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Groove   /gruv/   Listen
Groove

noun
1.
A long narrow furrow cut either by a natural process (such as erosion) or by a tool (as e.g. a groove in a phonograph record).  Synonym: channel.
2.
A settled and monotonous routine that is hard to escape.  Synonym: rut.
3.
(anatomy) any furrow or channel on a bodily structure or part.  Synonym: vallecula.



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"Groove" Quotes from Famous Books



... the groove, my friend, until you've made your name; after that—do what you like, they'll lick your boots ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... at a windmill that would not move, It puffed with its round red cheeks in vain; One sail stuck fast in a puzzling groove, And baby's breath ...
— Eric - or, Under the Sea • Mrs. S. B. C. Samuels

... won on this side the water[552]," while the American Minister himself believed that "the prospect of interference with us is growing more and more remote[553]." Russell also was optimistic, writing to Lyons, "Our relations have now got into a very smooth groove.... There is no longer any excitement here upon the question of America. I fear Europe is going to supplant the affairs of America as an exciting topic[554]," meaning, presumably, disturbances arising in Italy. On April 4 Adams described his diplomatic duties as "almost ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... sentiments move in the narrowest groove— be thankful you are not like them! Mere murder's an act which they seldom approve, and are even inclined to condemn: When the patriot blows up his friends or his foes, those prejudiced Saxons among, It is reckoned ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley

... had been. But, on examining the paper under a low power of the microscope, I found the surface to be perfect and intact. No loose fibre had been detached from it, for if it had, the broken end or, at least, the groove in which it had lain, would have been visible. The inference seemed to be that the loose fibre had existed, not in the paper which was found in the safe, but in the paper on which the original thumb-mark had been made. Now, as far as I knew, there was only one undoubted ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman

... simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect. Now, it was not really difficult, by an inspection of the groove between your left forefinger and thumb, to feel sure that you did NOT propose to invest your ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... glass plate. When the speaker talks or the singer sings, his voice strikes against a delicate diaphragm and throws it into vibration, and the metal point attached to it traces on the wax of a moving cylinder a groove of varying shape and appearance called the "record." Every variation in the speaker's voice is repeated in the vibrations of the metal disk and hence in the minute motion of the pointer and in the consequent record ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark

... no question as to that. Notwithstanding that the paddle had been in the water, the clean wood of the fracture showed quite plainly, and whilst Ainley was looking at it the Indian stretched a finger and pointed to a semi-circular groove which ran ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns

... or better still a piece of half-inch dowel ten or twelve inches long, for a handle. Cut a groove with a knife around one end to keep the ...
— Spool Knitting • Mary A. McCormack

... forward and laterally; in supra-condylar fracture of the femur, the muscles of the calf pull the lower fragment back towards the popliteal space; and in fracture of the humerus above the deltoid insertion, the muscles inserted into the inter-tubercular (bicipital) groove adduct the ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... often fortified by a tower on each side, and by a room over the intermediate passage; and the thick folding-doors of oak, by which the entrance was closed, were often strengthened with iron, and faced by an iron portcullis or grate, sliding down a groove from the higher ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby

... Aziel being set down upon the very verge of the cliff. Close to him a spur of granite jutted out twenty feet or so from the edge. At the end of the spur a groove was cut and over this groove, suspended by a thin chain from a pole, hung a wedge of pure crystal carefully shaped and polished. While Aziel wondered what evil purpose this stone might serve, the slaves had fastened a fine rope to the cage containing the wounded Hebrew soldier and ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard

... afterwards of several. The lowest of these layers is the alimentary canal, and Wolff followed its development from its commencement to its completion. He showed how this leaf-shaped structure first turns into a groove, then the margins of this groove fold together and form a closed canal, and at length the two external openings of the tube (the mouth and ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel

... are ornamented in various ways—some with a great spiral groove running from bottom to top; others with two spirals, ascending in different directions, so as to cross over one another; some are fluted or channeled straight up and down; some are wrought with chevrons, like ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... united family. One day, after breakfast, there arrived a new Academic coat for the master, and we tried it on together. I say 'we,' for he wanted to see how the palm leaves looked upon me. I put on the coat, hat, and sword, a real sword, my dear, which comes out, and has a groove in the middle for the blood to run away, and I assure you I was struck with my appearance; but this I tell you only to show the intimacy ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... man, who thought but little outside the narrow groove in which he worked, was somewhat aghast ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking

... page was a recent addition to Maud's inner circle. She had interested herself in him some two months back in much the same spirit as the prisoner in his dungeon cell tames and pets the conventional mouse. To educate Albert, to raise him above his groove in life and develop his soul, appealed to her romantic nature as a worthy task, and as a good way of filling in the time. It is an exceedingly moot point—and one which his associates of the servants' hall would have combated hotly—whether Albert possessed a soul. ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... some mountaineer. So had Leothric been transfixed; but Sacnoth smote sideways with the flat of his blade, and sent the tail whizzing over Leothric's left shoulder; and it rasped upon his armour as it went, and left a groove upon it. Sideways then at Leothric smote the foiled tail of Wong Bongerok, and Sacnoth parried, and the tail went shrieking up the blade and over Leothric's head. Then Leothric and Wong Bongerok fought sword to tooth, and the sword smote ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany

... over an open trail on a nervous little cow-pony. But it was both a bodily and mental relief for the outdoor girl who had been, for these past weeks, shut into a groove for which she ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe

... summit of a cliff to the valley beneath and made fast to posts driven into the ground. The Badi sits astride on a wooden saddle, to which he is tied by thongs; the saddle is similarly secured to the bast or sliding cable, along which it runs, by means of a deep groove; sandbags are tied to the Badi's feet sufficient to secure his balance, and he is then, after various ceremonies and the sacrifice of a kid, started off; the velocity of his descent is very great, and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... dam which an enterprising landowner was constructing. Three hundred women were consolidating the earthwork by means of round, flat blocks of granite about twice the size of a curling stone. Round each block was a groove in which was a leather belt with a number of rings threaded on it. To each ring a rope was attached. When these ropes were extended the granite block became the hub of a wheel of which the ropes were the spokes. A number of women and girls took ropes apiece and ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... general run of pupils it leads up a blind alley because the apprenticeship does not fulfill the promise which apprenticeship supposedly holds out. That is, the pupil, when he becomes a worker, will be thrown back into some factory groove where his experience as an apprentice cannot be used, where he is closed off from the chance to develop and use the knowledge or training he received. If, as Dean Schneider asserts, "we are rapidly dividing mankind into a staff of mental workers and an army of purely physical workers," and if "we ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot

... were upon the road. On the roof of my closet, not directly over the middle of the hammock, I ordered the joiner to cut out a hole of a foot square, to give me air in hot weather as I slept, which hole I shut at pleasure with a board that drew backwards and forwards through a groove. ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift

... merely laced on after rounding, there would be a gap between the square ends of the board and the edge of the back (see fig. 38), though the convexity and even curve of the back would be to some extent assured. What is done in backing is to make a groove, into which the edges of the board will fit neatly, and to hammer the backs of the sections over one another from the centre outwards on both sides to form the "groove," to ensure that the back shall return to the same form after the ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell

... the two sides and the back end of the pen-trap were formed. The top was covered with poles, weighted down with stones. The trap-door, which was at the front, was made of plank and slid up and down in a groove. When it was raised, it was held in place by a cord which passed over the top of the pen-trap and down on the back side, finally attaching to a trigger connecting with a spindle inside the pen, at the farther end. The bait was to be placed on ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes

... nostrils scarcely projecting; upper lip with a shallow vertical groove in front; index finger without a claw; thumb short; part of the terminal phalanx included in the wing membrane; metacarpal bone of the second finger equal to the index finger in length; tail short and distinct; the base contained in the narrow ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... of the trochlear surface of the femur. Between the medial condyle of the femur and the medial condyle (tuberosity) of the tibia, when the limb is in the flexed position, the line of the joint can be recognised as a groove or cleft, and this is made use of in measuring the length of the tibia. The lateral condyle (tuberosity) of the tibia can also be palpated, and must not be mistaken for the head of the fibula, which lies farther back and at a slightly lower level, and can readily ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... interest in life to draw him away from it, so that his soul was being gradually bricked up like the body of a mediaeval nun. But at last there came this kindly illness, and Nature hustled James Stephens out of his groove, and sent him into the broad world far away from roaring Manchester and his shelves full of calf-skin authorities. At first he resented it deeply. Everything seemed trivial to him compared to his ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... you, Master Marplot—it's you that's down, drunk or sober; and that's your own blood on your fingers, running from a three-inch groove in your ribs for the devil's imps to slide into you. Ugh! cry gramercy! for it's all over with ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... figures of every conceivable shape. The whole still retains its original colouring. At the centres of the main figures are gilt bosses—the one over the high altar being a shield with the royal arms—the wooden strips are black with a white groove down the centre of each, and the ground is either dark red or ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson

... of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his chief business ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and the nineteenth centuries, the progress of parliamentary intellectual development is not very encouraging. The speeches of honorable members, with some few very honorable exceptions, seem to run in the same groove, with the same utter incapacity of realizing a new idea, or a broad and cosmopolitan policy. There were men then, as there are men now, who talked of toleration in one breath, and proclaimed their wooden determination to enforce class ascendency of creed and ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... to lead others in their groove, and not in God's, and to place limits to their further advancement—as for those, I say, who know but one way, and would have all the world to walk in it, the evils which they bring upon others are irremediable, for they keep them all their lives stopping at certain things which ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon

... slow and tortuous, would require great strength and endurance. I faced about and began a thorough, desperate search for a downward route. I stood marooned in the canyon wall shaped like a crude horseshoe. At its toe water had leaped down and eroded a slight groove in the solid rock. This was my only chance. It was not inviting, but I had no alternative. It led me down a hundred feet, then tightened into a sort of chimney. Just below I could see the swaying top of a big ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills

... sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. In one heavy thunder-shower the lightning struck a large pitch pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... standing toward the operator; the diaphragm and stylus connected therewith, which receives the sound spoken into the tube; and thirdly, the revolving cylinder, with its sheet-coating of tin-foil laid over the surface of a spiral groove to receive the indentations of the point of the stylus. The mode of operation is very simple. The cylinder is revolved; and the point of the stylus, when there is no sound agitation in the funnel or mouth-piece, makes a smooth, continuous depression in the tin-foil over ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various

... as a bitter fight for good government in a Western city meant to the men at the front. After some months of peace upon my return to England I resented passport regulations which had previously been a commonplace; but soon I was back in the old groove, the groove of war, with war seeming as normal in England as peace seemed ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... again points towards the conductors; for, if incompetent persons are not to be permitted to maltreat classical music at their pleasure, how is it that the best and most influential musicians have not taken this matter in hand? why have they themselves led classical music into such a groove of triviality and actual disfigurement? In many instances the objection in question is merely put forward as a pretext for opposition to all efforts in the direction I have indicated. Indolent and incompetent persons form an immense majority: ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)

... Naab, with his hand on Silvermane's flank. He touched a raw groove, and the stallion flinched. ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey

... new generation is growing up with a larger desire for philosophic inquiry and speculation. But whilst the priests continue to control the public school system of the province, they have a powerful means of maintaining the current of popular thought in that conservative and too often narrow groove, in which they have always laboured to keep it since the days ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot

... a new period, a new life at the Snow place and in the office of Z. Snow and Co. Or, rather, life in the old house and at the lumber and hardware office slumped back into the groove in which it had run before the opera singer's son was summoned from the New York school to the home and into the lives of his grandparents. Three people instead of four sat down at the breakfast table and at dinner and at supper. Captain ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... another house at your disposal, or I would take the lease here off your hands, and later have it pulled down. Your case interests me greatly, and I mean to see you through, so you have no anxiety, and can drop back into your old groove of work tomorrow! The drug has provided you, and therefore me, with a short-cut to a very interesting experience. I am grateful ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various

