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Snowball   Listen
verb
Snowball  v. i.  
1.
To throw snowballs.
2.
To increase in magnitude at an accelerating rate, achieving large proportions; by analogy with a snowball rolling down a steep hill, causing a large snow slide.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Snowball" Quotes from Famous Books



... great snowball, And brought it in to roast; He laid it down before the fire, And soon the ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole

... he told the driver to go ahead. Did she mean that she would think of marrying him, by any chance? Of course she did, Alphonse. Hadn't he seen that all over her face three days ago? If he hadn't, he was a snowball. ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather

... always took King Inge's side. Ottar Birting was killed north in the merchant town (Nidaros), in an assault upon him in the twilight as he was going to the evening song. When he heard the whistling of the blow he held up his cloak with his hands against it; thinking, no doubt, it was a snowball thrown at him, as young boys do in the streets. Ottar fell by the stroke; but his son, Alf Hrode, who just at the same moment was coming into the churchyard, saw his father's fall, and saw that the man who had killed him ran east about the church. Alf ran after him, and ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson

... as might be; because we could not help remembering that this magnificent fleet was sailing in an enemy's bay, and that it was filled with troops for the invasion of that enemy's country. Thus, like a snowball, we had gathered as we went on, and from having set out a mere handful of soldiers, were now become an army, formidable as well from ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig

... farmyard, clucking and scratching busily; for all were hungry, and ran chirping round her to pick up the worms and seeds she found for them. Cocky soon began to help take care of his sisters; and when a nice corn or a fat bug was found, he would step back and let little Downy or Snowball have it. But Peck would run and push them away, and gobble up the food greedily. He chased them away from the pan where the meal was, and picked the down off their necks if they tried to get their share. His mother scolded him when the little ones ran to hide under her ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott

... picture to his lips, "how can I part with you?" And dropping his head on the hard, prickly cushion, by which he knelt, he cried in a way that would considerably have astonished the youths with whom he had, a few hours earlier, engaged in a vigorous snowball fight. They only knew a bright, mirthful Aubrey Clare, the cleverest lad in his class, and the "jolliest fellow out;" none but Kate had any idea of the deepest affections of his boyish heart, and she truly sympathised with her half-brother in his love for the ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various

... had suddenly pivoted clear around and sat now facing him, an eager, mittened hand staying his hard, skilful, obedient fingers, already making the snowball. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson

... be built by one patrol according to their own ideas of fortification, with loopholes, etc., for looking out. When finished, it will be attacked by hostile patrols, using snowballs as ammunition. Every scout struck by a snowball is counted dead. The attackers should, as a rule, number at least twice the strength ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America

... thirteenth year of her age, and in defiance of the strange verses just now quoted, Czarina began to breed, and two of her progeny, Claret and young Czarina, challenged the whole kingdom and won their matches. Major, and Snowball, without a white spot about him, inherited all the excellence of their dam. The former was rather the fleeter of the two, but the stanchness of Snowball nothing could exceed. A Scotch greyhound, who had beaten every opponent in his own country, was at this time brought to England, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... playmates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, sweep onward towards the West, teaching their men the art of riding, till the Persian cavalry becomes more famous than the Median had been. They gather to them, as a snowball gathers in rolling, the picked youth of every tribe whom they overcome. They knit these tribes to them in loyalty and affection by that righteousness—that truthfulness and justice—for which Isaiah ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... or below, or overside, or what not, the dog never seemed to pay much attention to him. But the minute Bill started aloft that dog began to cry—whine and bark—and try to climb the shrouds after that nigger. Land sakes, you never in your life saw such actions! Got so we had to chain the dog Snowball whenever it came on to blow, for there's a consarned lot o' reefin' down and hoistin' sail on one o' them big fo'masters. The skipper't keeps his job on a ship like the Sally S. Stern must get steamboat speed ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper

... illustrious ancestors, it was not unlikely that he would in time develop illustrious descendants, and the jeerings and sneerings soon ceased. The climax of Bonaparte's career at Brienne was in 1784, when he directed a snowball fight between two evenly divided branches of the school with such effect that one boy had his skull cracked and the rest were laid up ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs

... barbarous nations, over great rivers and mountains that were thought unpassable, Hannibal had lost a great part of his army, this Hasdrubal, in the same places, had multiplied his numbers, and gathering the people that he found in the way, descended from the Alps like a rolling snowball, far greater than he came over the Pyrenees at his first setting out of Spain. These considerations and the like, of which fear presented many unto them, caused the people of Rome to wait upon their consuls out of the town, like a pensive train ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various

