"Sibilant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dash with which the partners rush forward, the clinking and clattering of spurs as heel clashes with heel in mid air, punctuating the staccato of the music, the loud thud of boots striking the ground, followed by their sibilant slide along the polished floor, then the swift springs and sudden bounds, the whirling gyrations and dizzy evolutions, the graceful genuflections and quick embraces, and all the other intricate and maddening movements to the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... different Greek slates at the earliest period z as well as x; afier the symbol for p came Zade (@), which was a strong palatal s, though in name it corresponds to the Greek zera: while lastly Shin (@ follows rhe symbol for r, and was an sh-sound. The Greek name for the sibilant (sigma) may simply mean the hissing letter and be a derivative from sizo; many authorities, however, hold that it is a corruption of the Phoenician Samech. Unfortunately, it is not clear how many sibilants ere distinguished in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... world than gold. Water makes things grow and—and keeps a fella from gettin' thirsty. And mud makes things grow, too, but I dunno what rocks are for. Just to sit on when you're tired, I reckon." The sibilant burring of a rattler in the brush set his neck and back tingling. "And what snakes was made for, gets me! They ain't good to eat, nohow. And they ain't friendly like some of the bugs and things. I'm thinkin' that that there snake what clumb the tree and ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... roughly, William!" said the prompter in a sibilant whisper. "Don't make so much noise. They can't hear ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... read the advertisements of tooth-brushes and breakfast foods and underwear in their magazines, written in the language of persuasive, familiar fraternity. It was difficult not to confess this to Mr. Asprey; but I do not think he would have understood me." Mr. Drew spoke in a soft, slightly sibilant voice, with little smiling pauses between sentences that all seemed vaguely shuffled together. He paused now, smiling, and looking down ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... dear Mrs. Morris," said Mrs. Lee, "I think everything is sweet." Mrs. Lee said sweet with an effect as if she stamped hard to emphasize it. She made it long and extremely sibilant. Mrs. Lee always ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... vines clung to them in woven tapestries of living green. There opened from this road dim forest aisles, veiled in dusk in which sunbeams quivered, paths of mystery, winding toward strange twilight worlds where wild wood-creatures wandered. Warm earth-scents drenched the air; soft sibilant whisperings stirred overhead, and hidden birds ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... sibilant sound of j in jest is spelt with the single sign j, whilst the compound sibilant sound in chest is spelt with the ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... A sibilant hiss rose in the back of the room. The girls were more angry at this outburst of the teacher than all ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... and after service, it is not decorous to chat sociably along the aisles, or hold a gossiping conference in whispers with some one in the neighboring pew. I have in mind one woman, who ought to have known better, whose sibilant utterances—just five pews distant—came to be a regular part of the five minutes' pause immediately before the service began. Her conversation was usually directed to another woman, who, likewise, should have known better than to listen. The silent vault ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... confession Roma sat in her own room with a tremor of the heart which she had never felt before. Something personal and very intimate was creeping over her soul. She heard the indistinct murmur of the priest's voice at intervals, followed by a sibilant sound as of ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... had carried her to the centre of the stage an ominous sound broke the silence of expectation. A hiss came from one of the boxes; it was repeated from another, and another. The sibilant sound spread round the house; it swelled into a sinister storm of hisses and boos. The light faded out of the dancer's eyes, the smile from her lips; and as the tumult of disapprobation rose to a deafening ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... the people everywhere still reveal the nature of the old discipline. The strangest fact is that the old-fashioned manners appear natural rather than acquired, instinctive rather than made by training. The bow,—the sibilant in drawing of the breath which accompanies the prostration, and is practised also in praying to the gods,—the position of the hands upon the floor in the moment of greeting or of farewell,—the way of sitting or rising or walking in presence of a guest,—the manner of receiving or presenting ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... world—those simple souls who never have any secret to hide, either from each other or from heaven, and of whom Ruskin nobly said, 'These are our holiest.' I do not know what words her heart is murmuring: I hear only at moments that soft sibilant sound, made by gently drawing the breath through the lips, which among this kind people is a token of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... observations and Sunday-school memories when he wrote, describing the dawn of a spring morning (I quote from his essay): "Beneath in the water the little fishes darted about the boat; above the little birds twittered in the branches; while off on a sunny log in the pond the soft, sibilant croak of the mud-turtle was heard on the shore." If we could happen upon the mud-turtle mad with love, I am sure we should find that he had a voice—a "soft, sibilant croak," ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... late honey-gathering insect that will not be here to feed on the ivy's sweetness. And behind the blossoming curtain, alive with the minute, multitudinous, swift-moving, glittering forms, some nobler form will be hidden in a hole or fissure in the wall. Here