Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

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




Spawn   Listen
noun
Spawn  n.  
1.
The ova, or eggs, of fishes, oysters, and other aquatic animals.
2.
Any product or offspring; used contemptuously.
3.
(Hort.) The buds or branches produced from underground stems.
4.
(Bot.) The white fibrous matter forming the matrix from which fungi.
Spawn eater (Zool.), a small American cyprinoid fish (Notropis Hudsonius) allied to the dace.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Spawn" Quotes from Famous Books



... In the Yellow Dwarf he was the jaundiced embodiment of a spirit of Oriental evil: crafty, malevolent, greedy, insatiate,—full of mockery, mimicry, lubricity, and spite,—an Afrit, a Djinn, a Ghoul, a spawn of Sheitan. How that monstrous orange-tawny head grinned and wagged! How those flaps of ears were projected forwards, like unto those of a dog! How balefully those atrabilious eyes glistened! You laughed, and yet you shuddered. He spoke in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... surprising how few and simple are the elements of success. The crop generally appears in September, when temperature is genial and fairly equable, with sufficient but not superabundant moisture. The artificial production of Mushrooms in the garden needs only reliable spawn, a sweet fertile bed, and some means of maintaining a steady temperature under varying atmospheric conditions. When the principles of Mushroom culture are thoroughly mastered, they may be successfully applied ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... and the darkness once more closed in around. A horde of hideous thoughts, the very spawn of hell, swarmed like vermin in my mind; there was the breath as of a host of contending fiends upon my face; a hundred hungry hands seemed to lay hold on me, and to strive to drag me down and down to a bottomless pit that opened at my very feet, and into which ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... still possessed with the foolish greed to reach London, and after getting the engine to rights, went off under a clear black sky thronged with worlds and far-sown spawn, some of them, I thought, perhaps like this of mine, whelmed and drowned in oceans of silence, with one only inhabitant to see it, and hear its silence. And all the long night I travelled, stopping twice ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... the symptoms? The infant, in all probability, has had an attack of diarrhoea—bowel complaint as it is called—for several days; he having had a dozen or two of motions, many of them slimy and frothy, like "frog-spawn," during the twenty-four hours. Suddenly the character of the motion changes,—from being principally stool, it becomes almost entirely blood and mucus; he is dreadfully griped, which causes him to strain violently, as though his inside would come away every time he has a ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse

... another fortunate circumstance by which new stores for the winter were laid in. Shoals of salmon entered the Mercy, and ascended the country for several miles. It was the time at which the females, going to find suitable places in which to spawn, precede the males and make a great noise through the fresh water. A thousand of these fish, which measured about two feet and a half in length, came up the river, and a large quantity were retained by fixing dams across the stream. More than a hundred were thus taken, ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne

... dreadful place children were kidnapped and trained to various forms of vice. It was a school for murderers and robbers and prostitutes; and every night when the torches flared it vomited forth its deadly spawn. Here was the earliest home of Eleanor Gwyn, and out of this den of iniquity she came at night to sell oranges at the entrance to the theaters. She was stage-struck, and endeavored to get even a minor part in a play; but Betterton, the famous actor, thrust her aside when she ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... with savings and inheritances and prudent thrift. They must have tens of millions at their command. And these millions came through alliances, manipulations, deals, by all sorts of devices whereby money could be made to spawn miraculously.... ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... I, standing up and taking off MacMuir's coat, "and call me a lubberly clout like yourself, and we will see which is the better clout." I put off the longsleeved jacket, and faced him with my fists doubled, crying: "I'll teach you, you spawn of a dunghill, to speak ill ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... spawn of the late High Priestess Nlui-Mok, and now Most Glorious Air Lord of All the Hans." He rolled out these titles with a bow of exaggerated respect toward the west, and in a tone of mockery. Those of his men who were near enough to ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan

