Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

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




Gibe   Listen
verb
Gibe  v. i.  (past & past part. gibed; pres. part. gibing)  To cast reproaches and sneering expressions; to rail; to utter taunting, sarcastic words; to flout; to fleer; to scoff. "Fleer and gibe, and laugh and flout."






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





"Gibe" Quotes from Famous Books



... a gibe for his publicly expressed hopes of peace. Mason denounced his letter to Virginia gentlemen as a "puny, pusillanimous attempt to hoodwink" the people of Virginia. But Douglas replied with an earnest reiteration ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... he was meriting the old gibe of the atheists. He was shirking the responsibility of himself, turning it over to an ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... of these letters, the constant comparison between the two peoples, with many a gibe at the English, but always turning to their advantage, the preference given to the philosophical system of Newton over that of Descartes, lastly the attacks upon religion concealed beneath the cloak of banter—all this was more than enough to ruffle the tranquillity of Cardinal ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... there was no need for a hearth fire, but how exquisitely home-like and dear that room could be when the snow drove outside and there was the leap of flame on the hearth! Sydney was a scholar and a gentleman. He had led a gentle and sequestered life. Here in his native village there were none to gibe and sneer. The contrast of the traveling show would be as great for him as it had been for Margaret, but he was the male of the species, and she the female. Chivalry, racial, harking back to the beginning of nobility in the human, to its earliest dawn, fired Sydney. The pale ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... this reply to the oft-repeated gibe to which we have referred, it is also true that nowhere does the square man in the round hole do quite as great and as lasting injury as he does from the pulpit. The right man for the work—that must be the ideal of the Church, that man and no other, whatever be the ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson

... mental powers but what we possess, the inference would be precarious enough. The Anthropomorphist in the strict sense—the man who thinks that God or the gods must have human bodies—no doubt renders himself liable to the gibe that, if oxen could think, they would imagine the gods to be like oxen, and so on. But the cases are not parallel. We have no difficulty in thinking that in other worlds there may be colours which we have never seen, or whole groups of sensation different from our own: we cannot think that any ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... was given control of the Korean finances. He quickly brought extensive and, on the whole, admirable changes into the currency. Under the old methods, Korean money was among the worst in the world. The famous gibe of a British Consul in an official report, that the Korean coins might be divided into good, good counterfeits, bad counterfeits, and counterfeits so bad that they can only be passed off in the dark, was by no means an effort of imagination. In ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie

... The first glimpse of the hollow cheeks and the unshaven face of Bull Hunter quite awakened her. Bull could feel her watching him, as she glided about the room. He sunk his head between his shoulders and glared down at the table. No doubt she would begin to gibe at him before long. Most women did. He prepared himself to meet with patience that incredible sting and penetrating ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand

... I was one morning playing at marbles in the village ball alley, with a light heart and lighter pocket. The gibe and the jest went gaily round, when suddenly there appeared amongst us a stranger, of a very remarkable and very cheerful aspect; his intrusion was not the least restraint upon our merry little assemblage, on the contrary, he seemed pleased, and even delighted; he was a benevolent creature, ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various

... of vanity and folly. It overcomes me with pain to hear the thoughtless laugh aloud after them, in the public ways. For they are simply short-sighted trustful people, the myopic victims of the salesman and saleswoman. The little children gibe at them, pelt even.... And somewhere in the world ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... one. You won't let me convert you, I know; you always used to gibe and jeer at my philosophy. But ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley

... to give the only reply possible to such a gibe. These breakfast interludes had not lost piquancy in all these months. "I'm half a mind to go to this thing. I would, if it didn't break up my ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... College, or how their minds were developed in the highest sense, so long as they came out well in the Schools List. He was alleged, that is, to take a tradesman's view of learning. These kinds of gibe I naturally found soothing, for I was able to imagine myself as a scholar, though not as a winner of a First. Incidentally, also, though I did not acknowledge it to myself, I think I was a little hurt by the Master's want of what I might call humanity, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... gibed—but the gibe itself was almost a caress. "Sometimes you remind me of an impatient boy who has been promised a peach and can't wait until it ripens. But if you must have a reason why I won't drive you this afternoon, you may. We are going to have a tiny ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... trampled down the grass in Heaven's Meadow, They tore the flowers about, And flung them on the earth beyond the paling, With gibe, and ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various

... the student hears no mention of living immigrant or pioneer save in terms of gibe and sneer and taunt. The color and high romance of his own township is a thing undreamed of, as vague and shapeless as the foundations of Enoch, the city of Cain. And for his own farmstead, though for the first time on earth a man made here a home; though valor ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... saying yesterday—" and Duke repeated a bit of gossip that had a gibe at the Lorrigans for its point. "He got it over to Hitchcocks. It come from the Douglases. I guess Mary Hope don't want nothing of us—except what she can get out of us. We been a ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower

... assurance of sympathy, his terror of the commonplace—surely one knows them well? His tolerance of any impertinence, lest he should be thought to have misunderstood a jest, is a great distinction. But Congreve's gibe in the dedication at the critics, who failed 'to distinguish betwixt the character of a Witwoud and a Truewit,' is hardly fair: as Dryden said of Etherege's Sir Fopling, he is 'a fool so nicely writ, The ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve

... dinner time and the mother invited Viola to partake of their plain fare. She said: "You air u'st to all de good tings money can buy. We'uns cayn't gibe you much, but sich as we'uns hab you air ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick

... known the form of mock debate, Or seen a new-made mayor's unwieldy state; Where change of fav'rites made no change of laws, And senates heard, before they judg'd a cause; How would'st thou shake at Britain's modish tribe, Dart the quick taunt, and edge the piercing gibe? Attentive truth and nature to descry, And pierce each scene with philosophick eye; To thee were solemn toys, or empty show, The robes of pleasure, and the veils of woe: All aid the farce, and all thy mirth maintain, Whose joys are causeless, or whose griefs ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... him and herself at once on their common enemies. She wondered whether Lord Lovat's cool assurance would give way at such a moment—she almost feared not—almost shrank already from the idea of some wounding gibe—frowned and clenched her hands while fancying what it would be, and then smiled at the thought of how she would smile, and bow an eternal farewell to the dying man, reminding him of her old promise to sit at a window and see his ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau

... the Indian Poet Amir Khusru, puts in the mouth of his king Kaikobad a contemptuous gibe at the Mongols with their cotton-quilted dresses. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... tale, and the rest rejoicing in it; and the bright sun, glowing on their withered skin, discovered perhaps no viler thing in all the world to shine upon. One of them even pointed at my mill-wheel with a witty gibe—at least, perhaps, it was wit to him—about the Sawyer's misfortune; but the sun was then in his eyes, and my dress was just of the color of the timber. So on they rode, and the pleasant turf (having lately received some rain) softly answered to the ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... her face with an air of well-feigned alarm. "You don't think the sprain has gone to your head, Fanny?" he asked, and walked away, leaving Mr. Arbuton to the ladies. Mrs. Ellison did not care for this or any other gibe, if she but served her own purposes; and now, having made everybody laugh and given the conversation a lively turn, she was as perfectly content as if she had not been herself an offering to the cause of cheerfulness. She was, indeed, equal to any ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells

... not go to the Opera, his general faculty of enjoyment was unimpaired, and, as always, he loved a gibe at the clergy. On the 30th of November 1841, Samuel Wilberforce wrote to a friend about George Augustus Selwyn,[140] ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell

... The gibe acted differently on Paul. He recalled that Stanley had really suffered for him; he recalled too, the note of warning that had been left for him in his dormitory. Perhaps, after all, it had been written by Stanley? The Stanley he had once known as a friend. And there came over him the ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting

... Giles's hurrying out before him lined the street, and watched the old man as he crept along down the hill to his house, with many a shaken head and many a murmured blessing. In this last scene all were unanimous; there was no one to cast a gibe or an unkindly look upon that slow aged progress from the scene of his greatest labours to the death-bed which awaited him. When the spectators saw him disappear within his own door, they all knew that it was for the last time. He lay for about ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... Oxford last May—in the height of the summer term, just at that moment when Oxford normally is at its loveliest and fullest, brimming over with young life, the streets crowded with caps and gowns, the river and towing-path alive with the "flannelled fools," who have indeed flung back Rudyard Kipling's gibe—if it ever applied to them—with interest. For they had all disappeared. They were in the trenches, landing at Suvla, garrisoning Egypt, pushing up to Baghdad. The colleges contained a few forlorn remnants—under age, or medically unfit. ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... face flushed under this gibe, but before he could set his retort in order Tom had turned to Wilson, and was saying, with placid ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... advanc'd his head, And saw the monarch of the flood Lying half smothered in the mud. He calls the croaking race around: "A wooden king!" the banks resound. Fear once remov'd they swim about him, And gibe and jeer and mock and flout him; And messengers to Jove depute, Effectively to grant their suit. A hungry stork he sent them then, Who soon had swallow'd half the fen. Their woes scarce daring to reveal, To Mercury by night they steal, And beg him ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park

... open spoken, and no respecter of persons; and a woman may forgive an injury, but never a scornful gibe. It is this that has brought both France and Russia on him. Madame Pompadour, who is all powerful, hates Frederick for having made disrespectful remarks concerning her. The Empress of Russia detests him, for the same reason. She of Austria ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty

... continue. Pao-y was in Tai y's apartments relating about the rat-elves, when Pao-ch'ai entered unannounced, and began to gibe Pao-y, with trenchant irony: how that on the fifteenth of the first moon, he had shown ignorance of the allusion to the green wax; and the three of them then indulged in that room in mutual poignant satire, for the sake of fun. Pao-y had been giving way to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... are exchanged between the trenches when they are within such easy hearing distance of each other; but always from a safe position behind the parapet which the adversaries squint across through their periscopes. At the gibe business the German is, perhaps, better ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... Schwab, taking Schmucke's quaint inquiry for a gibe, of which that perfect Christian was ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... strangest things I ever heard of," he complained. "It almost seems as if it was a talent that I didn't possess." He went once more minutely through his proofs. "A clerk would simply gibe at them," said he. "Well, there's nothing else but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to hear you say so," said my uncle. "One has to come into the country to hear honest loyalty, for a sneer and a gibe are more the fashions in town. The King is grateful to me for the interest which I have ever shown in his son. He likes to think that the Prince has a man of ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... back to her mother in Vienna. It aroused in the Empress a resentment and a bitterness that did not rest until the splendid Cardinal-Prince was recalled from his embassy. It did not rest even then. By the ridicule to which the gibe exposed her—and if you know Marie Therese at all, you can imagine what that meant—it provoked a hostility that was indefatigably to labour ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... his opponent to pay his flippant gibe the honor of repartee, he was disappointed. To be sure, Hobart, admirably erect in his slender grace, was moved to a slight, disdainful smile, but it evidenced scarcely the appreciation that anybody less impervious to criticism than Ridgway ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine

... throw spells and weave charms and invoke conjures. He wore a pair of shoes which had been worn by a man who was hanged, and these shoes, as is well known, leave no tracks which a dog will nose after or a witch follow, or a ha'nt. Small boys did not gibe at Daddy Hannah, you bet you! There was Major Burnley, who lived for years and years in the same house with the wife with whom he had quarreled and never spoke a word to her or she to him. But the list is overlong for calling. With us, in that day and time, town characters ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... The gibe brought no response; yet slowly, so gradually that it was not possible to tell when it began, a look that was wholly rational came into his eyes. He blinked, touched his dry lips with his dry tongue and, turning his head, recognized her ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart

... angry. Not that I cared for the gibe; but because I disliked that one there should hear me called ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed

... people have dwelt upon our lands, serving the true God and His Prophet," he declared, with quivering indignation; "but now those idolaters have come. They gibe and they mock at me beneath my very window. My prayers are broken by their yammerings; they defile my casement, and the stench of their presence assails ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach

... not pay me," replied the lad, "but as soon as your worship had passed out of the wood and we were alone, he tied me up again to the same oak and gave me a fresh flogging, that left me like a flayed Saint Bartholomew; and every stroke he gave me he followed up with some jest or gibe about having made a fool of your worship, and but for the pain I was suffering I should have laughed at the things he said. In short he left me in such a condition that I have been until now in a hospital getting cured of the injuries which that rascally clown inflicted on me then; for all which ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... they are true, and if Madame de Grammont was the culprit, it is a sad confirmation of the old gibe, "Skittish in youth, prudish in age." It can only be pleaded in extenuation that some youth which was not skittish, such as Sarah Marlborough's, matured or turned into something worse than "devotion." And Elizabeth Hamilton was so ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... called his son "a one-legged fiddler" when he missed the dip of wave; while Mordacks stood with his leg's apart, and playing the easy part of critic, had his sneers at both of them. But they let him gibe to his liking; because they knew their work, and he did not. And, upon the ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... Wilde, which had been interrupted after he left prison by a silly gibe directed rather against the go-between he had sent to me than against him, was renewed in Paris early in 1898. I have related the little misunderstanding in the Appendix. I had never felt anything but the most cordial affection for Oscar and as soon as I went to Paris and met him I explained ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... hiss is music to his ears and a curse is a hushaby, lullaby song. Put him out of business? Why say, doesn't nearly every editorial writer in the country jump on him every day, and don't all the paragraphers gibe at him, and don't all the cartoonists lampoon him, and don't all of us who write news from down here in Washington give him the worst of it in our despatches?... And what's the result? Mallard takes on flesh and every red-mouthed agitator ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... In heart and soul I am an artist, I dabble in colours, I dream of lights and shades and glorious effects; but the power of working out my ideas is denied me. If I try to paint a tree my friends gibe at me. I am a poor literary hack; but I give you my word, my dear old Philistine, that I would willingly change places with you." Anna smiled, she was accustomed to this sort of talk; but to her surprise Verity, who had just rejoined them, ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... who, vain and proud, May ape the manners of the crowd, Lisp French, and lame it at each word, And jest and gibe to all afford:— But we, as in long ages past, Will still ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... nobleness of his nature made him ashamed of it, as soon as he had clambered back with his trophy. He felt that the sanctity of Saul's office as the anointed of the Lord should have saved him from the gibe. The king goes his way all unawares, and, as it would seem, had not regained his men, when David, leaving his band (very much out of temper no doubt at his foolish nicety), yields to a gush of ancient friendship and calls loudly after him, risking discovery and capture ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren

... the want of breeding and tastes, as infallibly as the needle points to the pole. Cards were often introduced in Mr. Effingham's drawing- room, and there was one apartment expressly devoted to a billiard- table; and many was the secret fling, and biting gibe, that these pious devotees passed between themselves, on the subject of so flagrant an instance of immorality, in a family of so high moral pretensions; the two worthies not unfrequently concluding their comments by repairing to some secret room in a tavern, where, after carefully ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper

... he turns; with a sea-hawk scream, and a gibe, and a song, Cries: "So; I will spare ye the child if, in sight of ye all, Ten blows on Maclean's bare back shall fall, And ye reckon no stroke if the blood follow not at the ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... jeer and gibe if you saw a man sinking in the waves time after time in spite o' rafts and life-preservers thrown out to him from ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin

... so, she looked up. A streak of light shot right across the statue, and the cruel face with its leering eyes seemed to smile down upon her mockingly, jeeringly, and she actually shrank, as if she dreaded to hear the satyr lips shoot some evil gibe ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice

... the parrot, with such appropriateness that even Hope had to join feebly in the woman's jolly laughter, while Faith plucked up strength to gibe a little in return for her sister's attack ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry

... said tenderly, "He is now become miserable, and that insures the protection of Johnson." At another "Mitre" meeting, on a Scotch gentleman present praising Scotch scenery, Johnson uttered his bitter gibe, "Sir, let me tell you that the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England." In the same month Johnson and Boswell met again at the "Mitre." The latter confessed his nerves ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... reason or other Bagshaw was always very decent to me, and when he heard that Ward, Dennison, Collier, Lambert and I were going to finish the evening at The Reindeer he asked me to come home in the brake, but that gibe of Dennison's was heavy upon me and I had determined to stick to my promise and do whatever came my way. I did not expect that the evening was going to be anything but a rowdy one, for when Lambert did undertake a thing he went at it most ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley

... In fact, the gibe was partly true. The detective had himself well in hand, and he knew that even though he were justified, a wounded man would lead to an inquiry which at the very least would prevent his going on with the Grell investigation for some time. But to let the taunt pass would invite disaster. ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest

... high-placed and heartless transgressors? Priests though they were, and therefore bound by their office to help any poor creature that was struggling with a wounded conscience, they had nothing better to say to him than this scornful gibe, 'What is that to us? ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... him, and he stands mute. The judge declares the dreadful penalty, and he stands mute. Oh, my father, my poor father! I tell ye my father will not mind anything. The Governor and the justices may command him as they will, the afflicted may clamor and gibe as they will, and I may pray to him, but he will not mind, he will stand mute. I tell ye there be not power enough in the colony to make him speak. Ye know not my father. He will ...
— Giles Corey, Yeoman - A Play • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... Of the gibe I took little heed. What imported was her warning. And I did not doubt that she had good cause to warn me. I remembered with a shudder her old-time habit of listening at doors. It was very probable that in like manner had she now gathered information that ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... that the habitee has quit worrying about it. And yet since the dawn of time when Adam poked fun at Eve's way of wearing her fig-leaf and on down through the centuries until the present day and date it has ever been the custom of men to gibe at the garments worn by women. Take our humorous publications, which I scarcely need point out are edited by men. Hardly could our comic weeklies manage to come out if the jokes about the things which women wear were ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... Domremy, In thine innocence only strong, Thou seest not the treason before thee, The gibe and the curse of the throng,— The furnace-pile in the market That licks out its flames to take thee;— For He who loves thee in heaven On earth will ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... young men watch him so that they may learn how to fish in deep and rough water, such as ours." These remarks were of course duly made public, and caused much indignation, neither the minister nor his flock liking the gibe about the deep, rough water; also the insinuation that anything about fishing was to be learnt from the new white man was annoying and ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke

... it held. Borso's court found him much to its taste. The men, however tall, of looks however terrible, bent their height and unbent their scowls to him; he was the pet of all the women; the very Fool, saturnine as he was (with a bite in every jest), had no gibe to put him to the blush withal. He made money, or money's worth, as fast as friends. A gold chain with a peregrine in enamel and jewels came to him by the hands of the Chamberlain; nothing was said, but he knew it was from the Duke. Countess Lionella ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... "So have I." He stood up, squaring his broad shoulders. "And I'm coming again—by special invitation." His dark eyes flung a gibe with the words. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... recorded that "the pilgrims did find no answer to the riddle, and the Clerk of Oxenford thought that the Prioress had been deceived in the matter thereof; whereupon the lady was sore vexed, though the gentle knight did flout and gibe at the poor clerk because of his lack of understanding over other of the riddles, which did fill him with shame and make ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney

... My gibe, harmless though it was, stung them into speech, and both at once, for I have noticed, however stupid they may be, that men never ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard

... the speaker to her husband. But Frederick had again put on his mask of apathetic indifference and answered his wife's gibe only by a shrug of his shoulders. Noting her brother's scowling face, ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... was one thing to hold up their heads at the shanty, and quite another to hold them up on the noisy, swarming campus where they knew nobody, and where the ill-bred bullies of the school felt free to jeer and gibe at their poor clothing and ...
— The Widow O'Callaghan's Boys • Gulielma Zollinger