on many a night I have listened to the sibilant screech of the white owl and the brown ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... admitted. He who affected by searching to find out and to equal God could not explain the power by which a tree pumps its sap from roots to leaves, or why a baby rabbit rejects the grasses that would harm it, or why a puling infant divines its mother among the motley and multitudinous mass of sibilant saints at a sewing society which is discussing the last wedding and the next divorce. He "who admits only what he understands" would have to look on himself as a conundrum and then give the conundrum up. He would have the longest doubts and the shortest creed ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... fond and foolish now, just as at one time it all seemed very big and wonderful. And I remember schooling my Poppsy to say "Daddy's all sweet" and how her little tongue, stumbling over the sibilant, converted it into the non-complimentary "Daddy's all feet," which my Dinky-Dunk so scowlingly resented. And I have even compiled a list of Dinkie's earliest "howlers," from the time he was first interested in Adam and Eve and asked to be told about "The Garden of Sweden" until he later explained ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... organ, a careless voluntary that stopped short, rambled, began again. They were early, and the lights were only lighted here and there; women, and now and then a man, drifted up the center aisle. Boots cheeped unseen in the arches, sibilant whispers smote the silence, pew-doors creaked, and from far corners of the church violent coughing sounded with muffled reverberations. Mary Lou would have slipped into the very last pew, but Virginia led the way up—up—up—in the darkness, nearer and nearer the altar, with its ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... the floor above, and a rumour of feminine voices drifted down, interrupted by an occasional sibilant rustle of silk, or a brief patter of high-heeled feet: noises which bore out the conjecture that madame's maid was undressing and putting her to bed; a ceremony apt to consume a considerable time ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... a divine world he has dreamed of, peopled by saints and martyrs, where the flowers are quickly woven into crowns and the light streams from the gates of Paradise, and every breeze whispers the sweet sibilant name of Jesus, and there, on the bare but beautiful roads, Christ meets His disciples, or at the convent gate welcomes a traveller, and if He be not there He has but just passed by, and if He has not just passed by He is ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... familiar objects, or repeating such as we found in the vocabularies of former voyages, took great pains to teach us, and were much delighted when we could catch the just pronunciation of a word. For my own part, no language seemed easier to acquire than this; every harsh and sibilant consonant being banished from it, and almost every word ending in a vowel. The only requisite, was a nice ear to distinguish the numerous modifications of the vowels which must naturally occur in a language confined to few consonants, and which, once rightly ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... came down from his mountain retreat. He heard the sibilant hiss of the scorned Persians as he passed among them on the outskirts of the crowd; he observed the threatening attitude of the men who waited and watched; he saw the white, ugly face of Von Blitz quivering with triumph; he felt the breath of disaster upon his cheek. And yet he walked ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... parlance the Dal supplants the Zal; e.g. Dahaba (for zahaba) he went (v. 277 and passim); also T takes the place of Th, as Tult for thulth one third (iii. 348) and Tamrat (for thamrat) fruit (v. 260), thus generally ignoring the sibilant Th after the fashion of the modern Egyptians who say Tumm (for thumma) again; "Kattir (for kaththir) Khayrak" God increase thy weal, and Lattama (for laththama) he veiled. Also a general ignoring of the dual, e.g. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... only a few yards below when, at the last sharp twist in the descent, the still air vibrated with a sibilant rattle. Slade's pony snorted and jumped sideways, leaving Lennon a clear view of the big diamond-back rattlesnake that lay coiled in the middle of the trail. The gaping jaws of the angry snake and the peculiar billowing ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... Presently the sibilant rush of waters forewarns rapids. Indians and voyageurs debark, invert canoes on their shoulders, packs on back with straps across foreheads, and amble away over the portages at that voyageurs' dog-trot which is half walk, half run. So the rapids of ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... passionately walked beside him. On the shores of the lonely fiord or in the pine forests, Elizabeth's bright, speaking face seemed to move before him like a will o' the wisp; even in the rustle of the summer breeze in the leaves he could hear her voice, with its odd breaks and sibilant pauses, so curiously sweet to his ear. "I am possessed," he would say to himself—"I am possessed!" and indeed with all his strength of will he was ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... murmur and awakening. How still the morning is! It is at such times that we discover what music there is in the souls of the little slate- colored snowbirds. How they squeal, and chatter, and chirp, and trill, always in scattered troops of fifty or a hundred, filling the air with a fine sibilant chorus! That joyous and childlike "chew," "chew," "chew" is very expressive. Through this medley of finer songs and calls, there is shot, from time to time, the clear, strong note of the meadowlark. It comes from some field or tree farther away, and cleaves the air like an arrow. The ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... she floated away into a peace indescribable, unlike anything she had ever known before, she heard a woman's voice, hushed to a sibilant whisper, remark, "My, Nap! You're too smart to be ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... English, in vivid French, or