... be sown in the early part of the month. The best sorts now are White Gem, or Snowball. All the Year Round will please those ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... Brooks, my boy, it's been mentioned to-night, and I'm a proud man when I think of it. There were others who did the showy part of the work, of course, the speechmaking and the bill-framing and all that, but I was the first man to set the Protection snowball rolling. It wasn't much I had to say, but I said it. A glass of wine with you, Sir Henry? With ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... the snow began. "We really thought it was time to begin work on the land," said the people; but they could put up with the cold—there was still time enough. They proceeded to snowball one another, and set their sledges in order; all through the winter there had been no toboggan-slide. Soon the snow was up to one's ankles, and the slide was made. Now it might as well stop snowing. It might lie a week or two, so that people might enjoy a few proper sleighing-parties. But ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... would have gone into the nursery to play with that lovely baby; but there were times, I am sorry to say, when Flaxie really enjoyed being unhappy. So now she stood still, rolling her little trouble over and over, as boys roll a snowball, making it larger and larger, till presently it was as ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May

... scandals in 1897 was as the rolling snowball. It is unnecessary to refer to them all in detail. The Union Ground, one of the public squares of Johannesburg, was granted to a syndicate of private individuals upon such terms that they were enabled to sell the right, ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick

... drink, the wandering trader plies the Mongol with whiskey, and then, taking advantage of his befuddled wits, gets him to take a lot of useless things at cut-throat prices—but no bother about paying, that can be settled any time. Only when pay-day comes the debts, grown like a rolling snowball, must be met, and so horses and cattle, the few pitiful heirlooms, are swallowed up, and the Mongol finds himself afoot and out of doors, another enemy of ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall

... it was then that it began to dawn on me that if I had failed in the art of letters, I had succeeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit. This happened, I should think, some time in April, and the snowball of rumour that was then set rolling has been rolling ever since, growing bigger and bigger, till it is now swollen to a ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen

... and known by a special name—virgin's bower. With its delicate leaves, almost as beautiful as a maidenhair fern, and its dainty pink flower, it festooned the ripening corn as wantonly and luxuriantly as it encircled the snowball ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... hailed these piles of snow as being fine for fortifications, and snowball battles that ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill

... way to his English friend; and, obeying directly, they hurried down the first turning, but in vain. A crowd of men and boys were after them, cheering loudly, and this crowd was snowball-like in the way in which the farther it rolled the more it grew. So that in spite of all their efforts they were literally hunted right up to the Doctor's gates, where they arrived hot and breathless to find a larger crowd than ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn

... and as a budding engineer, he has chronicled; he took part in snowball rows, in the debates of the Speculative Society, and in private dramatic performances, organized by his senior and friend, Professor Fleeming Jenkin. To "dress up" in old costumes always pleased him. He happened to praise the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... resistance, it not uncommonly occurred that these missiles were (doubtless purposely) made to contain a piece of ice, or even a sharp flint. In one of these skirmishes the writer himself was struck on the temple, his eye only just escaping, by a snowball, which a comrade picked up, on seeing that the wound was bleeding, and a fragment of glass was found inside it; this, surely, an extreme illustration of the principle that "all is lawful ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter

... thousand spears, and his force was growing in snowball fashion as he progressed through the land. The great road which Notiki, the northern chief, had started by way of punishment was beginning to take shape. Bosambo ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace

... spring seems to be set in a wood; it is so fresh and green. The flowering shrubs, on the other hand, are not to be compared with ours. Everyone rushes to see a few lilac bushes, and Gueldres roses trimmed to a stiff snowball of flowers, and everyone says Wie Herrlich! but you miss the profusion of lilac, hawthorn, and laburnum that runs riot all about London in every residential road and every garden. Above all, you miss the English lawns. In Berlin wherever grass is grown it looks either thin ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

... Charles, the old doe, its mother, died when Snowball was only a week old, and I reared it by feeding it with warm milk and bran; and it is now so fond of me that I would not part with it for a ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas

... advice and remedies, and we'll strike a balance somehow.' The Potters have during years had very little occasion for a doctor's services, and we, with this great family, have had to have groceries, shoes, and every other thing, and Potter's bill has kept rolling up like a great snowball, bit by bit. We pay something now and then. I sold my old sideboard that came to me from my grandparents, and paid a hundred dollars on it six months ago. Old Mr. Potter died. Rufus reigns in his stead, as the Bible says, and he wants to collect his money. I do not blame him, Grace, ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various

