a hearty kiss that my nose and chin were smudged into one green stain, and still I did not care. Far from caring, it filled me with a reckless, Backfisch pleasure in being dirty, a delicious feeling that I had not had for years. Alice in Wonderland, after she had drunk the contents of the magic bottle, could not have grown smaller more suddenly than I grew younger the moment I passed through that magic door. Bad habits cling ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp

... the young woman for an old one, naturally enough. Wrinkles, coming long before their time, furrowed her face and neck; she was clothed so grotesquely in a worn-out goatskin that if it had not been for a dirty yellow petticoat, a distinctive mark of sex, Hulot would hardly have known the gender she belonged to; for the meshes of her long black hair were twisted up and hidden by a red worsted cap. The tatters of the little boy did not cover him, but left ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac

... of the population in behalf of his person. Still, this may arise from a quiet resolve to keep him where he is, and an assurance that he can't be ousted in spite of the people and army. It is significant, I think, that Emile de Girardin should stretch out a hand (a little dirty, be it observed in passing), and that Lamartine, after fasting nineteen days and nights (a miraculous fast, without fear of the 'prefect'), should murmur a 'credo' in favour of his honesty. As to honesty, 'I do believe he's honest;' that is to say, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... kettles about him, who was lazy, as most Tinkers are when not at hard work, and lay on his back chewing straw, and cursing me fiercely whenever I moved. There was a Welsh gentleman, very ragged and dirty, with a wife raggeder and dirtier than he. He was addressed as Captain, and was bound, he said, for Bristol, to raise soldiers for the King's Service. He beat his wife now and then, before we came to Hounslow. There was the tinker's dog, a great terror to me; for although ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... in the middle of the church, in the thick of the ragged, dirty, unsavoury villagers. When Mass was over, he returned to the cloisters, and there, face to face, he met the lady ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland

... of courts, was dirty, unkempt and careless, a genuine son of the soil, heedless of fate, and an ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield

... evidently the owner of the store, and unmistakably a Jew, instantly appeared. Picking up the book, and wiping it with a dirty handkerchief, he thrust it ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell

... Romi, or gens maries, numbered about three hundred men and women, besides the children, who were very numerous. They divided themselves into seven bands, all of which followed the same track. Very dirty, excessively ugly, and remarkable for their dark complexions, these people had for their leaders a duke and a count, as they were called, who were superbly dressed, and to whom they acknowledged allegiance. Some of them rode on horseback, whilst others went on foot. The women and children ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix

... opens my eyes again I see the truck driver crawling down off his seat, wiping perspiration from his forehead. Over on the opposite curb there's a long, lean, lanky bird getting to his feet and helping up a badly scared youngster that's all wet and dirty. ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman

... under the name of swallow. I have not spoken of the swift, which does not visit this country till May; it is the largest of the swallow family, and has the whole of its body, both above and beneath, of a blackish-brown colour, except a small patch of dirty white under ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton

... dirty now, every one," confided Nell. "He had on five yesterday, and two this morning. He spilt his porridge down one at breakfast, and he nursed Floss in the other. She had just come in from the garden, and ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil

... admiral always sighed and shook his head gravely at the news, as if Brutus and Cassius had been sons of his own, who treated him with a want of proper filial respect. In two or three days' time the dogs always returned, lean, dirty, and heartily ashamed of themselves. For the whole of the next day they were invariably tied up in disgrace. On the day after they were scrubbed clean, and were formally re-admitted to the dining-room. There, Civilization, acting through the subtle ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... the ferry-boat gently alongside the landing-stage beneath the high wall of the Quay, and made his way through the underground passage and up the dirty steps that lead into one of the narrow ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman

... can keep permanently afraid: fear goes at last to the back of one's mind, accepted, and shelved, and done with. He squatted over his soup, sopping it up with his bread, and contemplated his comrades. They were all rather yellow and dirty, with four-day beards, and they grouped themselves in the tired, unpremeditated manner of men on a wreck. They talked little. The situation perplexed them beyond any suggestion of ideas. Three had been hurt in the pitching up of the ship during the fight, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... of his box and opened the door of one of the carriages—a dirty-looking second-class compartment; the other was a third-class; and a gentleman leaped out. A tall, slender man of about four-and-twenty; a man evidently of birth and breeding. He wore a light summer overcoat on his well-cut clothes, and had a most ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood

... to perceive the boys as they came close up to him. As he saw them he gave a sudden start, his eyes opened wider and wider until the whites showed all round, his teeth chattered, the shiny black of his face turned to a sort of dirty gray, and he threw up his hands with a loud cry, "oh, golly, ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty

... framed in the opening—an indescribably dirty, unutterably weary face, with matted white hair and a rime of whitish beard stubble on the jaws. It was fallen in and sunken and it drooped on the chest of its owner. The mouth, swollen and pulpy, as if from repeated ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... would have supposed that Bill's remark should have been, "We have got dirty weather," for at the time he spoke the good ship was bending down before a stiff breeze, which caused the dark sea to dash over her bulwarks and sweep the decks continually, while thick clouds, the colour of pea-soup, were scudding ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne

... had "Hamlin" left our room, reclad in his dirty uniform and headed for certain punishment back at his camp, than Mr. Davis proclaimed his intention ...
— The Deserter • Richard Harding Davis

... that he stuck his hands suddenly in his pockets, turned away from me, and stared very resolutely out of the dirty bow-window. ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... of not having it wear off soon enough to suit his purposes, he had gone to a professional hair dyer, and had ordered his shock of hair indelibly dyed to a dirty brick-red; and he had put spots on his face, and the back of his hands, with nitrate of silver, so that the spots burned into the skin. No soap and water could remove these. They would only disappear with time; but Patsy had never traveled on ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter

... things which, in the eye of the ordinary possessor, are really worthless. From estimating them at little value, and paying little for them, the steps are rather too short to estimating them at nothing, and paying nothing for them. What matters it, a few dirty black-letter leaves picked out of that volume of miscellaneous trash—leaves which the owner never knew he had, and cannot miss—which he would not know the value of, had you told him of them? What use of putting notions into the greedy barbarian's head, as if one were to find treasures for him? ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... had, when it came to the point, been inclined to put off a little longer. She was not afraid, she dared anything, but Mellersh was in such an admirable humour—why risk clouding it just yet? When, however, soon after breakfast Costanza appeared with a pile of very dirty little bits of paper covered with sums in pencil, and having knocked at Mrs. Fisher's door and been sent away, and at Lady Caroline's door and been sent away, and at Rose's door and had no answer because Rose had gone ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim

... the scuta, or on the scuta and terga, (and sometimes more on one side of the individual than on the other,) a nearly straight line, running diagonally across the capitulum, of slight, quadrilateral depressions, of a dirty greenish colour, with the edges blending away, is either conspicuously developed, or can only just be discerned. These marks increase in size from the umbones to the margins of the valves. There ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin

... niches or "hand-holds" were about two feet apart. He examined the lower ones. They were deeply chiselled, affording a substantial foothold as well as a grip for a strong, resolute climber. Most of them were packed with dirty, wind blown leaves from the trees nearby,—so tightly packed by the furious rains that beat against the rock that he had difficulty in removing the substance. Higher up they appeared to be quite clean and ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon

... cackle of occasional laughter, and took especial note of "War Eagle" Ivus Niles, who led the parade. A fuzzy and ancient silk hat topped his head, a rusty frock-coat flapped about his legs, and he tugged along at the end of a cord a dirty buck sheep. A big crowd followed; but when they shuffled into the yard of "The Barracks" most of the men were grinning, as though they had come merely to look on at a show. The old man in his aureole of roots gazed at them with composure, ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day