sibilant Tahitian, Lovaina issued her orders to the girls, shouted maledictions at the cook, or talked with all who came. Through that porch flowed all the scandal of the South Seas—tales of hurricanes and waterspouts, of shipwrecks, of accidents, of lucky deals in pearls or shells, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... reached the tent but the girl made no sign of going in. In the silence the sibilant lisp of the stream ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... sailing swiftly towards the bank on which Darrell reclined. He had evidently made friends with them, and they rested their white breasts close on the margin, seeking to claim his notice with a low hissing salutation, which, it is to be hoped, they changed for something less sibilant in that famous song with ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... my fellow watcher said, interrupting his whispered and sibilant devotions, and turning to me, as it seemed, unwillingly. "Have you not heard it before? Every evening since the death he has played it at midnight in memory of Alresca." Then ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... brilliant face an added accent of vigor. The chien de race was the dominant note now in the muscular, supple body, the keen-edged nostrils, and the intent gaze of the liquid eyes. These latter were fixed with the fixity of a savage on Charm. She was giving, in a sweet sibilant murmur, the man seated next her—Monsieur d'Agreste, the man who refused to bear his title—her views of ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... above, was smoother than she ever saw it afterward on Kon Klayu. There was something sinister in the gently heaving stillness of the vast body of water, for not ten feet from the flap of the tent tiny ripples of the incoming tide were swallowing at the dry sand with sibilant softness. One end of the pile of provisions just below the tent was already a foot deep in the ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... rapid, sibilant whisper, leaning forward so as to bring her eyes directly before Mrs. Thayer's face, and the effect was electrical. Mrs. Thayer struggled for a moment, as if she would rise, and then fell back and burst into tears. This was a fortunate relief, since she would have fainted if she had not ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... with watchful eyes, Piercing, shameless, and indiscreet, With ears wide open for soft replies And sounds that are sibilant and sweet! With light approach (not a lynx so still), With figure meanly invisible, With threatening voice and iron will, And shrill demands or he'll ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... the words—slight, because derivation is a seductive and frequently illusory pilot. Our language is said to have been arraigned by foreigners for its hissing enunciation; but, regardless of the rebuke, our pundits have, of late, unnecessarily increased the whistling by substituting the sibilant s for the vocal z, in all sorts of cases. Happily this same s not being yet acclimatized to the galley, Jack will continue to give tongue to an enterprizing cruize after Portugueze ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... she was almost palsied with recurrent terror: the footfall, stealthy, shuffling, weighty, sounded again. It was never the echo of her own deft, light step! A distinct, sibilant whisper suddenly hissed with warning throughout the place, and as she turned with the instinct of flight she caught a glimpse in the darkling mirror across the dining-room of a fugitive speeding figure, then another, and still another, all frantically, noiselessly fleeing—why ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... cluttering to the Treasury Cluck, like chicken, Now with small beaks the ravenous Bill opposing;[212:1] With serpent-tongue now stinging, and now licking, 15 Now semi-sibilant, now ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... right. For all the world as though they led war dogs, the keepers in brazen armor advanced, the dull metallic clank of their accoutrement clearly discernible above the sibilant hiss of their hideous charges, which hopped along grotesquely like kangaroos, using their long and powerful tails ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... a sibilant sound, as if out of a throat through clenched teeth. It had a mocking ring. It was impossible to say whence it came. It ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... watch a half-dozen times, to hasten its progress. I shook it impatiently to make it go faster. The great empty church looked cold and lonely. The little group of spectators only added to the loneliness of the scene. An occasional cough resounded harshly amid the universal stillness. The sibilant sounds of whispers struck sharply and ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... knees away from the lake, Willet leading and Tayoga bringing up the rear. It was hard and painful work for Grosvenor, but again he succeeded in advancing without noise, and he began to think they would elude the vigilance of the savage scouts, when a sibilant whisper from Willet warned them to fall flat again. His command was just in time as a rifle cracked in the bushes ahead of them, and Grosvenor distinctly heard the bullet as it hissed over their heads. Willet threw his rifle to his shoulder but quickly took it down again. The Indian ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... manner, and comes spinning round and round towards the ground looking more like a round ball than a bird. All the time it descends it utters a strange note, something like that of a frog or cricket, a protracted sibilant sound. This bird is close to Liothrix and Stachyrhis, although it ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... safety valve, tires, air escaping from tires, punctured tire; escaping steam, steam, steam radiator, steam release valve. V. hiss, buzz, whiz, rustle; fizz, fizzle; wheeze, whistle, snuffle; squash; sneeze; sizzle, swish. Adj. sibilant; hissing &c. v.