... waters recede during October, after the rains have ended, each runlet and purling stream becomes a scene of slaughter on a most reckless and improvident scale. The innumerable shoals of spawn and small fish that have been feeding in the rice fields, warned by some instinct seek the lakes and main streams. As they try to get their way back, however, they find at each outlet in each ditch and ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... do them any harm. Fishes continue to spawn and birds to nest without the benefits ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... come forth from slime and mud,—fetid and crawling, unformed and monstrous. I grant exceptions; and even in the New School, as it is called, I can admire the real genius, the vital and creative power of Victor Hugo. But oh, that a nation which has known a Corneille should ever spawn forth a ——-! And with these rickety and drivelling abortions—all having followers and adulators—your Public can still bear to be told that they have improved wonderfully on the day when they gave laws and models to the literature of Europe; they can bear to hear ——- ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... time; but, though the vast execution was necessary of the 25th of August, 1572, on the 25th of August, 1685, it was useless. Under the second son of Henri de Valois heresy had scarcely conceived an offspring; under the second son of Henri de Bourbon that teeming mother had cast her spawn over the whole universe. You accuse me of a crime, and you put up statues to the son of Anne of Austria! Nevertheless, he and I attempted the same thing; he succeeded, I failed; but Louis XIV. found the Protestants without arms, whereas in my reign they had ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac

... a favourite at the court of Nero. Tacitus calls him the spawn of a cook's-shop and a tippling-house; sutrinae et tabernae alumnus. He recommended himself to the favour of the prince by his scurrility and vulgar humour. Being, by those arts, raised above himself, he became ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus

... more and more animated. "Do you know how I picture God myself?" he said. "As am enormous creative organ, unknown to us, who scatters millions of worlds into space, just as one single fish would deposit its spawn in the sea. He creates, because it is His function as God to do so, but He does not know what He is doing, and is stupidly prolific in His work, and is ignorant of the combinations of all kinds which are produced by his scattered germs. Human thought is a lucky little local, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... society has its cant of lamentation.' Ib. No.128. 'Milton's invention required no assistance from the common cant of poetry.' Ib. No.140. 'We shall secure our language from being overrun with cant, from being crowded with low terms, the spawn of folly or affectation.' Works, v. II. 'This fugitive cant, which is always in a state of increase or decay, cannot be regarded as any part of the durable materials of a language.' Ib. p.45. In a note on I Henry VI, act iii. sc.1, he says: 'To roam is supposed to be derived from ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... previous to 1603 in which justices of the peace are mentioned and given some jurisdiction or duties. [Footnote: Lambarde, Eirenarcha, book IV., chap, xix., Table, App.] Under Elizabeth alone there were seventy-eight, ranging from the "preservation of spawn and frie of fish" to those "touching bulls from Rome." The infrequent and short- lived parliaments of James I. added thirty-six to the list. [Footnote: Dalton, The Country Justice, Table ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney

... conceiving how these trade-calculations can consist with a great deal of true love. And what was Amilcare's trade? His trade was politics, the stock whereof was the people of Nona, the shifty, chattering, light-weight spawn of one of those little burnt-brick and white cities of the Lombard Plain—set deep in trees, domed, belfried, full of gardens and fountains and public places—which owed their independence to being too near a pair of rival states to be worth either's ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... of locusts, the spawn of those conjured up by Moses, and the ship was covered with them. At length, though, it surged on a lifeless blue sea, where they saw no things around them, except from time to time the flying fish ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent; and the name of the serpent is Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you hear its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and sting and poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some hydra-headed infamy endangering whole nations and even races with its deadly breath, to the microscopic wrigglers that ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... "They come up at certain seasons of the year to spawn. There are only three places on the coast south of the Golden Gate where they run. For three or four nights now while the tide is high and the moon full they'll be swept up on this beach and left to lay their eggs in the wet sand. If you get closer you can ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton

... spawn of hell,— And woman's slander is the worst,— And you, whom once I loved so well, Through you my life will be accursed." I spoke with heart and heat and force, I shook her breast with vague alarms— Like torrents from a mountain source We rushed ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... was only fit to spawn her frightful monster-brood; Now fiery hot, now icy frore, now reeking ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... that Sahibs may read, and his disgrace be accomplished—that Ram Dass, my brother, son of Purun Dass, Mahajun of Pali, is a swine and a night-thief, a taker of life, an eater of flesh, a jackal-spawn without beauty, or faith, or cleanliness, ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling

... his 'Society and Solitude,' says "In contemporaries, it is not so easy to distinguish between notoriety and fame. Be sure, then, to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press or the gossip of the hour.... The three practical rules I have to offer are these:—1. Never read a book that is not a year old; 2. Never read any but famed books; 3. Never read any but what you like." Lord ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles

... the weather proves colder or warmer: and to note, that his manner of breeding is thus, a He and a She Pike will usually go together out of a River into some ditch or creek, and that there the Spawner casts her eggs, and the Melter hovers over her all that time that she is casting her Spawn, but touches her not. I might say more of this, but it might be thought curiosity or worse, and shall therefore forbear it, and take up so much of your attention as to tell you that the best of Pikes are noted to be in Rivers, then those in great Ponds or Meres, and ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton

... otter, and other animals. But one day while I was hunting, I came to the banks of the Susquehannah, and sat down near the water's edge to rest awhile. There I was forcibly struck at seeing with what industry the sun-fish heaped small stones together to make secure places for their spawn; and all this labor they did with their mouth and body, without hands. Presently a little bird, not far from me, raised a song, and while I was looking to see the little songster, its mate, with as much grass as it could hold in its bill, passed close by me, and flew into the bush, ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb

... this Cock, there be divers fishes that cast their spawn on flags or stones, and then leave it uncovered, and exposed to become a prey and be devoured by vermin or other fishes. But other fishes, as namely the Barbel, take such care for the preservation of their seed, that, unlike to the Cock, or the Cuckoo, they mutually labour, both the spawner ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton

... pumps in the oil wells kept up their dolorous whining and complaining, like great insects battening upon an abandoned world. In South Harvey the lights of the saloons and the side of the dragon's spawn glowed and beckoned men to death. Money tinkled over the bars, and whispered as it was crumpled in the claws of the dragon. For money the scurrying human ants hurried along the dark, half-lighted streets from the ant hills over the mines. For money ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... reach, within a few inches, the top of the siding, so that the water shall make a continuous surface the whole length of the trough. Each trough is filled with round river stones or pebbles washed clean, on which the spawn is laid. The water is let out of the mill-race upon these troughs through a wire-cloth filter, covering them about two inches deep above the stones. At the bottom, a lateral channel or race, running at right angles to the troughs, conducts the waste ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... on the 26th, the depth of water was gradually increased to seventeen fathom. On the 28th, our voyagers found the sea to be in many places covered with a brown scum, such as the sailors usually called spawn. When the lieutenant first saw it he was alarmed, fearing, that the ship was again among shoals; but the depth of water, upon sounding, was discovered to be equal to what it was in other places. The same appearance had been observed ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis

... plannin'. Nor was he long playin' it. For about a third of the run the bay raced like a steeplechaser tight on the heels of the hounds, leadin' even the master, for Lory could no more hold him than his own glee at the grand way they were takin' gates and walls. But suddenly that bay divil's-spawn swerves from the course, dashes up and stops bang broadside against a barn; and there, with ears laid back tight to his head and muzzle half upturned, for four mortal hours the bay held Lory's off leg jammed so tight against the barn that, rowel and crop-cut hard as he might, the only thing Lory ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson

... he said, "so there ye stand, scared like the cowardly spawn ye are. We took ye, and kept ye, and fed ye. What's more, we was friends to ye, eh mates? An' how do ye treat yer friends? Leave 'em to starve or drown on a sinkin' ship! Sneak off like a dog an' a son ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader

... passed, dashing the branches from my path, and lacerating my skin at every step. Onward, through sluggish rivulets of water, through tough miry mud, through slimy pools, filled with horrid newts, and the spawn of the huge rana pipiens, whose hoarse loud croak at every step sounded ominous in ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... Right Hon. Mr. Jackson assisted me with the greatest politeness in procuring the intelligence I wished about the salmon fishery, which is the greatest in the kingdom, and viewed both fisheries, above and below the town, very pleasantly situated on the river Ban. The salmon spawn in all the rivers that run into the Ban about the beginning of August, and as soon as they have done, swim to the sea, where they stay till January, when they begin to return to the fresh water, and continue doing it till August, in which voyage they are taken. The ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young

... man here says that anything is too hard for the Lord, let him go this day to the nearest standing pool, and look at the frog-spawn therein, and consider it till he confesses his blindness and foolishness. That spawn seems to you a foul thing, the produce of mean, ugly, contemptible creatures. Be it so. Yet it is to the eyes of the wise man a yearly MIRACLE; a thing past ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley

... scurrilous from their infancy: and if spiritual pride, venom, violence, contempt of superiors, and slander, had been the marks of orthodox belief, the presbytery and the rest of our schismatics, which are their spawn, were always the most visible church ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... Sahib. Would your Honour's servants permit? The jackal spawn is even now in the hands of the police. May his soul ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... he pointed to the departing people, as he cried: "If we cannot kill the spawn that preaches, why not kill ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson

... there was not the least danger nor any intent of harm, was pitiful to see. He wished to assure the buckskin that he was only a boy, a frail boy at that, and not what the animal had apparently taken him to be,—a spawn of Darkness and Terror. He followed up the trembling beast, trying to reassure him and to get near and pet him; but the creature fled wildly at every advance, and when not pursued stood with head aloft, ears cocked, and nostrils vibrant, ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... stand higher in the scale of life than fish; they have acquired legs in place of fins, and lungs instead of gills; they can hop about on shore with perfect freedom. Now, frogs still produce a great deal of spawn, as every one knows: but the eggs in each brood are numbered in their case by hundreds, or at most by a thousand or two, not by millions as with many fishes. The spawn hatches out as a rule in ponds, and we have all seen the little black tadpoles crowding the edges of the water in such ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... the waters of the world Come through the windows. Back and forth the women glide in their little waters; Cellar to garret and garret to cellar, Winding in and out under door arches and down passages, They and their spawn, In ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott

... thou thinkest the price be fair,—thy brethren wait to sup, The hound is kin to the jackal-spawn,—howl, dog, and call them up! And if thou thinkest the price be high, in steer and gear and stack, Give me my father's mare again, and I'll fight my ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... his one overmastering thought was. "Thank heaven, I did it! I held my temper and my tongue, didn't kill that spawn of Hell, and saved the whole situation. I'm out of a job, true enough, and out of the plant; but after all, I'm free—and I know ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... the general;] Caviare is the spawn of fish pickled, salted, and dried. It is imported from Russia, and was considered in the time of Shakespeare a new and fashionable luxury, not obtained or relished by the vulgar, and therefore used by him to signify ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare

... of the spawning and hatching season carrying with it a somewhat corresponding range in the assumption of the first signal change, and the consequent movement to the sea. They return under the greatly enlarged form of grilse, as already stated, and these grilse spawn that same season in common with the salmon, and then both the one and the other re-descend into the sea in the course of the winter or ensuing spring. They all return again to the rivers sooner or later, in accordance, as we believe, with the time they had previously left it after spawning, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... with them their firearms and a large supply of ammunition. They were sixteen in all: two runaway blue-jackets, a lanky deserter from a Yankee man-of-war, a couple of simple, blond Scandinavians, a mulatto of sorts, one bland Chinaman who cooked—and the rest of the nondescript spawn of the South Seas. None of them cared; Brown bent them to his will, and Brown, indifferent to gallows, was running away from the spectre of a Spanish prison. He didn't give them the time to trans-ship ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... to withdraw 10 years later by anti-Communist mujahidin forces. The Communist regime in Kabul collapsed in 1992. Fighting that subsequently erupted among the various mujahidin factions eventually helped to spawn the Taliban, a hardline Pakistani-sponsored movement that fought to end the warlordism and civil war that gripped the country. The Taliban seized Kabul in 1996 and were able to capture most of the country outside of Northern Alliance strongholds ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... had shown "fearless courage, inflexible honesty, and the highest ideals of private sacrifice to public duty." And they eagerly exaggerated him, to make his white contrast more vividly with the black of the "satanic spawn" in the legislature. His fame spread, carried far and wide by the sentimentality in that supposed struggle between heart and conscience, between love for the wife of his bosom ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips

... the spawn of toads is very small, as regards the size of the individual eggs, compared with the size of the full-grown animal. Nothing would be easier than for a piece of spawn or a tiny tadpole to be washed into some hole in a mine or cave, where there was ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... brat on bulk begot; Not bastard of a pedlar Scot; Not boy brought up to cleaning shoes, The spawn of Bridewell or the stews; Not infants dropped, the spurious pledges Of gipsies littering under hedges, Are so disqualified by fate To rise in church, or law, or state, As he whom Phoebus in his ire Hath blasted with poetic fire. What hope of custom ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... the last trace of veneer was gone, the last rag of pseudo-civilisation was rent off these young women; in physical conflict, vilifying each other like the female spawn of Whitechapel, they revealed themselves as born—raw material which the mill of education is supposed to convert into middle-class ladyhood. As a result of being held still by superior strength Ada fell into convulsions, foamed at the mouth, her eyes starting from their sockets; then she ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... together under the soft dirt, and when we came to an umbrella-shaped mound with little cracks on top, we would carefully lift the dirt with a stick and uncover big clusters of buttons of all sizes. We always broke the large buttons off with the greatest care and settled the spawn back in the loose dirt for a future harvest. We often found large mushrooms above ground, and these were delicious baked with cream sauce. They would be about the size of an ordinary saucer, but tender ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe

... the rivers would be eternally "dammed"—with fish; but the whales, and sharks, and sturgeons, and dog-fish, and eels, and snakes, and turtles, make three meals every day in the year on fish and fish eggs. If all the legal spawn should hatch out lawyers, the earth and the fullness thereof would be mortgaged for fees, and mankind would starve to death in the effort to pay off the "aforesaid and the same." If the entire crop of medical eggs should hatch out full fledged doctors, old "Skull and Cross Bones" would hold high ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor

... dun and Greenwell were on the cast), and had filled his basket. There were some fish of three-quarters and half a pound, but the bulk were smaller. These trout were not in good condition, for they spawn early in these parts, but they were not so bad as ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... taking in and digestion of the food. For we never see an egg formed immediately of mud, for it is produced in the bodies of animals alone; but a thousand living creatures rise from the mud. What need of many instances? None ever found the spawn or egg of an eel; yet if you empty a pit and take out all the mud, as soon as other water settles in it, eels likewise are presently produced. Now that must exist first which hath no need of any other thing that it may exist, and that after, which ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... chattering cricket, Hear, you spawn of the sod, The strange strong cry in the darkness ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton

... was recognized throughout the Northland. "Hell's Spawn" he was called by many men, but his master, Black Leclere, chose for him the shameful name "Batard." Now Black Leclere was also a devil, and the twain were well matched. There is a saying that when two devils come together, hell is to pay. This is to be ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London

... and past Lavis and Andie, up the narrow iron ladder, up the wider one above it. Again Lavis heard him: "You thought to forelay me, eh—and breed panic above? You misbegotten spawn, I'd kill you as I'd kill a cockroach—and every last one of you, if you force me. You ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly

... does Jack Shark cruise in under the lee of the rocks. It is in November, hot, sweltering November, when the clinking sand of the shining beach is burning to the booted foot, and the countless myriads of terrified sea salmon come swarming in over the bar on their way to spawn in the river beyond, that he and his fellows and the bony-snouted saw-fish rush to and fro in the shallow waters, driving their prey before them, and gorging as they drive, till the clear waters of the bar are turned into a bloodied froth. At such a time as this it might be bad to fall overboard, ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke

... one very soon that animal life does exist of so transparent a texture that to all intents and purposes it is invisible. The spawn of frogs, the larvae of certain fresh-water insects, many marine animals, are of so clear a tissue that they are seen with difficulty. In the tropics a particular inhabitant of smooth seas is as invisible as a piece of glass, and can be detected only in the love season by the color ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

... or this impudence on your part, has gone far enough—listen to me. What did I or my family do, I ask my own conscience in the name of God—what sin did we commit—whom did we oppress—whom did we rob—whom did we persecute—that a scoundrel like you, the bastard spawn of an unprincipled profligate, remarkable only for drunkenness, debauchery, and blasphemy—what, I say, did I and my family do, that you, his son, who were, and are to this day, the low, mean, willing scourge of every oppressor, the agent of their crimes—the instrument ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... of a porpoise, at the season when his favourite prey, the salmon, comes up the river to spawn, is another high excitement to dwellers on the Trent. I remember well the almost appalling interest with which, in childhood, I beheld some huge specimen of this marine visitor, drawn up by crane ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper

... Tub, Praising the lean and sallow Abstinence. Wherefore did Nature powre her bounties forth, 710 With such a full and unwithdrawing hand, Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks, Thronging the Seas with spawn innumerable, But all to please, and sate the curious taste? And set to work millions of spinning Worms, That in their green shops weave the smooth-hair'd silk To deck her Sons, and that no corner might Be vacant of her plenty, in her own loyns She hutch't th'all-worshipt ore, and precious gems To ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... accounted for by their physical conditions; indeed it seems that islands are peculiarly well fitted for these animals; for frogs have been introduced into Madeira, the Azores, and Mauritius, and have multiplied so as to become a nuisance. But as these animals and their spawn are known to be immediately killed by sea-water, on my view we can see that there would be great difficulty in their transportal across the sea, and therefore why they do not exist on any oceanic island. But why, on the theory of creation, they should not have ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin

... ova are little realized by most people. "Salmon-egg collecting," Frank Buckland wrote in 1878, "is one of the most difficult, and I may say dangerous, tasks that fall to my lot." And it was, indeed, the frightful exposure attending this search for spawn on a bitter January day in the icy waters of the North Tyne that shortened his bright, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various

... are as manna fallen from heaven," boomed a deep, resonant voice, surprising in its volume. "I take heart anew, young man, for surely thou art not the spawn of the scarlet woman, but, verily, one of the chosen people of ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... cannot be produced, the lobster must have been too long kept. When boiled, the tail preserves its elasticity if fresh, but loses it as soon as it becomes stale. The heaviest lobsters are the best; when light they are watery and poor. Hen lobsters may generally be known by the spawn, or by the ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... of all the swarm of orphan children down in the by-streets and outskirt alleys of the capital—children of whom no one has any account, and no one takes any account, who swarm down there only one floor higher, so to speak, than the spawn and small fry which are floating below in the sea among the quay piles, and which will one day become large male and ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie

... of herbs as before, and beaten almond, stamp them with the spawn of pike or carp and strain them with the crumb of a fine manchet, sugar, and rose-water, and fry it in ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May

... which, when paid, honors the giver and the receiver, and then pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young, but ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... night, at dinner, we were startled by hearing that we seemed to be running on a rock or shoal, where no rock or shoal was known to exist. We backed our screw, and finally went over the alarming spot, and on sounding found no bottom. The sea was discoloured, but whether it was by the spawn of fish or sea-weed we could not discover. Peel took up water in a bucket, but could discover nothing. If we had not been a screw, and had had nothing but sails to rely on, we should have kept clear of this apparent danger, and the result would have been that a shoal would have ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin

... they see? They saw nine and one-half millions of human beings. They saw the spawn of slavery, ignorant by law and by deviltry, crushed by insult and debauched by systematic and criminal injustice. They saw a people whose helpless women have been raped by thousands and whose men lynched by hundreds in the face of a sneering world. They saw a people with heads ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... out that in the river Gabilan, some four miles south of our camp, there were immense quantities of fish, which had come up to spawn. No one ever interfered with them, and their number was simply overwhelming. As the task of feeding thirty men in these wild regions was by no means a trifling one, I resolved to procure as many fish ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... have some spawn," she continued; "but then Maria Carlton, what you call Lady Doncaster, came and frightened them; I ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay

... in, or crying out for pain; and the ancient habit acquired in a worse cause, came to his help. He scarcely recollected the cause of his resistance; all his powers were concentrated in holding out, and when after another "Now, vile prelatic spawn, is thy heart still hardened? Yes or no?" the terrible whip came stinging and biting down on his shoulders and back, only protected by his shirt, he was entirely bound up in the determination to endure the pain ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge

... pretty tidy filly wi' him hisself, an' didn't reckon as no daisy from a bum saloon could gi' her any sort o' start. Wal, to cut it short, I guess the boys went dead out fer Bill's gal. It wus voted as ther' wa'n't no gal around Spawn City as could dec'rate the country wi' sech beauty. I guess things went kind o' silent when Shaggy Steele read the ballot. The air o' that place got uneasy. I located the door in one gulp. Y' see Brown was allus kind o' sudden. But the trouble come diff'rent. ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum

... boiled lobster in small pieces; then take the small claws and the spawn, put them in a suitable dish, and jam them to a paste with a potato masher. Now add to them a ladleful of gravy or broth, with a few bread crumbs; set it over the fire and boil; strain it through a strainer, or sieve, to the thickness of a cream, and put half of it to your lobsters, and save ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette

... and drunkards preserved her from being cut down! Not many have ridden out at me from ambush and lived to tell of it! But I saw who she was in time, and sheathed my steel again, and cursed her for the gipsy that she half is. The other half is spawn of Eblis!" ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... Mashumbwe, as a youth passed before him without making obeisance. "Do you dare stand before me—before me! thou spawn of these man-eating jackals? Lo! lie prostrate forever." And with the words he half threw, half thrust his great spear into the unfortunate lad's body. The blood spurted forth in a great jet, and, ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... smoked, each of us sang a different song, more or less in tune. It sounded not unmelodious upon the large waters. At intervals we asked one another where the 'gert bodies of herrings' had gone off to. Eastwards, westwards, to the offing, or down to the bottom to spawn? ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... the swordfish, conjecture is useless. I have already discussed this question at length with reference to the menhaden and mackerel. With the swordfish the conditions are very different. The former are known to spawn in our waters, and the schools of young ones follow the old ones in toward the shores. The latter do not spawn in our waters. We cannot well believe that they hibernate, nor is the hypothesis of a sojourn in the middle strata of mid-ocean exactly tenable. Perhaps they ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey

... a fierce voice in his ear. "I've got you—Captain Rogers at your service, and now you may tell his name to all you can. Shout it, you spawn ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs

... Hungarian Honey, Seminole, Black Spanish, Phinney's Early, Ice Cream White-Seeded, jumbo or Jones, Striped Gipsy, Georgia Rattle Snake, Mammoth Iron Clad, Kolba Gem, New Dixie, Volga, Kleckley's Sweet, Iceberg Mustard.—White London or English, Giant Southern Curled Mushroom Spawn.—Best English Okra.—White Velvet Pod Parsley.—Champion Moss-Curled Parsnips.—Long White Dutch, Imp. Hollow Crown, Guernsey or Cup Pumpkins.—Imp. Cushaw, Mammoth Tours, King of Mammoth, Connecticut Field ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis

... for Geneva, For the table or the altar, This spawn of a vote, He cares not a groat - For the PENCE he's your dog in a halter, Then ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay

... cheap spawn. They fester and multiply like maggots. They meant nothing—nothing, my dear, nothing. No more than your work people mean here, whose crowning stupidity is their continuing to beget more stupid spawn for the slavery ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... liber'a, -igi; senpaga. freeze : frostigxi, glaci'igi, -igxi. frequent : ofta; vizitadi. fringe : frangxo. fritter : fritajxo. frock : vesteto. "-coat," surtuto. frog : rano. frolic : petoli. frown : sulk'o, -igi. frugal : sxparema, fruit : frukto. "-ful," fruktodona. fry : friti, (spawn) frajo, "-ing" "pan," pato, fritilo. fuel : brulajxo, hejtajxo. fulfil : plenumi. fun : sxercado. function : funkcio. funeral : enterigiro. funnel : funelo. funny : ridinda. fur : felo; "—coat" pelto. furnace : fornego. furnish : mebli, provizi. furrow : sulko. further : pile, plimalproksime. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer

... largest monetary returns. This fish migrates to the coast of Norway to spawn and in search of food. The best cod fisheries are in Romsdal, Nordland, and Tromsoe counties, the Lofoten islands in Tromsoe alone furnishing employment to more than four thousand men. The cod weighs from eight to twenty pounds ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough

... to yourself for those words, you white-livered frog-spawn, with a speck in the middle for the black heart of you! You're going? Well, here's the bones of my fist and the toe of my ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason

... impatiently for my work to be done, in order to try out the machine, and if satisfactory, spawn a brood of their own on the same model. I was equally impatient. I hoped to fly off with the biplane before they had time ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... his death, and after reading Marsden's Marco Polo, tells how a fish-breeder of Banbury warned him against putting pike into his fish-pond, saying, "If you should leave them where they are till Shrove Tuesday they will be sure to spawn, and then you will never get any other fish to breed in it." (Romance of Travel, I. 255.) Edward Webbe in his Travels (1590, reprinted 1868) tells us that in the "Land of Siria there is a River having great store of fish like unto Salmon-trouts, but no Jew ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... porcebes, crawfish, shrimp, sea-spiders, center-fish, and all kinds of cockles, shad, white fish, and in the Tajo River of Cagayan, [91] during their season, a great number of bobos, which come down to spawn at the bar. In the lake of Bonbon, a quantity of tunny-fish, not so large as those of Espana, but of the same shape, flesh, and taste, are caught. Many sea-fish are found in the sea, such as whales, sharks, caellas, marajos, bufeos, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair

... accepted another gold coin; and with a queer sidelong smile, the incentive for which I had not the slightest idea, he vanished. I fronted my host, this Jacob Spawn. Strange fate that should have led me to Spawn! And ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... Christians, "You poor ignorant idiots; you have mistaken the mysteries of old for modern history, and accepted literally all that was only meant mystically." To which the Christians responded, "You spawn of Satan, you are making the mystery by converting our accomplished facts into your miserable fables; you are dissipating and dispersing into thin air our only bit of solid foothold in the world, stained with the red drops of Calvary. You are giving a satanic interpretation of the word of revelation ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill

... rascal did was to write a withering leader denouncing Mr. Scandril as a "demagogue, the degradation of whose political opinions was only equaled by the disgustfulness of the family connections of which those opinions were the spawn!" ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... and scorned by the overwise; but I bear it humbly, for the love of him who has laid all this upon me. Wait however until the end, and see whether his seven spirits whom he holds under his magical spell, can save him then; whether his Familiar, that spawn of ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck

... yet lived and knew old man Packard who would have suggested that he was not a good and thorough-going hater. His enemy and all of his enemy's household, wife and child, maid-servant and man-servant were all as the spawn ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory

... character of the execution . . . The nursing, defence, and education of offspring cannot be considered as in any way more dependent upon bodily organisation; nor yet the sites which insects choose for the laying of their eggs; nor, again, the selection of deposits of spawn, of their own species, by male fish for impregnation. The rabbit burrows, the hare does not, though both have the same burrowing apparatus. The hare, however, has less need of a subterranean place of refuge by reason of its greater swiftness. Some birds, with excellent ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler

... over—and my toys are here. I win, I always win. For I am the spawn of Mars, of War, and of Hate, the sister of War, and my toys are the things they leave behind." It gesticulated, waving the twisted stuff and now through the haze, they could see them—buildings. The framework of buildings ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell

... said; and it is just this execution which is unattainable without immense application and fastidiousness. If patience be genius,—"La patience cherche et le genie trouve,"—and if execution be its chariot, what possible fame can there be for the slipshod writers of to-day, who spawn columns and volumes at so much a minute, regardless of the good name of their mother tongue, devoid of ideas, which are the product only of brains that have been ploughed up and sown with fruitful seed? An author's severest critic should be himself. To be carried away by the popular ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... body of Hope, the spotless lamb Thou threwest into the high priest's slaughtering-room, And by the child Despair born red therefrom As, thank the secret sire picked out to cram With spurious spawn thy misconceiving dam, Thou, like a worm from a town's common tomb, Didst creep from forth the kennel of her womb, Born to break down with catapult and ram Man's builded towers of promise, and with breath And tongue to track and hunt his ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... seems to think that the dabchick likes insects and fish spawn better than fish, or at least more prudently dines upon them. "That fish are taken we have positive evidence from examples having been repeatedly picked up dead by the fishermen of the Thames, with a bull-head or miller's thumb ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin

... might have been a second Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey's matter.—Oh, thou real spawn of the red old dragon! for he too would have resisted the House's warrant, had we not taken him something at unawares.—Master Bridgenorth, you are a judicious magistrate, and a worthy servant of the state—I would we had many such sound ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... with courage enough to attempt the walk. You do, in fact, come suddenly on salt-water channels in the midst of fields at long distances from the sea, and find cockles on stretches of mud where you might expect frog spawn or black slugs. Therefore, it is quite likely that the high-tide line would really, if it were stretched out straight, reach right across Ireland and far put into ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham

... arms, ammunition, and money; to have their best friends thus cooled; their worst enemies thus heated; and rank rebellion again breaking up, out of a soil where they had promised themselves nothing but the richest fruits of passive obedience: and all this by a little, ugly spawn of a Frenchman! It was too much! they could not stand it. Revenge they must and would have; that was certain: and since, with all their efforts, they could not get at Marion, the hated trunk and root of all, they were determined to burn and sweat ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... this world of ours. Literally, horror was piled upon horror. And this was the twentieth century of which men boasted; this was civilisation! Built by men's hands, the result of centuries of work. Now look at them; those beautiful architectural monuments, destroyed, in a few months, by the vilest spawn that ever contaminated the earth. A breed that should and would be blotted out of existence as effectively as they had blotted ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins

... all about them the rocks seemed to spawn figures, till half a dozen men in rough plainsman's garb stood in the moonlight. Resistance was useless; worse, it might have resulted in a calamity more dire than the ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham



Words linked to "Spawn" :   spat, do, cause, engender, lay, make



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com