... And at the thought of that other lover—he was convinced that that beloved person was a lover, and she found herself unable to say a word to explain to him that this other person, the person she loved, did not even know of her love—Ramage grew angry and savage once more, and returned suddenly to gibe and insult. Men do services for the love of women, and the woman who takes must pay. Such was the simple code that displayed itself in all his thoughts. He left that arid rule clear of the least ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... smilingly told me "I was a crank about my American public." I took his little gibe in good part; for while he knew foreign audiences, he certainly did not know American ones as well as I, who have faced them from ocean to ocean, from British Columbia to Florida. Two characteristics they all share in common,—intelligence and ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris

... persist in living—cabbage. He is effeminate, cowardly, dishonest—a mere fraction of a man both in soul and body. He is represented by the thinnest fellow in the company; his starved person and frightened look are the unfailing signals for a laugh; and he is never spoken to but in a gibe at his trade: ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various

... and non-committal gibe satisfied most of the audience, and I was about to proceed to the next question when my interlocutor, a litigious-looking man with blue spectacles, rose ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay

... spite of the difficulties and impediments besetting him at every step, his promise of greatness and usefulness was not belied. In the Introduction to his commentary on Maimuni's Guide to the Perplexed (Gibe'at ha-Moreh), in which he attempted to reconcile his master's system with that of modern philosophy—even as the master had tried to reconcile Judaism with Aristotelianism—he gave a brief sketch of the development of modern thought. This part of his work was assiduously studied by his compatriots. ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... laws were not just nor their religion true. Josephus meets the charge—which in the materialistic thinking of the Roman world was hard to answer—by the not very happy plea that the Egyptians and Greeks had suffered a like fortune. So, too, he meets the gibe that the Jews do not eat pork, by saying that the Egyptian priests abstain likewise. He omits in both cases the true religious answer, which would probably not have appealed ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich

... a purty fix, now ain't it?" thought the victim of her embrace, casting a wary eye up and down the Lane, lest any mate should see and gibe at him, and call him a "softy." Besides, for Glory to become sentimental—if this was sentiment—was as novel as for him to be generous. So, to relieve the situation, the newsboy put these two new things together and wrenched himself free, saying, "Quit it, Glory Beck! I got to ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond

... the pair walked on, prostitutes in their gay attire accosted them from the doorways in which they lurked, but looking into Leandro's grim countenance and Manuel's poverty-stricken features the girls let them walk on, following them with a gibe at ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja

... writers into the use of their instrument for lashing political enemies. Two numbers were given to matters of trivial or temporary interest, and then there was a shot at a piece of fustian in the "Boston Argus" on Liberty, followed shortly after by a gibe at some correspondent of the "Argus," who frantically exclaimed, on the occasion of a town meeting refusing to hear Sam Adams: "Shall Europe hear, shall our Southern brethren be told, that Samuel Adams rose to speak in the midst of his fellow-citizens, and was silenced!" ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder

... over his shoulder, receives more attention from nurse maids and children than is sometimes comfortable, but it is easily possible to send one's impedimenta on by rail if the night's stopping place can be figured out in advance, and he can then progress without fear of gibe ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine

... chance in that hoose," Brodie burst out, ignoring the baker's gibe. "Dod, there's a chance, sirs. I wonder it never occurred to ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... quietly, raising her eyes for a moment. "There was a time, Everard, before that terrible tragedy—the last time you stayed at Dunratter—when I didn't gibe." ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... the Vanir applauded Thor as he stepped out of old AEgir's hall. But Loki, mischievous Loki, threw a gibe after him. "Do not let the hammer out of your hands this time, ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum

... empty house calls not to me, "Here, but for fate, were thou and she—" Its gibe for once is checked. To-night Silence is queen in grief's despite, And even the longing of my soul Is silent 'neath this ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit

... woeful, somber, unhappy, woebegone, mournful, depressed, despondent, gloomy, melancholy, heavy-spirited, sorrowful, dismal, dejected, disconsolate, miserable, lugubrious. Satiate, sate, surfeit, cloy, glut, gorge. Scoff, jeer, gibe, fleer, sneer, mock, taunt. Secret, covert, surreptitious, furtive, clandestine, underhand, stealthy. Seep, ooze, infiltrate, percolate, transude, exude. Sell, barter, vend, trade. Shape, form, figure, outline, conformation, configuration, contour, profile. Share, partake, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... bruised and bloody, ran straight to the Duke to complain, and with the intent of praying him to inflict some heavy punishment upon the gentleman of Ca Barbaro.—"What wouldst thou have me do for thee?" answered the Duke: "think upon the shameful gibe which hath been written concerning me; and think on the manner in which they have punished that ribald Michele Steno, who wrote it; and see how the Council of Forty respect our person."—Upon this the Admiral answered, "My Lord ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... Margaret eyed his elegant attire, his face with its expression of an intelligence concentrated upon the petty and the paltry. Her eyes suggested a secret amusement so genuine that she could not venture to reveal it in a gibe. She merely said: "I confess I was more interested in him than in what ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... lords of his council, all wrought in fine gold. 'I will have that golden emperor,' said Richard, 'having just made one out of clay. Let him be sent to me.' He spoke carelessly, as they all thought, simply to get in his gibe at the new Emperor of the Romans, his nephew, whom he had caused to be chosen; and seeing that that was not the treasure he craved, it is like enough. But somebody took his word into Languedoc, and somebody brought back word (Saint-Pol's word) that the Viscount of Limoges, as ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett

... barber more than any ten newspapers combined, and whenever some famous Conservative minister referred in parliament to a "revolutionary hydra" or a "hotbed of anarchy," they pictured to themselves a barbershop like that of Cupido, but much larger perhaps, scattering a poisonous atmosphere of cruel gibe and perverse effrontery all through ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... (delivering) Sabior. Trus' Him. He lead yuh. He show yuh de way. Dat all yuh got tuh do. Beliebe—pray—praise. Ebery night befo' I lay on my bed I git on my knees an' look up tuh Him. Soon I wake in de mornin' I gibe Him t'anks. Eben sometime in de day I git on my knees an' pray. He been good to me all dese years. He aint forget me. I aint been sick for ober twenty-five years. Good t'ing too, nobody left tuh tek care of me. Dey all gone. But I don't care now, jus' so I kin ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration

... sport which encourages boys to deny themselves luxuries, to scorn ease, to conquer bodily weariness by the exercise of the will, is not one which should be banished because for some the spirit has triumphed to the hurt of the flesh. In a self-indulgent age when sometimes it has seemed that the gibe of our enemies is true, that the most characteristic English word is "comfort," it is good to retain in our schools some forms of activity in which comfort is never considered at all. The Ithaca which was [Greek: hagathe koyrotrophos] was ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... Power and then propose to limit it to the land or to any particular continent. Now, did our believers in the Balance of Power ever wish to see power balanced anywhere else than on the continent of Europe? That, if we studied history in any other language than our own, we should know was the gibe which other peoples flung at our addiction to the Balance of Power. We wanted, they said, to see a Balance of Power on the continent of Europe, to see one half of Europe equally matched against the other, ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various

... epithet—rather a favorite, apparently, with our old writers—the epithet jovial, which is derived from the Latin name of its head. It is a life of all the pleasures of mind and body, of banquet and of revel, of music and of song; a life in which solemn grandeur alternates with jest and gibe; a life of childish willfulness and of fretfulness, combined with serious, manly, and imperial cares; for the Olympus of Homer has at least this one recommendation to esteem—that it is not peopled ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... nature of His kingdom, so as to remove any suspicion that it would bring Him and His subjects into collision with Rome, but He asserted His kingship, and it was His own claim that gave Pilate the material for His gibe. It is worth notice, then, that these two claims from His own lips, made to the authorities who respectively took cognisance of the theocratic and of the civic life of the nation, and at the time when His life hung on the decision of the two, were the causes of His judicial ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... come to the same place as the last night, and seemed by no means afraid of the man-host with its spears and shields, wherefore these last had turned their backs and run from them stoutly, and now sat together glowering on each other, and casting now and again a gibe each at each. But they were at one in this, that the wolves were huge and fierce beyond measure, and such as any man might fear. But at last John spake and said: "Well, master, it is as they say down the Dale, that this no lucky house; meseems ye are beset with no common wolves, ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris

... have still a Gibe in Store, And will be monstrous witty on the Poor; For the torn Surtout and the tatter'd Vest, The Wretch and all his Wardrobe are a Jest: The greasie Gown sully'd with often turning, Gives a good Hint to say the Man's in Mourning; Or if ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... archbishop; "let not the gibe and jest go round; there be matters of graver import that should occupy us this night. To-morrow, let the elements be propitious, and the day ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... worth answering: indeed, I knew it was not meant for an answer; it was a palpable gibe. I held my tongue, but now I knew I should get no information out of this soft-voiced ruffian until it suited him to give it. Our fate was still a mystery—if we were beaten in the struggle that was imminent, and I could not flatter myself with ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... this ill flouting from the damsel, he was wroth with wrath exceeding beyond which was no proceeding and said to the broker, "O most ill-omened of brokers, thou hast not brought into the market this ill-conditioned wench but to gibe me and make mock of me before the merchants." Then the broker took her aside and said to her, "O my lady, be not wanting in self-respect. The Shaykh at whom thou didst mock is the Syndic of the bazar and Inspector[FN459] thereof and a committee-man of the council of the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton

... a tragedy of which few men know the existence and certainly no man in these woman-ridden isles can ever have experienced. Men always treat with derision the woman anxious for matrimony, and gibe equally at the spinster who fails to attain it. Heaven alone knows why, since by men's laws and traditions the married state has been made to mean everything desirable for a woman, and the unmarried condition everything ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby

... the gibe. He passed out into the courtyard, and from the courtyard through the archway into the grain-market. Opposite to him at the end of the street, a grass hill, with the chalk showing at one bare spot on the side of it, ridged ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason

... lures. His mother's great sprawling letter had pleased him better than any save one. The exception was his stepfather's. Edwin Clayhanger, duly passing on to the next generation the benevolent Midland gibe ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... stand, legs wide apart and hands clasped behind his back, surveying the results of his devilry with the greatest self-satisfaction. As the prisoner groaned and moaned he would fling coarse joke, badinage, and gibe at the helpless wretch, and when the latter struggled and writhed in order to seek some relief, though in vain, he would laugh uproariously, urge the unhappy man to kick more energetically, and then shriek with delight ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney

... Leinster chieftains came to pay their respects to the young Prince, that they should not add insult to injury; for, not content with open ridicule, they proceeded to pull the beards of the chieftains, and to gibe their method of wearing ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... it well that thou shouldest seek to make me captive, and show me unto the army? For they have beheld our combat, and that I overcame thee, and surely now they will gibe when they learn that thy strength was withstood by a woman. Better would it beseem thee to hide this adventure, lest thy cheeks have cause to blush because of me. Therefore let us conclude a peace together. The castle shall be thine, and all it holds; follow after ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... part of a completely healthy and rounded human existence, and in this experiment he practised what he preached. The experiment caused no little stir in Oxford, and even the London newspapers had their gibe at the "Amateur Navvies of Oxford"; to walk over to Hinksey and laugh at the diggers was a ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... the tones now; his laugh was a bitter gibe. As it followed Ike, it reminded him that the man had not yet moved from beside the boulder, or he would have heard the thud of the ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... brook the fellow's saucy gibe, "That if the peasant must have bread to eat, Why, let him go and draw the plough himself!" It cut me to the very soul to see My oxen, noble creatures, when the knave Unyoked them from the plough. As though they felt ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

... occasion the Ragusans could be nobly firm, refusing to deliver a political refugee to the Turks, and so forth. In such tempestuous times the little State was forced to trim its sails; there was the gibe that they were prepared to pay lip service to anyone, and that the letters S.B. on the flag (for Sanctus Blasius, their patron saint) indicated the seven flags, sette bandiere, which they were ready to fly. But the Republic of Dubrovnik—a ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... presently, they make their appearance on the deck of the world with their book; if truth has been victorious, then has truth the hurrah! but if truth is pinioned against the mast, then is their fist thrust against the nose of truth, and their gibe and their insult spirted in her face. The strongest party had the sailor, and the strongest party has almost invariably the writer of the ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow

... looking, instead, out into the dark indifferently, as if the heresies which the old man hurled at him were some old worn-out song. Seeing, however, that the schoolmaster's flush of enthusiasm seemed on the point of dying out, he roused himself to gibe it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... no limit to the number of times a tale will bear retelling. Occasionally we give it a fresh setting, adorn it with fresh accessories, and present it as new-born to the world; but this is only another indication of our affectionate tenacity. I have heard that caustic gibe of Queen Elizabeth's anent the bishop's lady and the bishop's wife (the Tudors had a biting wit of their own) retold at the expense of an excellent lady, the wife of a living American bishop; and the story of the girl who, professing religion, gave ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... "This is a gibe at me," Moya explained, "because I don't read Emerson. 'It is the very measure of a marching chorus,' he goes on to say, 'where the step is broken by rocks and tree-roots;'—and he is chanting it to himself (to her it was in the ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote

... their purpose have in many cases lost their meaning; the duties our ancestors performed have lost their usefulness; the old bottles will not hold the new wine which our generation serves to us. And this is one reason why so many people rate and gibe at what they call the "muddle-headed British public; "because it cannot change its ideas so quickly as it is forced to change its conditions ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

... the next age, had no charms for him. Yet he must have lived somehow and to a good age, for he did not die till the 23d December 1631. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, a fact which drew from Goldsmith, in The Citizen of the World, a gibe showing only the lamentable ignorance of the best period of English poetry, in which Goldsmith was not indeed alone, but in which he was perhaps pre-eminent ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... several of the tamed girls at once heartily corroborated this statement, whereupon the newcomers ceased to gibe and consented to silence. Ramsey leaned forth over the edge of the overhanging bank, a dirt precipice five feet above the water, and peered into the indeterminable depths below. The pool had been stirred, partly by the inexpert pokings of the fishermen and partly ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington

... ancestor Daedalus; and if I were the sayer or propounder of them, you might say that my arguments walk away and will not remain fixed where they are placed because I am a descendant of his. But now, since these notions are your own, you must find some other gibe, for they certainly, as you yourself allow, show an inclination ...
— Euthyphro • Plato