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... ledge to the left, strained up, and, holding thus, reached out with his right. The hand closed about the cluster, and the twig was broken. Grayson gave a great shout then. He turned his head as though to drop them, and, that far away, I heard the sibilant whir of rattles. I saw a snake's crest within a yard of his face, and, my God! I saw Grayson loose his left hand to guard it! The snake struck at his arm, and Grayson reeled and caught back once at the ledge with his left hand. He caught once, I say, to do him full justice; then, without a ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... and artistic. One day, in the early 'Forties, the proprietor, to his amazement, heard one of his oysters whistling—a continuous shrill little whistle, doubtless through a hole in its shell. The fact was at once noised abroad, and crowds visited his shop to listen to the sibilant mollusc, which not only whistled, but, it was said with some truth, drew the town as effectively as old Drury herself, on the other ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... introduced. Two of them spoke neither French nor English, but the third man spoke French fluently. He had, by the way, a somewhat peculiar accent, different from that to which I was accustomed in the Turks. It was softer, more sibilant, and impressed me as that of a man who was accustomed to speak Italian. He was a good-looking chap, about my height and build, and were it not for his brown skin, one would not have regarded him as a Turk. One side of his face was deeply scarred with a sword-cut, ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... the Grecian Kobalus, whose sole delight consisted in perplexing the human race, and calling up those harmless terrors that constantly hover round the minds of the timid." "The English and Scottish terms, 'Puck,' 'Bogle', are the same as the German 'Spuk' and the Danish 'Spogelse,' without the sibilant aspiration. These words are general names for any kind of spirit, and correspond to the 'pouk' of Piers Ploughman. In Danish 'spog' means a joke, trick, or prank, and hence the character of Robin Goodfellow. In Iceland Puki is regarded as an evil ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... came together to the door of the third house, and their heads were together; and a few sibilant consonants escaped them. The breath of the men that stood out under the starlight went up like smoke in the air. It ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... on the wrist; and a certain puffiness was becoming observable in the injured hand and arm. Smith bent down and drew a quick, sibilant breath. ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... more ancient ruins, into a cottonwood grove and then on to a sandy flat. Sitting low in my saddle, almost dozing, I revived suddenly at a never-to-be-mistaken B-u-u-z-z-z! The horses recognized it instantly and froze in their tracks. Sibilant, wicked, it sounded again, and then a yellow streak slid across the trail and disappeared under a low bush. We waited, and pretty soon a coffin-shaped head came up and waved slowly to and fro. The Chief shot him with his forty-five and the snake twisted and writhed into the trail, then lay still. ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... he indrew an inhalation from his pipe with a long sibilant sound: her answer was ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... in the kitchen resembled the resonant humming of bees, and again, when it became animated, it sounded like the distant cackling of geese. Then there would come a pause; and it would begin again with sibilant whispers, and end in a chorus of dry laughter that somehow suggested the crackling of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... complacently Anticipative Visage, of an osseous and ogreish Aspect, gleamed lividly forth therefrom, as the Apparition appeared to Look and Listen through the Mist at one end of the Bridge for the welcome Sight of Disaster, the much desired Sound of Doom. A shrill and sibilant Metallic Shriek seemed to cleave the Shadows into which the Spectre gazed; a Violent Vibratory Pulsation, as of thudding iron nails threshing upon a resonant steel floor, seemed to heat the Roadway, shake the Bridge, and as it appeared to me to widen the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... fragrance just as the peach and other trees did in their flowers. And it was also expressed in the new sound they gave out to the wind. The change was really wonderful when the rows on rows of immensely tall trees which for months had talked and cried in that strange sibilant language, rising to shrieks when a gale was blowing, now gave out a larger volume of sound, more continuous, softer, deeper, and like the wash of the sea ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... 'Py-Khan', a corrupt spelling of pakhan, the Sanskrit pashana or pasana, 'a stone'. The compound pashana-murti is commonly used in the sense of 'stone image'. The sibilant sh or s usually is pronounced as kh in Northern India (Grierson, J.R.A.S., ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... afternoon rambles we have listened, underneath its boughs, to the plaintive note of the Green Warbler, who selects it for his abode, and who has caught a melancholy tone from the winds that from immemorial time have tuned to soft music its long sibilant leaves. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... my own heart, Tessa," and then Maoni, who sat smoking a cigarette in a corner of the room, discreetly turned her back as certain sibilant sounds were frequently repeated for a minute ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... replied, speaking the universal language with a sibilant accent that was very fascinating, ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... word, having heard the sibilant whisper. She likewise stared at the rusty-coated gentleman who had just passed the gate, having come from the main entrance of the Central ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... slave-coffle, as the slaves march on—as the husky gangs pass on by twos and threes, fastened together with wrist- chains and ankle-chains; I hear the entreaties of women tied up for punishment—I hear the sibilant whisk of thongs through the air; I hear the Hebrew reading his records and psalms; I hear the rhythmic myths of the Greeks, and the strong legends of the Romans; I hear the tale of the divine life and bloody death of the