... do, Miss Grey," he said, "and what I'll get our fellows to do. We'll have one, big snowball fight. And the side that gets licked 'll stay licked till school's out next spring. And there won't be any more scrapping all winter. We'll do that, won't ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene

... the snow and made a snowball. "Put it in your pocket, and take it home to Oscar as a souvenir of ...
— Gerda in Sweden • Etta Blaisdell McDonald

... her head. "Perhaps you weren't attending. Major Clowes was very down on him for wearing it—chaffing him, of course, but chaffing half in earnest: a snowball with a stone in it. Naturally Val wasn't going to say ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... and splendor, and this halo of sexual origin increases in its turn the sentiments of sympathy; and the sentiments of sympathy increase the sexual desire. In this way mutual suggestions grow like a snowball, and rapidly attain the culminating point of amorous intoxication, or what is called ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... to descend as a snowball rolls down hill, and both of us could see that an abyss lay at the foot of the hill; but how were we to hold back, and what measures could we take? And it was utterly impossible to conceal this; my entire parish was greatly disturbed, and said: "The priest's son has gone mad; he is possessed ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... for the ferule and birch rod now? Were boys created merely to study Latin and arithmetic? No; the better purposes of their being are to sport, to leap, to run, to shout, to slide upon the ice, to snowball. ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... nakedness by pooling their rags, were a musical rabble. Kevin MacHenery, carrying a saber captured from one of the BSG-OCS-men, shouted to a tuba-player, the bell of whose horn had been dimpled by a hard-cored snowball. "Play the National Anthem," he yelled. The player, chilly and terrified, raised the mouthpiece of the tuba to his lips and, looking fearfully about like the target of a test-your-skill ball-throwing ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang

... Uncle Peter! I certainly did need you to come along right now and set me straight. You founded the fortune, pa trebled it, and now I'll get to work and roll it up like a big snowball." ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... American. "My two friends, Johnson and Jones, were once having an argument. There were eight or nine inches of snow on the ground. The argument got heated, and Johnson picked up a snowball and threw it at Jones from a distance of not more than five yards. During the transit of that snowball, believe me or not, as you like, the weather changed and became hot and summer like, and Jones, instead of being hit with a snowball, ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... the front of the coast-guard lieutenant's house, is Cobaea scandens, covered with purple claret-glasses, as it has been ever since Christmas: for Aberalva knows no winter: and there are grown-up men in it who never put on a skate, or made a snowball in their lives. A most cleanly, bright-coloured, foreign-looking street, is that long straggling one which runs up the hill towards Penalva Court: only remark, that this cleanliness is gained by making the gutter in the middle street the common sewer of the town, and tread ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... the children assembled at school, they saw a strange sight. On the front steps of the building was a great snowball, so large that it almost hid the door from sight. And working at it, trying to cut it away so that the entrance could be used, was the janitor. He was ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at Snow Lodge • Laura Lee Hope

... sure he did, and he went out into the yard, where the snow was piled white and smooth and not even a path had been shoveled, and began to roll a snowball ...
— Sunny Boy and His Playmates • Ramy Allison White

... the field of my vision was open, and I saw Mrs. Mitchell holding her head with both hands, and the face of Turkey grinning round the corner of the open door. Evidently he wanted to entice her to follow him; but she had been too much astonished by the snowball in the back of her neck even to look in the direction whence the blow had come. So Turkey stepped out, and was just poising himself in the delivery of a second missile, when she turned ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald

... kitchen, William the coachman was, of course, the great centre of attraction to a large gathering of domestics, and of neighbours also, who soon came flocking in, spite of the lateness of the hour, to get an authentic version of the accident, which, snowball-like, would, ere noon next day, get rolled up into gigantic proportions, as it made its way through many mouths to the farther ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson

... is to attach a sting to an innocent remark! Our lightly-spoken words may blight the life of an innocent one, for words repeated are like the rolling snowball which grows larger as it is pushed over the fallen snow. As one dog, howling in the night, causes all the other dogs in town to howl, so we may start a needless alarm by ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold

... that date was a snowball fight. Whether snow is less plentiful, or students are too cultured and too refined for these rough pastimes it is impossible to say, but certain it is that a really great snowball fight is also a thing of the past. In those days they were Homeric ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black

... to the door to administer a farewell snowball to the unclassified aliens who went home to the village for dinner. A prompt answer came hurtling back, and as he dodged into the porch with a derisive yell of laughter, he barely escaped knocking over the new master. He hastily stepped aside ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith

... spiritual flagellation to BEN HECHT, who, as he says, "ten years ago prided himself upon being as indigestible a type of the incoherent young as the land afforded." And nonsenseorship in general he regards as a war-born Frankenstein, a frenzied virtue grown hugely luminous; "a snowball rolling uphill toward God and gathering furious dimensions, it has escaped the shrewd janitors of orthodoxy who from age to age were able ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... y will vanish, When that Bonnet I recall; And a vision fair will banish, Newton, Euclid, and Snowball. And a gleam of tresses golden, And of eyes divinely blue, Will interfere with Holden, And ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling

... Society." And I quote it because I believe that it sums up in a few words, not only the world-politics of the future, but the religion—the real, practical religion, and therefore the only religion which counts in so far as this life is concerned—of the future as well. The snowball—if I may thus describe it symbolically—has just begun to roll, but it will gather weight and impetus with every succeeding year, until, at last, there will be no nations—as we understand nations to-day—but ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King

... snows so deep but that Sylvia and her grandfather went forth for their afternoon tramp. There was nothing morbid or anaemic about Sylvia. Every morning she pulled weights and swung Indian clubs with her windows open. A mischievous freshman who had thrown a snowball at Sylvia's heels, in the hope of seeing her jump, regretted his bad manners: Sylvia caught him in the ear with an unexpected return shot. A senior who observed the incident dealt in the lordly way of his kind with the offender. They called her "our co-ed" and "the boss girl" after ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... summer—Spanish breezes, Italian sky and sunsets, Alpine mountains, tropical luxuriance of vegetation, a nearly uniform climate, a big outdoor conservatory. There is no other place on earth that combines so much in the same limits. You can snowball your companions on Christmas morning on the mountain-top, pelt your lady friends with rose leaves in the foot-hills three hours later, and in another sixty minutes dip in the surf no cooler than Newport in July; and the theatre in the evening. As a bright workman said, you can freeze ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn

... thus roused by the presence of Snowball, had its development greatly assisted by the scrupulosity with which most things in the kitchen, and chief of all in this respect, the churn, were kept. It required much effort to come up to the nicety considered by Jean indispensable in the churn; and the croucher on the ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... Alpine glaciers are common enough, but as glaciers and the Glacial Age have a great deal to do with the antiquity of man, we can not do better than to learn what we can of their formation, and their wonderful extension during this period. The school-boy knows that by pressure he gives his snowball nearly the hardness of ice. He could make it really ice if he possessed sufficient strength. The fact is, then, that snow under the influence of pressure passes into the form of ice. In some cases nature does this on a ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... down for $50, which started it well. Mr. Jowett could do no less than Mr. Korley, and Mr. Wheaton no less than Mr. Jowett; and so, the subscription once started, grew very rapidly, like a boy's snowball, to adequate proportions. The second Tuesday in July I was enabled to give notice to all the subcribers to meet at my house. My parlors were well filled. I had taken pains to get some lady subscribers, ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott

... Still, even to the eye looking directly at the cluster through a powerful telescope, the central part of the wonderful congregation seems almost a solid mass in which the stars are packed like the ice crystals in a snowball. ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... dare mention his desire for that young bronze beauty until he had brought in five or six heads. After that he had some standing in the lady's sight. Without the heads he had no more chance of winning either the girl herself or her pa or ma or any of the Dyak family than the proverbial snowball has of getting through Borneo without melting. It just simply couldn't be done according to ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger

... by your rash engagement. But I wish you to be aware that the right is not with you; that you are fighting against the real interests of your country; and that you ought, as an Englishman and a patriot, to take the first opportunity to leave this unhappy expedition before the snowball melts.' ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... face of the little Princess broke up like a snowball in the sun, and the two other men dropped ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... made the money," continued Leverich, "I mean that I actually have made most of it—made it out of nothing! like the first chapter of Genesis. If a man has money to start with, he can add to it as easily as you can roll up a snowball. It's no credit to him. But I've had only my brains. I've seen money where other men couldn't, and nothing has stood in my way of getting to it. That's the whole secret of success. And my attitude's ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... called "fox and geese," but that's all I can remember about it. If there was a little more snow you tried to wash the girls' faces in it, and sometimes got yours washed. If there was a good deal of wet snow you had a snowball fight, which is great fun, unless you get one right smack dab in your ear—oh, but I can't begin to tell you all the fun there is at the noon hour in the country school, that the town children don't know anything about. And when it was time for school to "take up," there wasn't any forming ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood

... this world are not to be produced by each generation for itself; but we are all intended, not to carve our work in snow that will melt, but each and all of us to be continually rolling a great white gathering snowball, higher and higher—larger and larger—along the Alps of human power. Thus the science of nations is to be accumulative from father to son: each learning a little more and a little more; each receiving all that was ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin

... tale was told, Like a snowball growing while it rolled. The nurse hushed with it the baby's cry; And it served, in the worthy minister's eye, To paint the primitive Serpent by. Cotton Mather came posting down All the way to Newbury town, With his eyes agog and his ears set wide, And his marvellous inkhorn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various

... Cambridge High School, a good many of whom were much bigger than he was, undertook to throw snowballs at him one day as he went by. Whereupon Curtis marched up to the biggest boy and told him if another snowball were thrown at him he would thrash him and he might pass it over to the boy who did it. The result was that Curtis was ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... powdered the virgin snow with diamond and ruby. Snake-like the party wound along beside the river. Dogs barked; voices rang clear on the crystal night; now and again, with laughter and shout, the lads raced hither and thither from their stolid elders, and here and there jackets carried the mark of a snowball. Behind the procession a trampled grey line stretched out under the moonlight. Then all passed like some dim, magic pageant of a dream; the distant dark blot of naked woodlands swallowed them up, and the voices grew faint and ceased. Only the endless ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... and stately habit is the old Snowball. When well grown, few shrubs can surpass it in beauty. Its great balls of bloom are composed of scores of individually small flowers, and they are borne in such profusion that the branches often bend beneath their weight. Of late years there has been widespread complaint of failure ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford

... open? There are three or four windows open!" gleefully shouted a fuzzy, Woolen Boy Doll. "Look at the snow blowing in! Hurray! Now we can have a snowball fight without going outside. Come on!" cried the Woolen Boy Doll to a little Flannel Pig who had just been stuffed with cotton. "Come on, have ...
— The Story of a Plush Bear • Laura Lee Hope

... stack, sheaf, haycock[obs3]; fascicle, fascicule[obs3], fasciculus[Lat], gavel, hattock[obs3], stook[obs3]. accumulation &c. (store) 636; congeries, heap, lump, pile, rouleau[obs3], tissue, mass, pyramid; bing[obs3]; drift; snowball, snowdrift; acervation[obs3], cumulation; glomeration[obs3], agglomeration; conglobation[obs3]; conglomeration, conglomerate; coacervate[Chem], coacervation[Chem], coagmentation[obs3], aggregation, concentration, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... crossed with other breeds? have the Shorthorns, without good reason, been purchased at immense prices and exported to almost every quarter of the globe, a thousand guineas having been given for a bull? With greyhounds pedigrees have likewise been kept, and the names of such dogs, as Snowball, Major, etc., are as well known to coursers as those of Eclipse and Herod on the turf. Even with the Gamecock, pedigrees of famous strains were formerly kept, and extended back for a century. With pigs, the Yorkshire and Cumberland breeders "preserve and print ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin

... to work together. Wade caught one ship in the molecular ray, and Fuller hit with a heat beam. Like some titanic broom they swept it around at dozens of miles a second, leaping, twisting, smashing ship after ship. Like a snowball, the lump of glowing metal grew with each crash, till a dozen ships had fallen into it. It was a new broom, and ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell

... mate early after emerging, and lay about two hundred small eggs to the female, from which the caterpillars soon hatch, and begin their succession of moults. One writer gave black haw and snowball as their favourite foods, and the length of the caterpillar when full grown nearly two inches. They are either a light brown with yellow markings, or green with yellow; all of them have white granules on the body, and a blue-black horn with a yellow base. They spin ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter

... jump over a high board fence when anybody was chasing me. Now we have some kind of breakfast food three times a day because ma reads the advertisements, and dad is so weak he has to be helped to dress, ma goes moping around like a fashionable invalid, I am so tired I can't hit a window with a snowball, and the dog that used to fight cats now wants to lay in front of the grate and wish he was dead. Gosh, but there ought to be a law that any man that invents a new breakfast food should be compelled to eat it. Gee, but that onion gives a ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck

... arrested by Nature on the way to become albinesses. There are others that are shot through with golden light, with tawny or fulvous tinges in various degree,— POSITIVE or STAINED blondes, dipped in yellow sunbeams, and as unlike in their mode of being to the others as an orange is unlike a snowball. The albino-style carries with it a wide pupil and a sensitive retina. The other, or the leonine blonde, has an opaline fire in her clear eye, which the brunette can hardly match ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... intervals, along this walk, some bushes of lilacs, bridal-wreath spirea, flowering almond, snowball, syringa, and scarlet flowering quince; for roses, Mme. Plantier, the half double Boursault, and some great clumps of the little cinnamon rose and Harrison's yellow brier, whose flat opening flowers are things of a day, these two varieties having the habit of travelling ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright

... the Charlestonians were called in by their captain, for they were first at bat. The Kingstonians dispread themselves over the field in their various positions. The umpire tossed to the nervous Reddy what seemed to be a snowball, whose whiteness he immediately covered with dust from the box. The Charlestonian batter came to the plate and tapped it smartly three or four times. ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes

... a necessary for the middling class, and will soon become a necessary for the lowest, or all but the lowest, members of society. Most of our readers are acquainted with the story of the Highland chief who rebuked his son indignantly for making a pillow of a snowball. Sumptuary laws have always been inefficient, or efficient only for the purposes of oppression. Public morality has been their pretext—the private gratification of jealousy their aim. In republics they were intended to allay the envy of the poor—in monarchies ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... had hit upon the idea of "Snowball" Saunders. Snowball had come to the house to borrow the Merriams' ice-cream freezer. There was to be an informal "repast" at the Shriners' hall, and Snowball engineered all the Shriners' gustatory festivities ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin

... and so they rolled on down. It was a wet snow and as they rolled they took up more and more of it till by the time they came slap up against the side of the barn every single goose was sealed up in the middle of a hard, round snowball. They all stopped there and all that grandfather had to do was to pile them up, and there they were, in cold storage for the winter. Every time the family wanted roast goose they went out and split open a snowball. The folks in granddad's time used often to freeze their fresh meat ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... beware," is a legal fiction. It should read, "Let the seller beware," for he who is intent on selling the people a different article from what they want, or at a price beyond its value, will stay in trade about as long as that famous snowball ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... the blind fish; crossed the streams "Lethe" and "Styx"; plied with music and guns the echoes in these alarming galleries; saw every form of stalagmite and stalactite in the sculptured and fretted chambers,—the icicle, the orange-flower, the acanthus, the grapes, and the snowball. We shot Bengal lights into the vaults and groins of the sparry cathedrals, and examined all the masterpieces which the four combined engineers, water, limestone, gravitation, and time, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... less civilized than themselves; and we had learnt before now that when we snowballed each other or snowballed the rougher "lot" of village boys, we did so under different conditions. We had our own code of honour and fairness, but Bob Furniss was not above putting a stone into a snowball if he ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... pinky berries render a fair-sized plant particularly handsome and attractive, and for which alone, as also beauty of autumnal foliage, the shrub is well worthy of extensive culture. It grows fully 15 feet high, and may frequently be seen as much through. V. Opulus sterilis (Snowball Tree) is one of the commonest occupants of our shrubberies, and a decidedly ornamental-flowering shrub. The large, almost globular flower heads hanging from every branch tip, are too well-known to require description, and have made the shrub one of ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster

... out there you've about as much chance as a snowball in hell. O'Hara's half way to Galaxy Center. Look, with a little luck we get you out to Salaman. If you leave all this equipment I might be able to hide you ...
— Dead World • Jack Douglas

... perceives IN ITSELF, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call IDEA; and the power to produce any idea in our mind, I call QUALITY of the subject wherein that power is. Thus a snowball having the power to produce in us the ideas of white, cold, and round,—the power to produce those ideas in us, as they are in the snowball, I call qualities; and as they are sensations or perceptions in our understandings, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke

... "Good-by, Snowball," said Tom, extending his closed hand toward the negro. "I don't want you to do this for nothing. Here's a dollar to pay you for ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon

... their happiest dreams until the crisis is long past. All the more credit to them for a great effort. They by no means grasp at present the fact that with every acre they add to arable, with each additional acre of wheat, they increase their own importance and stability, and set the snowball of permanent prosperity in their industry rolling anew. Pasture was a policy adopted by men who felt defeat in their bones, saw bankruptcy round every corner. Those who best know seem agreed that after the war the price of wheat will not come down with a run. The world shortage of food and shipping ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy

... had been cleaned and put to rights after the fire. In the same window was some doll's furniture, and on the bureau was a looking glass. The China Cat caught a glimpse of herself. She was as clean and white as a new snowball. ...
— The Story of a China Cat • Laura Lee Hope

... for fun ma frien', but w'en you spark for keep She's not sam t'ing an' mak' you feel so scare lak' leetle sheep Some tam you get de fever—some tam you're lak snowball An' all de tam you ack lak' fou—can't ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond

... I was almost constantly kept at work—by night as by day. I may say there was no drudgery—no "dirty work"—that was not mine. I was not only slave to captain, mates, and carpenter, but every man of the crew esteemed himself my master. Even "Snowball" in the "caboose"—as the cook was jocularly termed—ordered me about with a fierce exultation, that he had one white skin that he ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid

... HALL RIVALS Or, Fun and Sport Afloat and Ashore It is a lively, rattling, breezy story of school life in this country, written by one who knows all about its ways, its snowball fights, its baseball matches, its pleasures and its perplexities, its glorious excitements, its rivalries, and its chilling disappointments. It is a capitally written story which ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.

... party succeeded in obtaining at one time a footing on the parapet, and were able to hold the same for the space of two minutes. Both sides were to abstain from putting pebbles into their snowballs, nor was it permissible to use frozen ammunition. A snowball soaked in water and left out to cool was a projectile which in previous years had been resorted to with ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... cat. Her name is Snowball. She is as white as snow. When she curls up in front of the fire she is round ...
— Five Little Friends • Sherred Willcox Adams

... look in one day to ask if they'd like some sweetpeas, but I found the Ethels were ahead of me. The old lady has a fine snowball bush and a beauty syringa in front of the house. When I spoke about them she said she had always wanted to have a bed of white flowers around the two bushes, so I offered to make one ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith

... little pet lamb, which he had carried on his shoulder for many a mile across the country. It was a poor little orphan, its mother having died; but Willie had brought her up on warm new milk, which the farmer had given him. We at once named her Daisy, she was so white and fluffy, just like a snowball; and twice a day we used to feed her with warm milk out of a bottle. She very quickly got tame, roaming about and following us in our walks. She knew Sunday quite well, and never attempted to go to church ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous

... of which Owen was the secretary, and as the snow continued to fall, he occupied himself after dinner in the manner his wife suggested, until four o'clock, when Frankie returned from school bringing with him a large snowball, and crying out as a piece of good news that the snow was still falling heavily, and that he believed ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... flickered the light of a fire, small and distant, round which wavered the inky silhouettes of men, and beyond which dimly shone a yellow face or two, a yellow fist clutched full of boiled rice like a snowball. Beyond these, in turn, gleamed other little fires, where other coolies were ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout

... and their power of gliding, and the lightness of their following; all of which I could see at once, through knowledge of our own farm-sleds; which we employ in lieu of wheels, used in flatter districts. When I had heard all this from her, a mere chit of a girl as she was, unfit to make a snowball even, or to fry snow pancakes, I looked down on her with amazement, and began to wish a little that I had ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... Abner stolidly. "By their own bulk—like a big snowball. And by their own badness. People are rolling back to the country—the country they came from. Improved transportation will do it." The troubles of the town were ephemeral—he waved them aside. But his face ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller

... Scotch sauce for fish, Sea bass or black-fish, boiled, Sea bass, fried, Sea catchup, Sea kale, to boil, Secrets, Seidlitz powders, Shad, baked, Shad, to fry, Shalot vinegar, Shells, Short cakes, Shrub, (cherry,) Shrub, (currant,) Shrub, (fox-grape,) Smelts, to fry, Snowball custard, Snipes, to roast, Soda biscuit, Soda water, Spanish buns, Spinach, to boil, Spinach and eggs, Sponge cake, Spruce beer, Squashes or cymlings, to boil, Squash, (winter,) to boil, Squash, pudding, Strawberries, preserved, Strawberry ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie

... deeper. It was assumed between them that the expulsion of the Modernist clergy was only a question of months—possibly weeks. Once indeed Meynell referred slightly to the agitation in the country, to the growing snowball of the petition to Parliament, to the now certain introduction of a Bill "To promote an amended constitution for the Church of England." The Bishop's eyebrows went up, his lip twitched. It was the scorn of a spiritual aristocracy threatened ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... grass, weeds and trees, and several plants noted somewhat in detail yet unlike any form known to me. Of the recognizable plants a number were used somewhat cleverly for their analogical significance. Of these may be mentioned the snowball and hydrangea whose flowers as every botanist knows are sterile, the size of the individual blossom being gained at the expense of loss of stamens and pistils. These plants were plainly used to indicate barrenness and the predominance of traits ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... eyes, with the sunshine quivering in them as in dewdrops, then I should like to see that gem, and have it set in the finest gold, and send it to the most beautiful woman in the world to wear for a ring. This rabbit was white as a snowball, with ears as pink as blush roses, and a mouth that was always in motion, whether Adolphus put lumps of sugar ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May