... it the cheerful voice of aid? Begins the time, his heart has prayed, When men may reap and sow? Ah, God! back to the cold earth's breast! The sages chuckle o'er their jest! Must they, to give a people rest, Their dainty wit forego? The tyrants sit in a stately hall; They gibe at a wretched people's fall; The tyrants forget how fresh is the pall Over their dead and ours. Look how the senators ape the clown, And don the motley and hide the gown, But yonder a fast rising frown ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... To Godmar; who said: Now, Jehane, Your lover's life is on the wane So fast, that, if this very hour You yield not as my paramour, He will not see the rain leave off: Nay, keep your tongue from gibe and scoff Sir Robert, or I ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris

... no attention to the friendly gibe. As they entered the street of the camp, largely deserted, though there was every evidence of crowds forgetting time in the drinking and gambling shacks, Sandy moved up even with Wyatt and locked ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn

... might look for trouble with him, as he seemed ein wilder Kamerad. They were mistaken, and Goethe was to prove one of Stilling's warmest friends. Stilling himself relates how, when one at the table directed a gibe at him, it was Goethe who rebuked the railer. When Stilling was in despair at the news of the illness of his betrothed, it was to Goethe he flew for comfort, and he found him a friend in need. At a ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown

... that he was making progress with them. The hated gibe "white slave" was less frequently heard. Sam, passionately bent on making good in the community, weighed every shade of the men's manner toward him, like a ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner

... weave itself around him. This vague stirring of his mental pulses, what did it mean? Heavens! it was horrible. It brought back old memories, whose tin-pot unreality was never recalled save as subject matter for bitter gibe and mockery. He could not have ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... the deepest meditation Of the philosophic scribe, From the poet's inspiration, For the cynic's polished gibe, We invoke narcotic nurses In their jargon from afar, I indite these modest ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various

... her way; Knew not was it night or day; Sprang up the bank, tore through the furze, Threaded copse and dingle, And heard her penny jingle Bouncing in her purse,— Its bounce was music to her ear. She ran and ran As if she feared some goblin man Dogged her with gibe or curse Or something worse: But not one goblin skurried after, Nor was she pricked by fear; The kind heart made her windy-paced That urged her home quite out of breath with haste ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti

... have made to this gibe I do not know, for at that moment we reached the door of the ante-chamber; and this being narrow, and a sentry in the grey uniform of the Swiss Guard compelling all to enter in single file, my young friend was forced to fall back, leaving ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... steady eyes met the gibe unfaltering. "I know it's a chance that doesn't come every day, and I know you mean well by him. I shan't put ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell

... by, some of the bristly tribe, Who felt so touched by the peeper's gibe, Their backs were up; for they thought, at least, It aimed at them the low, mean beast: And they challenged Chick to her tiny face, In their sharp, high notes, and their ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould

... all the rest Crushed his spirit with gibe and jest, Whispered softly, "Whatever they say, I know you will build the wheel some day!" Chirping crickets and singing birds Were not so sweet as her heartsome words; Straight he answered, "If ever I do, I know it will only be ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various

... manner, but the passage is interesting as a sidelight on the joint family system. It concludes by advising the girl, if she cannot detach her husband from his family, to poison him and return as a widow. This last counsel is a gibe at the custom which the caste have of taking large sums of money for a widow on her second marriage. As such a woman is usually adult, and able at once to perform the duties of a wife and to work in the fields, she is highly valued, and her price ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... too,' I said, remembering that the sceptic is sometimes vouchsafed revelations to which the most devout believer may not aspire. It is, for instance, always the young man who scoffs at ghosts that the family spectre chooses as his audience. But it required more than a mere sneer or an empty gibe to pump information out of Bradshaw. He took me ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse

... phenomenal lack of speed, and general unsuitability for the service upon which she was employed, had, with her crew, become the butt and laughing-stock of every stupid and scurrilous jester on the coast, and many a time had we been made to writhe under the lash of some more than ordinarily envenomed gibe; but now the laugh was to be on our side; we were going to demonstrate to those shallow, jeering wits the superiority of brains over ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood

... to denying or even repeating what he said; far less to justify myself. Yet I should like to mention, in passing, that his coarse gibe concerning my fawning on a rich man is the most unjust of ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco

... gibe at army rules Appreciated fully; I sparkled when describing mules As "embryonic bully," Or, aided by some hackneyed tune, Increased my easy laurels By stringing verses to impugn ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various



Words linked to "Gibe" :   check out, shaft, razz, beseem, align, ride, harmonise, tally, underpin, pattern, cod, tease, check, tantalise, adhere, scoff, homologize, correspond, twit, be, correlate, jeer, corroborate, taunt, conform to, remark, rally, cheap shot, slam, consort, consist, rhyme, twin, fit in, harmonize, jibe, meet, input, resemble, suit, bear out, agree, dig, rime, barb, shot, support, bait, square, concord, disagree, accord



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com