beautiful God, the Christ; I hear the Hindoo teaching his ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... explosions had given place to a series of swishing whistles, merging together into a sound as of water falling, only less regular, more sibilant. Occasionally there was the rending burst of a shell, and at intervals came the swinging detonations of the three guns. In the dugout, except for two men who snored loudly, ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... from the body of the house Sally heard nothing—only the crepitation of rain on the roof and the sibilant splatter of drops trickling from her saturated skirts into the puddle that had formed beneath ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... that flickered in the wind cast an uncertain gleam upon the slushy whiteness under foot, and the blurred outline of a towering water-tank showed dimly through the sliding snow. He could also just discern the great locomotive waiting on the side-track, and the sibilant hiss of steam that mingled with the moaning of the wind whirling a white haze out of the obscurity. Beyond the track, and showing only now and then, the lights of the wooden town blinked fitfully; on the other hand and behind the depot was an empty waste of ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... there was a great variety of them in the swamps and thickets beneath through the noises that they made—heart-quaking cries, squealing sounds, gruntings, and, most trying of all, a loud, piercing whistle whose sibilant pulsations penetrated the ear like thrusts of a needle. I pictured to myself a colossal serpent as the most probable author of this terrifying sound, but the error of my fancy was demonstrated by a tragedy which shook even ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... its nail again, when the door closed behind me. It shut firmly, without any particular amount of sound, and I was left in the dark. I groped my way to it, irritably, to find it locked on the outside. I shook it frantically, and was rewarded by a sibilant whisper through the keyhole. ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... stilly night are almost wholly of the faintly pulsing sea—sibilant and soft. Twice have the big-eyed stone plovers piped demoniacally. Once there were flutterings among the nutmeg pigeons in the star-proof jungle of the crowded inlet to the south. A cockatoo has shrieked out in dismay at some grim nightmare of a snake. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... speech in support of an unpopular measure or an unpopular man. But here the hisser is not so safe, nor the hissee—to coin a convenient word—so defenceless. The orator is not hampered by the studied words of a written part: he has the right of free speech, and he may retort upon his sibilant surrounders. Macready records that on one occasion, when Sheil was hissed, he "extorted the applause of his assailants by observing to them, 'You may hiss, but you cannot sting.'" Even finer was the retort of Coleridge under similar circumstances: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... Close the emergency—" Then a gluey mass cut across my mouth, and, as though carried on huge soft springs, I was hurried away, with the sibilant, whispering sounds louder and closer than ever. With me, as nearly as I could judge, went every man who had not been on ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... sacrament, sacrilege, salient, salubrious, sardonic, satellite, saturnine, schism, scurrilous, sectarian, secular, sedative, sedentary, seditious, sedulous, segregate, seismograph, senescent, sententious, septuagenarian, sequester, sibilant, similitude, sinecure, sinuous, solicitous, solstice, somnolent, sophisticated, sophistry, sorcery, spasmodic, specious, spirituelle, splenetic, spontaneity, sporadic, spurious, stipend, stipulate, stoical, stricture, stringency, stultify, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... a sibilant whisper over Jack's shoulder; for he was only a few feet ahead of the other pair ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... Facing Gavrilo at another table sat a drunken man in the dress of a sailor, with a red beard, all over coal-dust and tar. Hiccupping every minute, he was droning a song all made up of broken and incoherent words, strangely sibilant and guttural sounds. He ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... front shop, bearing trays of cakes and steaming cups of coffee. There was a rumble and clatter of German. Every one seemed to know every one else. A game of chess was in progress at one table, and between moves each contestant would refresh himself with a long-drawn, sibilant mouthful of coffee. There was nothing about the place or its occupants to remind one of America. This dim, smoky, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... would not open except by the application of brute force, and many of the windows rattled, so that carpenters were in possession of the premises a total of one hundred and twenty-eight hours in the course of nine calendar months, and I was compelled to listen in hang-dog silence to Josephine's sibilant commentary, that this was the natural result of buying a ready-made house. Still, I must admit that on the whole she behaved extraordinarily well under these trying circumstances, and said nothing more tart than that, if she ever were ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... never accused of not being noisy enough, while we have one bird who, though he is classed with the oscines, passes his life in almost unbroken silence. Of course I refer to the waxwing, or cedar-bird, whose faint, sibilant whisper can scarcely be thought to contradict the foregoing description. By what strange freak he has lapsed into this ghostly habit, nobody knows. I make no account of the insinuation that he gave up music because it hindered his success in cherry-stealing. ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... the speaker was Girasole. He had heard the sibilant sounds of the whispering, and, knowing that Minnie could not speak Italian, it had struck him as being a very singular thing that she should be whispering. Had her sister joined her? He thought he would go up and see. So he went up softly, and the whispering still went on. He therefore concluded ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... tia should be sounded zia: and in Greek transliterations of the sixth century we find such forms as δωναζιόνεμ for donationem, and ἄκτζιο for actio. Pompeius says that whensoever a vowel follows ti or di, the ti or di becomes sibilant. So again on Christian epitaphs we find Constantso for Constantio, etc. But in the classical period of the language, there is no reason for thinking that this assibilation existed, for the Greek transliterations of that period invariably denote ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... fairest landscape. No plant on earth rustles in such a horribly metallic fashion when the wind blows through those everlastingly withered branches; the noise chills one to the marrow; it is like the sibilant chattering of ghosts. Its oil is called "medicinal" only because it happens to smell rather nasty; it is worthless as timber, objectionable in form and hue—objectionable, above all things, in its perverse, anti-human habits. What other tree would have the effrontery ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... an enemy," came in a sibilant whisper too low to be heard by the watchful overseer. "Monakatocka never forgets a friend. Some day ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... had vigor to sing, the song of the mill knew no resting; morning and evening, day and night it crooned its rhythmic tune; only during the daylight Sundays did its murmur die to a sibilant hiss. All the week its doors were filled with the coming and going of men and women and children: many men, more women, and greater and greater throngs of children. It seemed to devour children, sitting with its myriad eyes gleaming and its black maw open, drawing in the pale white mites, ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... must come from some other Italic dialect. The symbol G was a new coinage in the 3rd century B.C. The pronunciation of C throughout the period of classical Latin was that of an unvoiced guttural stop (k). In other dialects, however, it had been palatalized to a sibilant before i-sounds some time before the Christian era; e.g. in the Umbrian facia Latin facial. In Latin there is no evidence for the interchange of c with a sibilant earlier than the 6th century A.D. in south Italy and the 7th century A.D. in Gaul (Lindsay, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... showed his teeth in a wolfish snarl. "She is my wife," he said, in his slow, sibilant way. "I shall not set her free. And—wherever I go, ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... But, as I said, all this time we were at work; our emissaries gave us enough to do: we knew what spoil the robbers in the March had made, the decree issued in Vienna, the order of the day in Paris, the last word exchanged between the Cardinals, what whispers were sibilant in the Vatican; we mined deeper every day, and longed for the electric stroke which should kindle the spark and send princes and principalities shivered widely into atoms. But, friend, this was not to be. We knew one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... light shone from the open door of an isolation room where a nurse was watching by a patient dying of gangrene. Two comrades who had been to the movies at the Gaumont Palace near the Place Clichy began to talk in sibilant whispers of the evening's entertainment, and one of them said, "That war film was a corker; did you spot the big cuss throwing the grenades?" "Yuh, damn good," answered the other pulling his shirt over his head. It was a strange ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... polonaise! When you hear it, does there not recur to you some dream of bygone happy hours, the sibilant murmur of fragrant night winds through the crisp foliage, the faint call of Diana's horn from the woodlands, moon-fairies dancing on the spider-webs, the glint of the dew on the roses, the far-off music of the surges tossing impotently on the sands, the forgetfulness of time and place and ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... sibilant tones of the Fire-daemon flutter away, slowly the spheres recede and vanish in the clasp ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... Helene. Mother Fetu had ceased whining on his entrance, but kept up a sibilant wheeze, like that of a child in pain. She had understood at once that the doctor and her benefactress were known to one another; and her eyes never left them, but travelled from one to the other, while her wrinkled face showed that her mind was covertly working. The doctor put some questions ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... turned courteously and went back to the door, half closing it and making her request in a low tone. Then her stepmother's excited sibilant whisper: ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... cook gave us a warning glance. He then laid hold of the rope that was made fast to a shears overhead, swung out, and slid down to the very keelson. Silently, one at a time, we followed. The only sound was our sibilant breathing and the very faint shuffle of feet. Now we could see, almost midway between the hatches, the dim light of a candle and a man at work. While we watched, the man cautiously struck several ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... not lasted more than three minutes. The frightened household clustered at the top of the stairway. From below, as from out an abyss of blackness, came up a gurgling sound, as of air bubbling through water. Sometimes this gurgle became sibilant, almost a whistle. But this, too, quickly died down and ceased. Then naught came up out of the blackness save a heavy panting of some creature ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... shadows of a fern-brake far in the woods on the right, and they heard the muffled trickling of water, falling on mossy stones hard by, from a spring so slight as to be only a silver thread. The trees far below waved in the wind, and a faint dryadic sibilant singing sounded a measure or so, and grew fainter in the lulling of the ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... talked, and not once did her listener interrupt. Her words were spoken in that sibilant whisper that is louder than ordinary speech, and not one of them was lost. When she had finished, she rose and demanded, laying her hand ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... through the blue fog of incense! KO-NGAI!