... of the trip he was rather restless. He wandered about the boat, talking little with the returning picnickers. Toward the last, as they drew near Washington and the white dome of the Capitol hung aloft before them, looking as simple as a suspended snowball, he found himself, on the deck, in proximity to Mrs. Steuben. He reproached himself with having rather neglected her during an entertainment for which he was indebted to her bounty, and he sought to repair his omission by a proper deference. But the only act of homage ...
— Pandora • Henry James

... to play snowball fight," decided Sue. "I see Mary Watson and Sadie West. I'm going to play ...
— Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue Giving a Show • Laura Lee Hope

... the company in health, Captain Jervoise encouraged the men to get up games, in which the four young officers took part. Sometimes it was a snowball match in the open; at other times a snow fort was built, garrisoned, and attacked. Occasionally there were matches at hockey, while putting the stone, throwing the caber, running and wrestling matches, were all tried in turn; and the company suffered ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty

... less—find themselves being hurt by the other's ways of acting. Each allows a sense of antagonism to grow up. This makes them more ready to resent the next difference in opinion or purpose. Once started, the feeling of enmity can grow like a snowball until neither one is willing to believe in the other's honesty, fairness, or decency. This road leads straight ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various

... first baby blue fox said to the second, "Who are the snow ghosts the ghosts of?" The second baby blue fox answered, "Everybody who makes a snowball, a snow man, a snow fox or a snow fish or a snow pattycake, ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg

... an individual player is too strongly aroused, he spoils the game, just as an angry player spoils a friendly wrestling match or snowball fight, and just as a thoroughly frightened passenger spoils a trip down the rapids, which was meant to be simply thrilling. The instincts are active in play, but they must not be too active, for human play is an activity carried on well above the instinctive ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... mouths in this His Spirit"[11]—and that it locates the springing forth of "the Seed" in the North of England. It was, we are now well aware, out of the Seeker-groups of the northern counties of England that the new "Society" was actually born, and it grew, like a rolling snowball, as it gathered in the prepared groups of "Seekers," both north and south in England, and a ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... was a good shot with stones, but he found none to throw. Near where they stood, however, was an unfreezing spring, and the soggy snow on it was easily packed into a hard, heavy snowball. Rolf threw it straight, swift, and by good luck it hit the panther square on the nose and startled him so that he sprang right out of the tree and ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton

... Indeed, that had been as close an imitation of this one as Lambert could contrive in a colder climate with smaller means. Here was a fountain trellised over by a framework rich in roses and our lady's bower; here were pinks, gilly-flowers, pansies, lavender, and the new snowball shrub recently produced at Gueldres, and a little bush shown with great pride by Anton, the snow-white rose grown in King Rene's garden ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge

... and drab, and, as such, were decent and reasonable, while he was brown-eyed and preposterously fair-haired. To be sure, it was only his oval face that saved him from the horrible indignity of being called "Snowball." ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond

... "Snowball," said I, addressin' a dark skinned individual with a white apern, while I was seated at the dinner table, "what in the deuce makes all your ...
— Punchinello Vol. 2, No. 28, October 8, 1870 • Various

... gentlemen, source of my tenderest care; the brokerage, the speculation for the account, and my good friend, the Minister of the Interior, and of the Travaux Publics; and the snowball of my fortune, which must stop unproductive till I recover;—how can I leave ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle

... young children, "it may happen That we die before our time! Little Alice died last year—the grave is shapen Like a snowball, in the rime. We look'd into the pit prepared to take her— Was no room for any work in the close clay! From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her, Crying—'Get up, little Alice, it is day!' If you listen by that grave in sun and shower, With your ear down, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... recommend the cure to their friends. 'Are you sure it's all right?' they are asked. 'Of course it is,' they can reply. 'I know the man, Clem Sypher himself.' And the friends are convinced and go about saying they know a man who knows Clem Sypher, and so the thing spreads like a snowball. Have you read ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... that I am such a fool as to throw that snowball just because you want to have me? You may throw your own ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott

... a snowball; but Tom tripped him into a bank of snow and spoiled his aim. "None o' ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson

... Langsett, in the parish of Peniston and county of York, pays yearly to Godfrey Bosville, Esqre., a snowball at Midsummer, and a ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton



Words linked to "Snowball" :   bombard, sand verbena, frozen dessert, snow, pelt, Abronia elliptica, increase, ball



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