... The spidery, dirty, ridiculous business! Laying his arms on the table, he leaned his forehead on them. Full ten minutes he rested thus, till a managing clerk roused him with the draft prospectus of a new issue of shares, very desirable, in Manifold and Topping's. That ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... they pay many times more than the natives, are not admitted. The reason of this is to be found in our manners, which are coarse and uncultivated in the eyes of the natives. "The European walks with his dirty boots on the carpets, spits on the floor, is uncivil to the girls, &c." Thanks to the letters of introduction from natives acquainted with the restaurant-keepers, I have been admitted to their exclusive ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... pontiff, with a black neck-band, old Schwalbach, the famous picture-dealer, displayed his prophet's beard, tawny in places like a dirty fleece, his three overcoats tinged by mildew, all that loose and negligent attire for which he was excused in the name of art, and because, in a time when the mania for picture galleries had already begun to cause millions to ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... is beautiful!" cried Jeanne. "Something like the farms outside of the palisades at home. Inside—" she made a pretty gesture of dissatisfaction,—"the town is crowded and dirty and full of bad smells, except at the end where some of the officers and the court people and the rich folk live. They are building some new places up by the military gardens and St. Anne's Church, and beside the little river, where everything keeps green and which is full of ducks ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... being arrested, and that means an indefinite waste of time, perhaps several days; and time, that had defeated me at the Gries, threatened me here again. I had nothing to sell or to pawn, and I had no friends. The Consul I would not attempt; I knew too much of such things as Consuls when poor and dirty men try them. Besides which, there was ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... that three-sided well of a brick-paved yard, and walked towards the printing-office at the far end of the narrow strip of garden, the first door beyond the pump-trough led him to a flight of stairs. The flight of stairs, dirty and littered, mounted to a lumber-room, where there were great piles of waste-paper, refuse from the shop and office. There were many torn and battered old books here, and most of them were deserving of the neglect into which they had fallen. The father had bought old books literally ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... you don't like to be washed and be drest, But would you be dirty and foul? Come, drive that long sob from your dear little breast, And clear your sweet face ...
— Phebe, The Blackberry Girl • Edward Livermore

... that. It's only that if you feed him, we'll never get rid of him. Doesn't he look dirty ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith

... Kitchen,—squads of young apprentices and assistants, the shutters being closed over the scene of their labours, came hither for fresh air doubtless,—rakish young medical students, gallant, dashing, what is called "loudly" dressed, and (must it be owned?) somewhat dirty,—were here smoking and drinking, and vociferously applauding the songs; young university bucks were to be found here, too, with that indescribable genteel simper which is only learned at the knees ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... inside dressed in a pair of red plush breeches, white stockings a good deal soiled, a yellow long-flapped waistcoat, and a wig, with a cue to it which extended down the whole length of his back,—evidently a servant in dirty lively. There was something degagee and rather impudent in his manner and appearance, which Harry considered as in good keeping with all he had heard of this eccentric nobleman. Like master like ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... of this which happened at the time. Chancing to cross the King's path as he was going to Marly and I coming from Rambouillet, my two postillions jumped from their horses, threw themselves on the high road upon their knees, though it was very dirty, and remained there, offering up their benedictions, till he ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe

... When calicoes incline to fade, the colors can be set by washing them in lukewarm water, with beef's gall, in the proportion of a tea-cup full to four or five gallons of water. Rinse them in fair water—no soap is necessary, without the clothes are very dirty. If so, wash them in lukewarm suds, after they have been first rubbed out in beef's gall water. The beef's gall can be kept several months, by squeezing it out of the skin in which it is enclosed, adding salt to it, and bottled and corked tight. The water that potatoes ...
— The American Housewife • Anonymous



Words linked to "Dirty" :   unclean, draggled, muck, colly, dirty word, soiled, off-color, travel-soiled, impure, bawdy, feculent, dirty pool, salacious, grungy, smudgy, marked-up, clean, infected, foul-mouthed, lewd, dirty money, indecent, bedraggled, raunchy, sooty, dirty linen, dirty bomb, stormy, smutty, grime, nasty, dirty dog, flyblown, septic, foul-spoken, filthy, squalid, dirty war, muddy up, grimy, Augean, dirty tricks, buggy, muddied, illegible, ill-gotten, dirty story, splash, hostile, dirty trick, blasphemous, scabrous, profane, uncleanly, dirty joke, untidy, ribald, snotty, unsportsmanlike, dingy, dirtying, dirtiness, cruddy, pestiferous, blemish, alter, dirt, spot, smear, ratty, crock, change, dirty laundry, begrime, blue, unswept, befouled, muddy, slime, mire, unsporting, cobwebby, begrimed, unfair, cheating, dirty-minded, mucky, pollute, mud, scatological, dirty old man, fouled, maculate, muck up, foul, snot-nosed, awful, illegal, corrupt, contaminate, lousy, sordid, greasy, black, modify, obscene, scummy, travel-stained, soil, contaminating



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com