—What a thunder tone was that! All the lacquered goblins on the palace cornices wriggle their fire-colored tongues! And after each huge shock, how wondrous the multiple echo and the great golden moan and, at last, the sudden sibilant sobbing in the ears when the immense tone faints away in broken whispers of silver,—as though a woman should whisper, "Hiai!" Even so the great bell hath sounded every day for well-nigh five hundred years,—Ko-Ngai: ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... something of timidity in the repulsive faces of the waiting creatures, this newcomer was of a different type. He opened flabby thin lips to give one sharp note of command. It was as sibilant as the hissing of a snake. The man with the weapon returned it to a holder at his side; the whole group cringed before the power and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... from the twilight of the south door and looked distractedly about him in the full light before he saw his vacant place. The galleries at the lower end were occupied too, down there, where she had failed to obtain a seat. Yet from all the crowded interior there was no sound but a sibilant whispering; from the passages behind she could hear again the quick bell-note repeat itself as the lobbies were cleared; and from Parliament Square outside once more came the heavy murmur of the crowd that had been inaudible for the last twenty minutes. ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... another—sibilant, clearer, uncannily human. Nicholas had heard, too, for he threw down the tattered deerskin, and went to the other side of the fire. Voices in the tunnel. Nicholas held back the flap and gravely waited there, ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... not gifted with the trolling-line. Sometime I shall write an article on the humors of using it—on the soft and sibilant hiss with which it goes out over the stern; on the rasping with which it grates on the edge of the boat as it holds on, stanch and true, to water-weeds and floating branches; on the low moan with which it buries itself under a rock and dies; ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... without a break; nor might he have said it was in motion or of any depth. A sound came from the direction not unlike that of a sibilant wind. Presently out of the perspective, which reduced the many to one and all sizes to a level, the line developed into unequal divisions, with intervals between them; about the same time the noise became recognizable as the voices ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... the others at his heels, the morio slowly made his way up the stairs. Goaded by the taunts of the outlaws, his face was distorted with ferocity; through his lips came a fierce, sibilant breathing; in the dim light his colossal figure and enormous head seemed in no wise human, but rather a murderous phantasm. With head rolling from side to side, stabbing in the air with his knife, he continued ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... A sibilant whisper. Sergeant Tremp muttered something in reply. The trio turned the corner and immediately it seemed they were at the back of the firing shelf where—every so far apart—the figures of riflemen stood waiting ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... out when there was any exchange of sentiments. He had a great admiration for the gifts of Ned Nestor, and wanted every one to understand what his sentiments were. So he started to open his mouth to say something, when Ned lifted a hand and gave a low sibilant hiss. ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... away foraging, but a faint sibilant squeaking within the dome told me that the little ones were there, and hungry as usual. As I watched there was a swift movement in a tunnel among the roots, and the mother-mouse came rushing back. She paused a moment, lifting her forepaws against a root to sniff what danger threatened. Then ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... but his strength failed him, and the sailors of the trader had to catch him as he tottered, take the young woman from his arms, and help him struggle up the ladder on deck, like a man whose every bone and muscle is racked by rheumatism. Attempting to speak, he could produce only an asthmatic, sibilant wheeze. On deck, he groaned, burst into a senseless, cackling laugh, and spread out his purple, frozen hands. His lips, too, were purple, and his sunken eyes glowed feverishly from a face crusted with dirt and brine. He seemed to want nothing so much as to ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... was tightening his obnoxious coils about her all the time. Even now she could feel his hand upon her arm, could hear his sibilant whisper, could see his intense eyes full of suggestion and threat. Now she found herself face to face with the crisis of all these years. Her only hope lay in the thought that neither could afford the scandal of an open declaration. Bansemer was merciless ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... outside the gates of Ludwigsburg; they raised a shout when they saw their Duke. He bowed, and the Landhofmeisterin also bent her head in dignified salutation. Immediately the shouting ceased, and a low ominous groan went up, intermingled with sibilant hissings. Wilhelmine grew pale, and shot a glance of hatred towards the peasants. His Highness spoke rapidly in a low tone to the cadet who rode at his elbow. The youth galloped back along the line of the cortege, and delivered an order to the captain of the 1st Regiment of Wirtemberg Cavalry. ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... the wings of night, was sharp with the fragrance of heather and the sea. One fancied how it would surge through the dim aisles of cathedral-like forests, ruffling the plumage of drowsy birds, stirring the surface of some dark pool, where the trout still slept, and making sibilant music among the ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... stirred. He drew a quick, sibilant breath, and turned, planting his back against the door and ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... traces of the endeavour to distinguish them otherwise and more precisely. Already in very early times two such proposals of change must have been made, each of which found a field for its diffusion. In the one case they employed for the sibilant—for which the Phoenician alphabet furnished two signs, the fourteenth ( —"id://") for —"id:sh" and the eighteenth (—"id:E") for —"id:s" —not the latter, which was in sound the more suitable, but the former; and such was in earlier times the mode of writing ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... knocker put by with Mr. Bowls's plate. She insisted that the Doctor should call twice a day; and deluged her patient with draughts every two hours. When anybody entered the room, she uttered a shshshsh so sibilant and ominous, that it frightened the poor old lady in her bed, from which she could not look without seeing Mrs. Bute's beady eyes eagerly fixed on her, as the latter sate steadfast in the arm-chair ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... listened to the infinitesimal noises of the night, straining their ears in the stillness. The river wound past them with a faint, sibilant sound like a child chuckling in its sleep; an owl hooted somewhere in the far-off sanctuary of the trees. Betty drew her breath with a little sigh that was no louder than the rustle of the bat's wings overhead. ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... interesting to step back sixty years into the lives of Miss Mitford and her "dear young friend Miss Barrett," when the -esses of "authoresses" and "poetesses" and "editresses" and "hermitesses" make the pages sibilant; when 'Books of Beauty,' and 'Keepsakes,' and the extraordinary methods of "Finden's Tableaux" make us wonder that literature survived; when Mr. Kenyon, taking Miss Mitford "to the giraffes and the Diorama," called for "Miss Barrett, a hermitess in Gloucester Place, who ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... tremeti. Shuffle (cards) miksi, enmiksi—igi. Shuffle (prevaricate) cxikani. Shun eviti. Shut fermi. Shutter, window fenestra kovrilo. Shuttle naveto. Shy timeta, hontema. Shyness timeteco, honteco. Si (music) B. Si (flat) Bes. Sibilant sibla, sibla sono. Sick (ill) malsana. Sick vomema. Sicken malsanigxi. Sickle rikoltilo. Sickly malsanema. Side flanko. Sideboard telermeblo. Side face profilo. Siege siegxo. Sieve kribrilo. Sift kribri. Sigh ekgxemi. Sigh after—or for sopiri pri. Sight ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... with the ocean of life, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk'd where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok, Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant, Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways, I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems, Was seiz'd by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot, The rim, the sediment ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... midst of the commotion that followed and while Mrs. Saumarez, attended by the doctors, was being carried out of the Court-room, Tansley, at Brent's elbow, drew in his breath with a sharp sibilant sound that came near being a whistle. Brent turned from the withdrawing figures to look ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... is always elided before a vowel. An illustration of the way in which final M and N were weakened may be found in the nasalised pronunciation of them in modern French (main, faim). The gutturals C and G have by some been supposed to have had from the first a soft sibilant sound before E and I; but from the silence of all the grammarians on the subject, from the transcriptions of C in Greek by kappa, not sigma or tau, and from the inscriptions and MSS. of the best ages not confusing CI with TI, we conclude ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... there emerged a deep, regular pat-pat. It was the tread of some animal—the rhythm of soft but heavy pads placed cautiously upon the ground. It stole slowly round the camp, and then halted near our gateway. There was a low, sibilant rise and fall—the breathing of the creature. Only our feeble hedge separated us from this horror of the night. Each of us had seized his rifle, and Lord John had pulled out a small bush to make ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he said, his voice low, sibilant, menacing. "I have laid my plans, and shall pursue them with a complete detachment. Others may suffer—so shall I. I have practically reached the limit of my resources. In a month or less I shall be penniless. What money I could scrape together I devoted to the furtherance of this marriage-project, ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... eyes and there saw the light of undreamed-of hopes. The white world was tearing itself to pieces. White solidarity was riven and shattered. And—fear of white power and respect for white civilization together dropped away like garments outworn. Through the bazaars of Asia ran the sibilant whisper: 'The East will see the West to bed.'" At last comes the inevitable conclusion pleading for a better understanding between England and Germany and for everything else that would make for racial solidarity. The pitiful thing about this book is that it is so thoroughly ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... began, "but he is less civilised than Denis." Mary's pronunciation of "civilised" gave the word a special and additional significance. She uttered it meticulously, in the very front of her mouth, hissing delicately on the opening sibilant. So few people were civilised, and they, like the first-rate works of art, were mostly French. "Civilisation is most ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... columns of blue smoke drifted up here and there between the close-set tents, and the sibilant wearing of stone-mills, as they ground the wheat, was heard in many households. The nutty aroma of parching lentils, and the savor of roasting papyrus root and garlic told the stage of the morning ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... sibilant as in thigh; or semivocal as in thee; both of which are simple sounds, and ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin |
