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Cog   /kɔg/   Listen
Cog

noun
1.
A subordinate who performs an important but routine function.
2.
Tooth on the rim of gear wheel.  Synonym: sprocket.



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"Cog" Quotes from Famous Books



... not wish her pleasure to be spoiled and her excitement to be diminished by trials. Her husband humoured her, but secretly he took care that every preventible chance of a breakdown should be removed. When she was absent, he tested every pinion and every cog, eased a wheel here and an axle there, and in truth what he had to do in this way with file and sandpaper was almost equal to the labour spent upon saw and chisel. Infinite adjustment was necessary to make the idea a ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford

... done with my recital he sat with his eyes wide open, seeming to wonder whether my reason had slipped a cog. ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read

... much amused with the brisk way in which they trundled the huge hogs-heads along, running them up to the pier-head, slinging them to the chains of the crane, and then lowering them down into the launch. There was much creaking of cog-wheels and cheerful, "Yo-heave-hoing!" from the men in the boat below, as they stowed them away in the bottom of the craft as easily as if they were only so many tiny little kegs, the darkeys joining in the ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... masters; Furor's a masty dog, Nor can with a smooth glosing farewell cog. Nought can great Furor do but bark and howl, And snarl, and grin, and carl, and touse the world, Like a great swine, by his long, lean-ear'd lugs. Farewell, musty, dusty, rusty, fusty London; Thou art not worthy of great Furor's wit, That cheatest virtue of her due desert, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... the king That I, forsooth, am stern and love them not? By holy Paul, they love his grace but lightly That fill his ears with such dissentious rumours. Because I cannot flatter and look fair, Smile in men's faces, smooth, deceive, and cog, Duck with French nods and apish courtesy, I must be held a rancorous enemy. Cannot a plain man live, and think no harm, But thus his simple truth must be abus'd With silken, ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... wages but recognition as men was what they really sought. What joy can there be in life, what interest can a man take in his work, what enthusiasm can he be expected to develop on behalf of his employer, when he is regarded as a number on a payroll, a cog in a wheel, a mere "hand"? Who would not earnestly seek to gain recognition of his manhood and the right to be heard and treated as a human ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... in the compartment, soldiers and workers, each a cog in the big machine, each bound upon some important errand. Each had news to tell—tales of the fighting, or of the progress of preparation. For more than a year now America had been getting ready, and here, in the most desperate crisis of the war, what was she going to do? Everybody was on tip-toe ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... The stuffing coil, O, inserted into the lower port of the tube H H', and forced up or down in the tube by the cog wheel, M, substantially as and ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various

... have Mandane. For the rest, with the rare and slight exceptions mentioned, they flit like shadows ticketed with more or less beautiful names. Even Philidaspes, the most prominent male character after the hero by far, is, whether he be "in cog" as that personage or "out of cog" as Prince and King of Assyria, merely a petulant hero—a sort of cheap Achilles, with no idiosyncrasy at all. It is the fault, and in a way the very great fault, of all the kind: and there is nothing more to do with it but to admit ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... Through this pulley, the cable passed to the cylinder of a windlass which was held to the ground by massive beams. This windlass which can be operated by only two hands, multiplies man's strength by means of a series of cog-wheels. Although there is a gain in force, there is of course ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal

... gods or a cog in the wheels of the universe this was the problem which life offered to the thinking Greek; and in undertaking its solution, he set in motion the forces that have made our modern civilization. That the problem remains unsolved is nothing ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... out in the rain. Jud wanted to watch the machinery he had mended and he asked Meg to turn the crank and Bobby to feed in the ears of corn. They were never allowed to touch the sheller unless some older person was around, for little fingers could get easily nipped in the cog wheels. So they were rather proud to be especially asked to help Jud make ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Brookside Farm • Mabel C. Hawley

... That was the key to the enigma. It was just that unvarying smooth routine, that endless grinding away at the same familiar things that to-day, when everything about him spoke of change and growth and freedom, was making him restless and perturbed. He was just a cog in the ever-turning wheel. He was a slave to his desk, and not the less a slave because his chains ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes

... remained open. A waxed cord inserted in the middle of the drum-head, and reaching down through the keg, completed the instrument. The pulling of the hand over this cord made a hideous bellowing, hence its name. Bill Day had a gigantic watchman's rattle, a hickory spring on a cog-wheel. It is called in the West, a horse-fiddle, because it is so unlike either a horse or a fiddle. Then there were melodious tin pans and conch-shells and tin horns. But the most deadly noise was made by Jim West, ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston

... force and direction of the wind. To keep such a watch by human vigilance, and to make such a register by human labor, would be a tedious, expensive, and irksome task; and human ingenuity taxed itself to make a machine for perfecting such work. The wind turns a weather-cock, and, by aid of cog-wheels the motion is transferred to a lead pencil fixed over a sheet of paper, and thus the wind is made to write down the direction which itself is blowing. Not far distant is a piece of metal, the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various

... of the cart below. The cog is keyed or set-screwed to the driving shaft of the wheels with either key or set-screw used in original fastening, ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... this point that the lumber lord began to fear that some one had slipped a cog in sending him to first one and then another, and finally to ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... night, to thy task by the blazing ingle, or in the solitary barn, where the repercussions of thy iron flail half affright thyself, as thou performest the work of twenty of the sons of men, ere the cock-crowing summon thee to thy ample cog of substantial brose. Be thou a kelpie, haunting the ford or ferry, in the starless night, mixing thy laughing yell with the howling of the storm and the roaring of the flood, as thou viewest the perils and miseries of man on the foundering ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... are most carefully obscured. In the case of archaeology, however, the tedious details of construction are so placed in the foreground that the final picture is hardly noticed at all. As well might one go to Rheims to see men fly, and be shown nothing else but screws and nuts, steel rods and cog-wheels. Originally the fault, perhaps, lay with the archaeologist; now it lies both with him and with the public. The public has learnt to ask to be shown the works, and the archaeologist is often so proud of them that he forgets to mention the ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall

... evidence by his mellifluous song. Let me enumerate the localities in which I found my little favorite: Forty miles out on the plain among some bushes of a shallow dip; among the foothills about Colorado Springs and Manitou; on many of the open bushy slopes along the cog-road leading to Pike's Peak, but never in the dark ravines or thick timber; among the bushes just below timber-line on the southern acclivity of the peak; everywhere around the village of Buena Vista; about four miles below Leadville; and, lastly, beyond the range ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser

... that power the worker is a mechanical drudge, whose work has no quality save that of dogged fidelity to the task. Now, this power of keeping the whole before the mind while dealing with the parts, of seeing the completed machine while shaping a pin or a cog, of getting the complete effect of the argument while elaborating a minor point, resides in the imagination. It is the light which must shine upon all toil that has in it intelligence, prevision, and freshness; and its glow is as essential in mechanical ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... life when Nature Seems to slip a cog an' go, Jes' a-rattlin' down creation, Lak an ocean's overflow; When de worl' jes' stahts a-spinnin' Lak a picaninny's top, An' yo' cup o' joy is brimmin' 'Twell it seems about to slop, An' you feel jes' lak a racah, Dat is trainin' fu' to trot— When yo' ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... deal of the friendship which drew these young men together was the result of their great dissimilarity of character. They acted on each other somewhat after the fashion of a well-adjusted piece of mechanism, the ratchets of selfishness and cog-wheels of vanity in Shank fitting easily into the pinions of good-will and modesty which characterised his friend, so that there was no jarring in their intercourse. This alone would not, perhaps, have induced the ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne

... where he slipped a cog," remarked Mr. Nestor. "Well, Tom, I like your tank, what I've seen of her, but it's getting late and I think Mary and I had better be ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton

... individual, and as these threatened to interfere with the State, the politicians got alarmed and put him to death. Plato, much more cautious, wrote his "Republic," wherein everything is subordinated for the good of the State, and the individual is but a cog in a most perfectly lubricated machine. Aristotle saw that Socrates was nearer right than Plato—sin is the expression of individuality and is not wholly bad—the State is made up of individuals, and if you suppress the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... Trevithick had produced a locomotive which was used for a time to transport metal and ore to the Pen-y-darran iron works in South Wales. The heavy engine so damaged the tracks that it was soon dismounted and degraded to the work of a steam pump. In 1812 a cog-wheel locomotive, invented by a Mr. Blenkinsop, began running in a colliery a few miles out of Leeds, and served very well its purpose to haul heavy trains almost as fast as a horse could walk. The next year a Derbyshire mechanic produced a "Mechanical ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... society can cultivate goodwill in you. You might as well create a society for shaving or for saying your prayers. And further, goodwill is far less a process of performing acts than a process of thinking thoughts. To think, is it necessary to involve yourself in the cog-wheels of a society? Moreover, a society means fuss and shouting: two species of disturbance which are both futile and deleterious, particularly in an ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett

... a charge of the enemy and whose thigh is fractured by a cannon-ball, has just passed over to the enemy. The mechanism which, for fifteen years, has worked so well, breaks down of itself through its own action; its cog-wheels have got out of gear; cracks show themselves in the metal which seemed so sound; the divinations of popular instinct verify this; the exaggerations of the popular imagination expand it and suddenly the whole machine ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... the pursuing smoke trail rose above the intervening hill-shoulders near and threatening. With the parts of a great machine whirling in unison and nicely timed to escape destruction, a small accident to a single cog may spell disaster. ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde

... known as the battle of Sluys, when Philip the Sixth sat on the throne of France. The English fleet consisted of only 260 ships fit for warfare. The French, whose fleet amounted to no less than 400 sail, lay securely, as they thought, in the harbour of Sluys. Edward embarked on board the cog Thomas, commanded by Richard Fyall, and attended by several noblemen. A cog was a craft larger than those usually designated ships—the cog John, which is spoken of, had a crew of eighty-two men, and ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... indeed, nearly concerned in the fracas which their laziness occasioned, being no other than the faithful Mr. Fairservice, with his friend Mr. Hammorgaw, and another person, whom I afterwards found to be the town-crier, who were sitting over a cog of ale, as they called it (at my expense, as my bill afterwards informed me), in order to devise the terms and style of a proclamation to be made through the streets the next day, in order that "the unfortunate young gentleman," as they had the impudence to qualify me, might be restored ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... college, in his club or in his secret society lodge or the quarters of his ward boss does he find himself in intimate social relations with human beings of like mind and a similar social status. He is a cog in a wheel, a thing, a point of potential, a lonely and numerical unit, instead of a gregarious human animal rejoicing in his friends and companions, and working, playing and quarreling with them, as God made him and meant him ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... of you an' the death of me if you keep on makin' a picter of yourself like that lonely Indian a-sittin' on a pinnacle in the jographys, watchin' the inroads of civilization, with a locomotive an' a cog-wheel in front, an' the buffalo an' the grisly a-disappearin' in the distance. Now it'll be much better for all of us,' says I, 'if you'll git down from your peak, and try to make up your mind that the world has got to move. Aint there some place where you kin go an' be quiet an' ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... at mine now,' and turning out his pockets, he displayed a double-bladed knife containing several implements, including a corkscrew and an attachment for extracting stones from horses' feet, a piece of string, a watch spring, twenty or thirty shot, a button, a magnet, a cog-wheel, a pencil, a match-box, a case of foreign stamps all stuck together with salt water, a whistle, a halfpenny with a hole in it, and a soaked and swollen cigar which the Captain had ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas

... combinations of capital in industry and commerce. Why was that phrase used so widely? The answer is illuminating: we took it for granted that an individual employer would treat his artisans to some extent as human beings and not merely as cog-wheels in a productive machine; but we also took it for granted that an impersonal corporation, where no individual was dominantly responsible, would regard its artisans merely as pieces of machinery, with no respect ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs

... Beauty Stanton. She was a part of Benton. She was treading the loose board-walk of the great and vile construction camp. She might draw back from leer and touch, but none the less was she there, a piece of this dark, bold, obscure life. She was a cog in the wheel, a grain of dust in the whirlwind, a morsel of flesh and blood for the hungry maw of a wild and passing ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey

... our plans appear to have slipped a cog. There's the wagon broken down and the boy has gone with the horse. Two of our men were to stop him, you know, and keep him here ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman

... fitted into other cogs of more and larger wheels. And to make life run smoothly we all must work together, each quietly turning his own big or small circumference as he had been fashioned. Alone nothing could be accomplished. Wings indeed! Fairy-tales. Cog-wheels must mesh. ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty

... the principle of cog-wheels and weights, is attributed to a monk, named Gerbert, who died in 1013. He had been instructor to King Robert, and was made Bishop of Rheims, later becoming Pope Sylvester II. Clocks at first were large affairs ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... true, but there we sang together above the heads of venerable men who preached. They were good men, sometimes great scholars, but the ears they addressed were not always willing. A somewhat machine-like sermoniser who, it was irreverently declared, ran as if wound up but sometimes slipped a cog, had been known to pray "that the intemperate might become temperate, the intolerant tolerant, the industrious dustrious." Longfellow always came with his beautiful wife, the heroine of Hyperion, whose tragic fate a few years later shocked the world. ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer

... to doubt; and as time flew on and matters evinced a disposition to grow worse instead of better, she gradually, like the sundial in the moonlight, awakened to the fact that there was something wrong; a cog loose somewhere in the complicated machinery of fate—the fate which had always been her ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major

... as an atomic engine inspector, his work was most uncreative. He was a small cog in a large cog-laden machine. A government worker helping to produce engines that would send supplies and immigrants and tourists to the U.S. ...
— The Odyssey of Sam Meecham • Charles E. Fritch

... silk handkerchief from his pocket and stepped forward. Kid Wolf's eyes were gleaming with icy-blue lights. This was the moment he had been waiting for! That handkerchief was a necessary cog in his carefully laid plans. Captain Hermosillo was soon to learn just how cowardly this young Texan was. And the surprise was not ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens

... suffered horribly, and each was well aware of the other's real feelings. Sometimes there was a lull, and they could almost believe that the whole thing was over. And then the old machine gave a creak, and the rusty cog-wheels took one more turn, and they both felt the horrid ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle

... said. "Your caring so much for me as to wish me to marry your sister, I shall never forget it. You see, I've never thought of her in that way. I suppose I don't think of women at all in that way," he went on, with a certain splendid mendacity. "It's a case of cog-wheels instead of corpuscles. I'm just a heathen bit of machinery, with my head full ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... fifty, with a double chin, a considerable moustache, a low broad forehead, and bright, round, black eyes, very far apart. When introduced to Lady George, she declared that she had great honour in accepting the re-cog-nition. She had a stout roll of paper in her hand, and was dressed in a black stuff gown, with a cloth jacket buttoned up to neck, which hardly gave to her copious bust that appearance of manly firmness which ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... step; some of it with the enemy on the run. Take it all together, it is a long way. Much of it will not have to be travelled over again. The engine of municipal progress once started as it has been in New York, may slip many a cog with Tammany as the engineer; it may even be stopped for a season; but it can never be made to work backward. Even Tammany knows that, and gropes desperately for a new hold, a certificate of character. In the last election (1901) ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis

... spine, spicule [Biol.], spiculum^; needle, hypodermic needle, tack, nail, pin; prick, prickle; spur, rowel, barb; spit, cusp; horn, antler; snag; tag thorn, bristle; Adam's needle^, bear grass [U.S.], tine, yucca. nib, tooth, tusk; spoke, cog, ratchet. crag, crest, arete [Fr.], cone peak, sugar loaf, pike, aiguille^; spire, pyramid, steeple. beard, chevaux de frise [Fr.], porcupine, hedgehog, brier, bramble, thistle; comb; awn, beggar's lice, bur, burr, catchweed^, cleavers, clivers^, goose, grass, hairif^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... shoals of fish spluttered, raising tiny tempests. Languid jelly-fish floated near, tremulously waving a thousand legs. A row of porpoises trundled along like a procession of cog-wheels. The sky became greyed save where over the land sunset ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane

... cog-wheels made his steps inaudible to the man who was manipulating the machinery in the hut as he entered and shot him dead. It was rather sickening, for the fellow pitched forward into the machinery and ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... same song that from pride to pride and joy to joy has been singing through the hearts of The Men Who Make, from the beginning of the world. The thing that was not, that now is, after all the praying with his hands ... iron and wood and rivet and cog and wheel—is it not more than these to him standing before it there? It is the face of matter—who does not know it?—answering the face of the man, whispering to him out of the dust of ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee

... he hated play, Except to pass an hour away: And well he might; for to his cost, By want of skill, he always lost. He heard there was a club of cheats, Who had contrived a thousand feats; Could change the stock, or cog a dye, And thus deceive the sharpest eye: No wonder how his fortune sunk, His brothers fleece him when ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift

... thinking of David and the letter she had not been able to write; it seemed as if, when she tried to make it clear to herself why she did not write to him, something stopped in her mind—a cog did not catch; the thought eluded her. When this happened—as it had happened again and again in these last days; she would fall to thinking, with vague amazement, that this irremediable catastrophe was out of all proportion to its cause. It was monstrous that a crazy ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland

... unless transported over seas. She has a peculiar genius for organization, not only in elaborating minute detail, but in the grasp of a coherent whole. She knows the art of giving a brain to a machine, of transmitting power to the uttermost cog-wheel, and at the same time of concentrating responsibility in a supreme centre. She has a small navy, but very effective for its purpose, built, trained, and manned on methodical principles, for defined ends, and backed by an inexhaustible reserve of men from her maritime ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... he loses twenty times as much? Doth it not require more dexterity in the fingers to draw out a man's purse from his pocket, or to take a lady's watch from her side, without being perceived of any (an excellence in which, without flattery, I am persuaded you have no superior), than to cog a die or to shuffle a pack of cards? Is not as much art, as many excellent qualities, required to make a pimping porter at a common bawdy-house as would enable a man to prostitute his own or his friend's wife or child? ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding

... high cum diddledy, The cog-wheels of life have need of much oiling; Smack, crack,—this is our jubilee: Huzza, my lads! we'll keep ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat

... he could hardly see his way in half an hour. Sometimes a crow would caw, to hear strange sounds go past, like an old watchman's rattle moved one cog. The stars became bright, however, and the moon was new, and when Phoebus came to a large cleared opening in the pines, the lambent heavens broke forth and bathed the sandy fields with silver, and showed a large, high house at the middle of the clearing, with outside chimneys, one ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... into dead towns that paralyze her effort and hinder her progress. In a word, Belgium had had no political existence for her own behoof. She was not an organic unit in the sodality of nations, but a mere cog in the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... to the gloom. The men tramped wearily, hanging their heads, ashamed and humiliated by the retreat, the necessity of which they could not grasp, having, as they thought, successfully repulsed the enemy. It was difficult to make them understand that our regiment was only a cog in the huge wheel of the Austrian fighting machine and that, with a battle line extending over many miles, it was quite natural that partial successes could take place and yet the consideration of general strategy necessitate a retreat. ...
— Four Weeks in the Trenches - The War Story of a Violinist • Fritz Kreisler

... shocked nor particularly interested. His expression was that of one disappointed. It suddenly flashed across Ralph, he could scarcely have told why, that the young inventor had indeed been "inventing" something, that something had slipped a cog, and that he was responsible for the catastrophe of the moment. Now Archie looked about him in a stealthy, baffled way, as though he was anxious to ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman

... "Saranoff has slipped a cog this time," said the doctor. "He sent that as a night message, but it was delivered as a straight message through error. He has got further north than I expected. We will turn out our pilot and take off. We should make Wilmington ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... welcome is touching, yet nought o' the faun— A warmth is express'd in the shake o' his han'; His cog and his bed, or ought in his biel, The lonely will ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... to be two trillion two hundred thousand billions of times larger than the sun. Oh, be at peace with the God who made all that and controls all that—the wheel of the constellations turning in the wheel of galaxies for thousands of years without the breaking of a cog or the slipping of a band or the snap of an axle. For your placidity and comfort through the Lord Jesus Christ I charge you, "Seek Him that maketh the Seven ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... seems to have slipped a cog somewhere," Bart remarked to his comrades, a few days later, as they were resting after a hard morning's work at organizing the position that their ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall

... and cantie wi' mair, Whene'er I forgather wi' sorrow and care, I gie them a skelp as they're creepin' alang, Wi' a cog o' gude swats, and an ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... The sakieh is made of a notch-wheel fixed vertically on a horizontal axle, and is actuated by various cog-wheels set in continuous motion by oxen or asses. A long chain of earthenware vessels brings up the water either from the river itself, or from some little branch canal, and empties it into a system of troughs and reservoirs. Thence, it flows forth ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... emotions and a heartfelt wish to put my shoulder to the great wheel of good. What could I say? Every prayer seemed based on the idea that God was a magnified man—that He needed asking and praising and thanking. Should the cog of the wheel creak praise to the Engineer? Let it rather cog harder, and creak less. Yet I did, I confess, try to put the agitation of my soul into words. I meant it for a prayer; but when I considered afterwards the "supposing thats" and "in case ofs" with ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... merry night we get the corn in, O sweetly, then, thou reams the horn in! Or reekin on a New-year mornin In cog or bicker, An' just a wee drap sp'ritual burn in, An' ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... eye for his leader and one for the possible dangers on his flank, was a mere automaton. There was no opportunity for displaying initiative—he was a cog ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace

... Chelandri, goldfinch. Cheres, cheers. Cheves, moves. Chirm, chirp. Church-giebe-house, grave. Claes, clothes. Claithing, clothing. Clamb, climbed. Claught, catch up. Clinkin, smartly. Clinkumbell, the bell-ringer. Clymmynge, noisy. Cockernony, woman's hair gathered up with a band. Cofte, bought. Cog, basin. Cood, cud. Coost, cast. Corbie, raven. Core, company. Cotter, tenant of a cottage. Coulier, ploughshare. Cour, stoop. Couth, couthy, sociable, affable. Crack, chat, instant. Craig, rock. Cranreuch, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... than twenty years since he had last seen Orde, his schoolmate, and their paths in the world had divided early. The one had quitted college to become a cog-wheel in the machinery of the great Indian Government; the other more blessed with goods, had been whirled into a similar position in the English scheme. Three successive elections had not affected Pagett's position with a loyal constituency, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... wheels were lifted up over against them; and their wings were full of eyes round about, and they were so high that they were dreadful. So of the institution of Ignatius,—one soul swayed the vast mass; and every pin and every cog in the machinery consented with its whole power to every movement of the one ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord

... kept so many servants, and to personate their part the better take upon them to be gentlemen of good houses, well descended and allied, hire apparel at brokers, some scavenger or prick-louse tailors to attend upon them for the time, swear they have great possessions, [5178]bribe, lie, cog, and foist how dearly they love, how bravely they will maintain her, like any lady, countess, duchess, or queen; they shall have gowns, tiers, jewels, coaches, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... the application of its force this machine, being man-made, like all machines, and thus without a soul, gets out of order, loosens a cog or bolt perhaps, throwing the mechanism "out of gear," as it is called. When this happens, the engine resting on its bed-plate still keeps its foundation, but some lesser part, the loom or lathe or driving-wheel, which is another ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... changed his mind. As he let himself slowly down to his heels there was a sardonic grin on his brown face. In outguessing Tighe he had slipped one little mental cog, after all, and the chances were that he would pay high for his error. A man had been lying in the mesquite close to the creek watching him all the time. He knew it because he had caught the flash of light on the rifle barrel that ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine

... Cloud arrived at the carnival grounds in the evening, having been delayed on the trip by a broken cog wheel, which was mended in mid-air. As the three navigators approached, they saw a small machine flying around ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton

... ambulances, batteries of artillery, London omnibuses, painted slate gray, filled with troops, seemingly endless columns of infantry on foot, all moving with us, along parallel roads, toward the firing-line. And most of these troops and supply columns belonged to my own division, one small cog in ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall

... on my back feeling like a Hindoo widow on a burning ghat. Old Atasca, an untrained Indian nurse, sat near the door like a petrified statue of What's-the-Use, attending to her duties, which were, mainly, to see that time went by without slipping a cog. Sometimes I would fancy myself back in the Philippines, or, at worse times, sliding off the horsehair sofa ...
— Options • O. Henry

... been only a question of time when vice should get its clutches upon her, as a cog-wheel seizes whoever comes too near the machine. After whirling her around through a short life of shame and degradation, it would, with mechanical punctuality, have cast her off into some corner, there to drag ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland

... wined him, and fleeced him while he was drunk." He took a goblet of claret from the lackey who brought his salver, emptied it, and went on, hoarse with passion. "To the marrow of your bones you are false, all of you! You do not cog your dice, perhaps, but you bubble your friends with finesses, and are as much sharpers at heart as the lowest tat-mongers in Alsatia. You empty our purses, and cozen our women with twanging guitars and jingling rhymes, and laugh ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... wrist rapped the cornet or box with vehemence on the table, the dice as yet not appearing from under the box. The 'Dribble' was, when with an air of easy but ingenious motion, the caster poured, as it were, the dice on the board—when, if he happened to be an old practitioner, he might suddenly cog with his fore-finger one of the cubes. The 'Long Gallery' was when the dice were flung or hurled the whole length of the board. Sometimes the dice were thrown off the table, near a confederate, who, in picking them up, changed one of the fair for a false die with two sixes. This was generally done ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... name of the God of Poetry; from braga, to glisten, to shine, or from bragga, to adorn; ph. cog. ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson

... to a crisp grey, had bowed his shoulders to the desk he had used for twenty-two years. His eyes alone retained their boyish brightness, and a sort of appealing look as of one who his whole life long had been a dependent on other people. As an automaton, a mere cog in a vast machine, he had won the praise of his superiors by his complete self-effacement. He was never ill, never absent, never had trouble with his subordinates, never talked back, never made complaints, and, in the flattering language of ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne

... occasionally for them. Doc had a Rip Van Winkle look. His hair hung down his back, and his clothes were threadbare and green with age. His shoes were tied to his feet with wire, and stockings he had none. Doc had studied in a Medical College until the eve of his graduation. Then he slipped a cog and went down, down, down, until he landed at Halloran's dive. For twelve years he had been selling penny song-sheets on the streets and in saloons. He was usually in rags, but a score of the wildest inhabitants of that dive told me that Doc was their "good angel." He could play the songs of their ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine

... a small, unnecessary cog in a great machine for only a week," he told her, slowly. "And yet you will know that I am telling you the plain truth when I say that such a failure would bring to me the biggest disappointment I have ever felt. Failure," he cried, sharply, as though he had but ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory

... private word or so to his godfather, he would soon make it all right with him again. Dwarfs must be managed. Bless you, I have one in my own mill. Every ninth night he hammers away on the twenty-first cog of the third wheel; and as soon as he begins, three honey cells must be put upon the millstone for him, if I don't wish the mill to stand still immediately, and all the grain to breed worms. It is nothing but Dwarf's roguery, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... man brought him a cog of brose. Sim stared at it and sickened: he was too far gone for food. Young Harden passed, and looked curiously at him. "Here's a man that has na spared himsel'," he said. "A drop o' French cordial is the thing for you, Sim." And out of a leathern flask he poured ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... fight," hastened Craig. "You have opponents who know the game in its every crooked turn. If I can be only a small cog on a wheel that crushes them, I shall be only too glad. Your face tells me that something particularly ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve

... or, more precisely, a cog in the great fighting machine that was producing death and destruction to Belgium. Just as the Germans have put men through a certain mold and turned out the typical German soldier, in like manner through other molds they have turned out according to pattern the German secret ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams

... for sixteen livres, money of Piedmont, where the livre is exactly the shilling of England. Twelve rupes of maize sell for nine livres. The machine for separating the husk is thus made. In the axis of a water-wheel are a number of arms inserted, which, as they revolve, catches each the cog of a pestle, lifts it to a certain height, and lets it fall again. These pestles are five and a quarter inches square, ten feet long, and at their lower end formed into a truncated cone of three inches diameter, where cut off. The conical part is covered with iron. The pestles ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... driving is by means of chains, which run round sprocket (cog) wheels on the ends of a shaft crossing the frame just behind the gear-box, and round larger sprockets attached to the hubs of the driving-wheels. In such a case the axles of the driving-wheel are fixed to the springs, and the wheels revolve round them. Where a Cardan (shaft) drive is used the axles ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams

... the transportation, provides rail or other transportation, supervises and controls everything connected with the entire trip. He is held financially responsible, and signs many contracts. The Company Manager handles everything connected with money and transportation and is an important cog in the ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn

... the thatched huts hidden among crops—looked with strange eyes unable to take up the size and proportion and use of things—stared for a still half-hour. All that while he felt, though he could not put it into words, that his soul was out of gear with its surroundings—a cog-wheel unconnected with any machinery, just like the idle cog-wheel of a cheap Beheea sugar-crusher laid by in a corner. The breezes fanned over him, the parrots shrieked at him, the noises of the populated house behind—squabbles, orders, and ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling

... result. Thrown into the midst of a slow-moving machinery, alone in his estimate of the potential greatness of the School, supremely conscious of his mission, he found himself a solitary. There are two methods of progress. One to oil the old cog-wheels and pray for progression. Another to point out the clogging nature of the machinery and propose a new device. He chose the latter method. It was bold and dangerous. But he went through with it courageously. The numbers dropped rapidly, the fame of the School suffered a relapse, but in the ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell

... me—I stepped aside, but the world never waits; I was a cog discarded from the mechanism of society—" He was so pleased with the metaphor that ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... I kep' that in mind steady, as you may say. I thought I was so used to the idee that it wouldn't jar me much of any when it come to the fact. But it did; yes siree, it did, sure enough. 'Peared as if a cog slipped somehow, and my whole works ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards

... in motion a system of gear wheels keyed at an angle, at B and C, upon intermediate shafts that transmit motion to the four vertical threaded rods of the frame, D. All these shaftings are 11/2 inch in diameter, and the cog-wheels, twenty in number, are ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various

... old world should jump a cog Sometime, in its dizzy spinning, And go off the track with a sudden jog, What an end would come to the sinning, What a rest from strife and the burdens of life For the millions of people in it, What a way out of care, and worry and wear, All in ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... employer of Shine McManus, none other than the fat gentleman with the purple jowls, otherwise Izzy Marx, known to his friends as "Easy Marks." McManus was a not unimportant cog in the secret-service department ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan

... this, when one stops to remember that this army of three hundred thousand men and a hundred thousand horses was merely one single cog of the German military machine; that if all the German war strength were assembled together you might add this army to the greater army and hardly know it was there—why, then, the brain refuses to wrestle with a computation so gigantic. The imagination ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... produce an article almost from raw material to finished product: now he has learned to stand at an automatic and labour at a single part. In short, he is becoming a specialist which makes him a cog in ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson

... Land presents itself as a tremendous enterprise in transportation, unparalleled in the modern world. What transportation? It is a complex of all human enterprises which we shall fit Into each other like cog-wheels. And in the very first stages of the enterprise we shall find employment for the ambitious younger masses of our people: all the engineers, architects, technologists, chemists, doctors, and lawyers, those who have ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl

... watching him," Forrest concluded. "He was a good man at first, but he's slipped a cog recently. Sure, send him down the hill. And send that other fellow—Hopkins, you said?—along with him. By the way, Mr. Hennessy." As he spoke, Forrest drew forth his pad book, tore off the last note scribbled, and ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... by his opponents. His advantage of speed was nullified by the superior tactical and strategical acumen of his antagonists, the result being that the German airman, who has merely been trained along certain lines, who is in many cases nothing more than a cog-wheel in a machine, and who is proverbially slow-witted, has concluded that he is no match for the airmen of the Allies. He found from bitter experience that nothing afforded the Anglo-French military aviators such keen delight as to lie in wait for a "rover," and then to swoop ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot

... the Live Children were dragged towards the blue workshops, where each of the little inventors set his machine going. It was a great blue whirl of disks and pulleys and straps and fly-wheels and driving-wheels and cog-wheels and all kinds of wheels, which sent every sort of machine skimming over the ground or shooting up to the ceiling. Other Blue Children unfolded maps and plans, or opened great big books, or uncovered azure statues, or brought enormous flowers and gigantic fruits that seemed made ...
— The Blue Bird for Children - The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness • Georgette Leblanc

... railing thus. "Old Pan," said Fortune, "what's this fuss? Am I the patroness of dice? Is not she our fair cousin, Vice? Do I cog dice or mark the cards? Do gamesters offer me regards? They trust to their own fingers' ends: On Vice, not me, the game depends. So would I save the fools, if they Would not defy my rule by play. They worship Folly, and the knaves Own all ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay

... of slipping a cog in our plans—making a false start, having somebody get on to us! Why, man, there may be jail for us both ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... planet were two cog-wheels geared into each other, the sun being 3 feet diameter and the planet 2 feet diameter, the latter was keyed tightly on the bottom end of the connecting rod, and the sun which was keyed tightly on the end of the shaft, that was to revolve and work the machinery. But although this method ...
— The Stoker's Catechism • W. J. Connor

... chosen the Right—but the Right was ineffective, impotent, almost ludicrous. It left him shorn, powerless, and in moral revolt. The world had suddenly left him, as the vision of Carrie Wynn had left him, alone, a mere clerk, an insignificant cog in the great grinding wheel of humdrum drudgery. His chance to do and thereby to be had ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... somebody's pocket! To wager when you know that you have made winning certain! The outcome of it all is that, in the unequal battle between the men who back and the men who lay, the latter must win; they will win, even if they have to cog the dice on a pinch; and, moreover, they will not be found out officially, even though their "secret" is as open as if it were written across the sky. A strange, hard, pitiless crew are these same bookmakers. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... dissatisfaction are the natural fruit of monotony. Here is an important item in the problems of our times. Side by side with growth of the cities and their excitement is the growing monotony of most labor. The factory, with its specialized production, reduces the worker to a cog in the machinery. In some factories, in the name of efficiency, the windows are whitewashed so that the outside world is shut out and talking is prohibited; the worker passes his day performing his unvaried task from morning to night. ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... from any feeling of regard for the children, for they were allowed to climb, and push, and run over the sky-lights, and over the engine, and I every moment expected that some of them would be provided for either by the cog-wheels or the ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... iron, and the precautions in the way of cross sections of masonry are very elaborate. The average ascent per mile is 1,320 feet, and the total ascent is nearly 8,000 feet. In the center of the track, between the heavy steel rails, are two cog rails, of great strength. These are provided to insure absolute safety for travelers, one being for general use and the other ...
— My Native Land • James Cox



Words linked to "Cog" :   subsidiary, geared wheel, tooth, bring together, gear, subordinate, roll, gear wheel, join, foot soldier, roll out, cog railway, underling



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