... of the fourth cervical nerve of the left side, after having joined a branch of the third and of the second cervical nerves, descending between the subclavian vein and artery, is received in a groove formed for it in the pericardium, and is obliged to make a considerable turn outwards to go over the prominent part of it, where the point of the heart is lodged, in its course to the diaphragm; and as the other phrenic nerve of the right side has a ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is. Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... furniture, hewing planks from logs for tables, and for a tub chopped off the end of a log, dug a hole through it, leaving only a shell, in which, with a jackknife, they made a groove for the bottom, which also was hewn from a piece of log. The shell of their tub was then soaked with hot water, to enlarge its circle; the plank bottom was then crowded into the groove, and the tub dried before the fire. If not water-tight, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various

... limb; the limbs themselves display a constantly increasing differentiation of parts from the batrachian to the mammalian. There was no good ankle joint in early Eocene times. The model ankle joint is a tongue and groove arrangement, and this is a later evolution. In Eocene times they were nearly all flat. The arched foot, too, comes in; this is an advance on the flat foot. The bones of the palms and soles are not locked until the later Tertiary. The vertebral column progressed in the same way, from flat ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... unwise to adopt it. While the general idea of mandates issuing from the proposed international organization was presumably acceptable to the President from the first, his support was doubtless confirmed by the fact that it followed the groove which had been made in his mind by the Smuts phrase "the heir ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing

... could not find the material to carry over the land; if they did find it, it would not have the markings which are found in the Drift, and it would possess marine fossils not found in the Drift; and the waves would not and could not scratch and groove the rock-surfaces underneath the Drift, as we know they are scratched ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... the loss of old confidence, a sickness coming over the heart and brain of his love, that unnerved him. It was not the horrid cruelty to his friend, and his own grievous loss thereby, but the recoil of his loving endeavour that, jarring him out of every groove of thought, every socket of habit, every joint of action, cast him from the city, and made of him a wanderer indeed, not a wanderer in a strange country, but a wanderer ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... a sort of lip whose internal diameter corresponds exactly to the surface of the plates, b. This rim, J, is cast in one piece, and carries on its circumference two small, diametrically opposite iron studs, which are so placed that they may engage in the groove, p, at the upper edge of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various

... to consist in doing good when it is not exactly pleasant to do it, and to people who are not in our own groove, or in "our set," but like the people invited in the feast prescribed by Christ, and for whom we work as a duty, whether it is immediately agreeable or not. It is giving up our own will to God's command and obeying this ungrudgingly: ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... is not a little curious that when the way was cleared for the Heath Society's great work, in its formal organization with M. Mourier-Petersen, a large landowner, as their associate in its management, the three men who for a quarter of a century planned the work and marked out the groove in which it was to run were all of that strong stock which is by no means the ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis

... cylinder was then rotated, and the sounds produced by the escaping air could be heard, and the words understood a distance of at least 8 feet from the phonograph." The point of the jet is glass, and could be directed at a single groove. ...
— Development of the Phonograph at Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory • Leslie J. Newville

... Diptera; a groove or grooves in the middle of the face as though for the lodgment of the antennae; bounded on the ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith

... "Look at this stuff lying in the groove," and he pointed to what appeared to be some kind of gum, ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn

... walls, except that it has a roughly triangular timber grooved along the lower side and fitted over the top board as a cap. The doorposts are two timbers sunk in the ground; their tops fit into the two "caps," and each has a groove from top to bottom into which the ends of the boards of the front wall are inserted. A few dwellings have a door consisting of a single board set on end and swinging on a projection sunk in a hole in a doorsill buried in the earth; the upper part of the door swings on a string secured to the doorpost ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... fall as this! She would have said,—indeed, she often had said,—to the archdeacon that Griselda's religious principles were too firmly fixed to be moved by outward worldly matters; signifying, it may be, her conviction that that teaching of Plumstead Episcopi had so fastened her daughter into a groove, that all the future teaching of Hartlebury would not suffice to undo the fastenings. When she had thus boasted, no such idea as that of her daughter running from her husband's house had ever come upon her; but she had alluded ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope

... as a magistrate. I am as prepared to die now as I should be twenty years on. I have been rather a lonely man since I lost my wife. Cuthbert's ways are not my ways, for he likes life in London, cares nothing for field sports. But we can't all be cast in one groove, you know, and I have never tried to persuade him to give up his life for mine, why should I? However, though I wish you to tell no one else, I should be glad if you will call on Brander and ask him to drive over. I made my will years ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty

... seemed a pitiful, bewildered person. While talking to Princess Mary he continually looked round as if asking everyone whether he was doing the right thing. After the destruction of Moscow and of his property, thrown out of his accustomed groove he seemed to have lost the sense of his own significance and to feel that there was no longer a place for ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... serving their country by yet again dishing up the old fables for the foreigner as history; and some Europeans, knowing no better or aiming at setting alongside the unedifying history of Europe the shining example of the conventional story of China, continue in the old groove. To this day, of course, we are far from having really worked through every period of Chinese history; there are long periods on which scarcely any work has yet been done. Thus the picture we are able to give today has no finality about it and will need many modifications. ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard

... this world very much in the same way. The improvement originates in one man's mind, and, being carried into effect with evident good results, it is copied by others. We are all apt lazily to run in the groove in which we find ourselves; we are creatures of habit, and slaves of tradition. Now and then, however, in every profession and sphere, if they are untrammelled by law, an individual appears who is discontented with the ancient ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... who had had some intimate experience of late with the light-fingered community, immediately recognised as a jemmy. "Take hold of that," said Juve, and as Charles took it in his hand he added: "Now put the jemmy into this groove, and press with all your force. If you can move that needle to a point which I know, and which it is difficult but not impossible to reach, you may congratulate yourself on being ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... success, and "Lohengrin" will follow soon. For the latter we shall have to get Frau Stager from Prague, because amongst our local artists there is none who could undertake Ortrud. Otherwise everything here is very much in the old groove, and there is little to ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)

... of the sternum of this bird (the Crane) have long been known. The trachea or windpipe, quitting the neck of the bird, passes downwards and backwards between the branches of the merry-thought towards the inferior edge of the keel, which is hollowed out to receive it. Into this groove the trachea passes, ... and after making three turns passes again forwards and upwards and ultimately backwards to be attached to the two lobes of the lungs." Yarrell, Brit. ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various

... had become fanatical; the atoms of common sense no longer functioned in the accustomed groove. And yet he knew clearly and definitely what he purposed to do, what the future would be. This species of madness cannot properly be attributed to his illness, though its accent might be. For a time he would be the grim Protestant Flagellant, pursuing the idea of self-castigation. That ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath

... had to break the dry wood to keep up the fires. They had no tools. So the men made a stone ax with a groove. Then they put a handle on the grooved stone and fastened it with rawhide. This was used. Then they wanted something better to break the wood. So they made ...
— Myths and Legends of the Great Plains • Unknown

... sharpies were 1-1/4 inches thick. The sharpie's bottom was planked athwartships with planking of the same thickness as the sides and of 6 to 8 inches in width. That part of the bottom that cleared the water, at the bow and under the stern, was often made of tongue-and-groove planking, or else the seams athwartship would be splined. Inside the boat there was a keelson made of three planks, in lamination, standing on edge side by side, sawn to the profile of the bottom, and running about three-fourths to seven-eighths the ...
— The Migrations of an American Boat Type • Howard I. Chapelle

... silence for a few moments; but Gertrude knew she had succeeded. Her father had been wavering, but she had stirred him to passion, and his thoughts had suddenly returned to the groove they would not leave again. The fixed idea had once more possessed him; unavailing sorrow and longing for justice would drive him on along ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss

... was very generally neglected. Unless war intervened—and nothing seemed more improbable than another campaign—even a Napoleon would have had to submit to the inevitable. Jackson caught eagerly at the opportunity of freeing himself from an unprofitable groove. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... building had emerged triumphant, hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thickness of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the heavy arches, long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar, except where, near the porch, a deep groove was furrowed into one wall by the tower-stair; and even there the barbarity was veiled by the graceful gothic arcade which pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves smilingly in front of ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... prolong a conversation referring to the "old, old story," which ran very much in the usual groove. Suffice it to say that Edwin at last carefully consulted the Bible as to the plan of redemption; and, in believing, found that rest of spirit which he had failed to work out. Thenceforward he had a higher motive for labouring at his daily toil, yet the old motive did not lose ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne

... had been a want of something,—some deficiency felt but not yet defined,—which had hitherto been fatal. The young men said it was because no old stager who knew the way of pulling the wires would come forward and put the club in the proper groove. The old men said it was because the young men were pretentious puppies. It was, however, not to be doubted that the party of Progress had become slack, and that the Liberal politicians of the country, although a special new club had been opened for ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... Tom; bless you in your career without, in your home within," said Kenelm, wringing his friend's hand at the door of the carriage that was to whirl to love and wealth and station the whilom bully of a village, along the iron groove of that contrivance which, though now the tritest of prosaic realities, seemed once too poetical for a poet's ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... noble insect. Darwin has some remarks about the smallness of the brain of an ant, assuming that this insect possesses a very high intelligence, but I doubt very much that the ant, which moves in a groove, is mentally the superior of the unsocial flea. The last is certainly the most teachable; and if fleas were generally domesticated and made pets of, probably there would be as many stories about their marvellous intelligence and fidelity to man as we ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... Colorado." The geographer could count some scores of rivers so named—point them out on any map. They are seen in every latitude, trending in all directions, from the great Colorado of canon celebrity in the north to another far south, which cuts a deep groove through the plains of Patagonia. All these streams have been so designated from the hue of their waters—muddy, with a pronounced tinge of red: this from the ochreous earth through which they have coursed, holding ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid

... books wiv yearnings to improve, To 'eave meself out of me lowly groove, An' 'ere is orl the change I ever got: "'Ark at yer 'eart, an' you kin learn ...
— The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke • C. J. Dennis

... Josie, nodding her head with intelligent perception. "Each section, when lighted, will burn for one hour, running along its groove but harmless until the end of the fuse is reached. If the entire fuse is lighted, it will require just six hours to explode the bomb, while if it is cut off to the last mark and then lighted, the bomb will explode in fifteen ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)

... cried Carey, and he hurried round the rock, followed by his companions; but there was apparently no sign of any reptile, till the doctor pointed to a great groove in ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn

... the mission-house during his absence consisted of a chaplain, a missionary lady learning Malay and teaching the girls' school, our young friend Mr. Grant, myself, and baby Mab. The days ran along a smooth groove, although we had all plenty to do. Up early in the morning, then a walk, and service in church at seven. After prayers some hours' teaching and learning before midday bath and breakfast. The afternoon was a more lazy time, though the hum of school went on continuously, ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall

... down the four corners of that piece of wood till it had eight smooth sides all just alike. Then Mart was compelled to go over to Jellicombe's carpenter shop and put his piece of wood in a vise, so it would be held steady, while he took a saw and sawed a long groove, more than half an inch deep, in the middle of each one of those eight faces. Jellicombe told him he had done ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... idea which seems likely to help us, and thus we vary our course, on the next occasion we remember this idea by reason of its novelty, but if we try to repeat it, we often find the residuum of our old memories pulling us so strongly into our old groove, that we have the greatest difficulty in repeating our performance in the new manner; there is a clashing of memories, a conflict, which if the idea is very new, and involves, so to speak, too sudden a cross—too wide a departure from our ordinary course—will sometimes render the performance ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler

... repeated. "Of course, brother, it has been in your mind for some time, but it comes altogether fresh to me, and I must look at it in every light. For myself, I have no wish at all to become master of our father's estate. I have been going in one groove for the last twenty years, and don't care about changing it. You wished me to do so ten years ago, and I declined then, and the ten years have not made me more desirous of change than ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty

... with a long flat board at right angles at the foot of the posts, and all painted a bright red. At the further end of the boards was a miniature basket, and between the two posts, at the top, was a miniature knife which ran up and down in a groove and was drawn by a miniature pulley. Folk who knew said that this was a model of ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... drawers or open the cupboard doors. Speaking of cupboards, there's no end to the bother if you don't just camp down in the pantry and stay there till the top shelf is up and the bottom drawer slides in its groove. In spite of our efforts, Mrs. John says there's no place for her tallest covered dish except the top shelf, which she can't reach without a step-ladder. You'll never know whether you are specially bright or the joiners extra stupid, but it's certain your way won't be their way, whichever ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner

... was flooded with clear light that had a rosy tinge. From my position on the floor I could not see what made the light. It streamed from a crevice that extended clear around the cave parallel with the floor and about twelve feet above it. From this groove, along with the light, came the soft ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... only one to discover a new and firmer note in Dorothea's voice. Life at Bayfield slipped back into its old comfortable groove, but the brothers fell—and one of them consciously—into a habit of including her in their conversations and even of asking her advice. One day there arrived a bulky parcel for Narcissus; so bulky indeed and so suspiciously heavy, that ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... could see, a deep groove was cut along the stem, and the bow-board, perhaps three feet in width, was slipped into it and made fast at the top with ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready

... of campaign, were to be called upon in the midst of his meditations to bully a private for not cleaning his buttons. Naturally, you were annoyed. Your giant brain, wrenched temporarily from its proper groove, expended its force in one tremendous reprimand of Comrade Jackson. It was as if one had diverted some terrific electric current which should have been controlling a vast system of machinery, and turned it on to annihilate a black-beetle. In the present ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse

... time, the royal court was a scene devoid of any graces: the kings could not speak our language, and their feminine favourites were the reverse of fair or virtuous; whilst domestic hate ruled in the palace. Power then ran into a new groove of corruption and bribery; and the scene, vile in itself, was made viler by exaggeration and the retaliations of one political party on the other, whilst either side was equally lauded by its own party. Therefore we may reasonably conclude that matters were not so bad as they were ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay

... disappointment. Mr. Gresley took the seat on the sofa beside Rachel which Ada Pratt had vacated, and after a few kindly eulogistic remarks on the Bishop of Southminster and the responsibilities of wealth, he turned the conversation into the well-worn groove ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley

... the Punjab lasso, in a groove in the floor, a black-headed nail of which I knew the use. At last I had discovered the spring! I felt the nail ... I lifted a radiant face to M. de Chagny ... The black-headed nail yielded ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux

... articulating surface of the first phalanx; an inferior surface, also articulatory, which in shape is obverse to the superior, bearing two unequal condyles, separated by an ill-defined antero-posterior groove, which surface articulates with the os ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks

... the south wall is a piscina, having a triangular head and shelf groove. Towards the west end, on the north side, are portions of some very valuable woodwork, apparently co-eval with the chapel itself. These probably constituted the lower part of a rood screen, and consist of slender pillars, supporting ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... of her promise to Colonel Colquhoun. It had cramped her into a narrow groove wherein to struggle would only have been to injure herself ineffectually. There comes a time when every intellectual being is forced to choose some definite pursuits. Evadne had been formed for a life of active usefulness; but now she found ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... with silent, woeful gaze, Seeks the cruel boy to move; But, alas! in vain she prays— To the string he fits the groove. When from out the clefts, behold! Steps the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... went straight they might go far; They are strong and brave and true; But they're always tired of the things that are, And they want the strange and new. They say: "Could I find my proper groove, What a deep mark I would make!" So they chop and change, and each fresh move Is only ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service

... appearance nobody could have been more than Abraham Lincoln a man of his own time and place. Until 1858 his outer life ran much in the same groove as that of hundreds of other Western politicians and lawyers. Beginning as a poor and ignorant boy, even less provided with props and stepping-stones than were his associates, he had worked his way to a position of ordinary professional and political distinction. He was ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... the folder we then may grow bolder, And form and groove pans with our consciences clear; Drive each of the turners with skill beyond learners, And put in stout wire with our hearts full of cheer. Then take a burr and make it whirr, As the bottoms spin round like a "top;" And fit these tight, which is but right ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd

... square, set on a spreading base of concrete, and divided perpendicularly down the middle into Titanic halves, these being snugly fitted one to the other by a series of triangular corrugations, a variation of the familiar tongue and groove. Interlacing the ponderous mass, from corner to corner, were huge steel bolts, and the hulking heads of more bolts, some forty on each of the four sides, showed that the whole might be split into halves at will, and ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle

... inch thick. He would make bigger ones when he grew to be bigger himself, but you mustn't expect too much at first. Chip after chip was torn out in this way, and gradually he would work around the tree until he had completely encircled it. Then the groove was made deeper, and after a while it would have to be broadened so that he could get his head farther into it. He seemed to think it was of immense importance to get the job done as quickly as possible, for he worked away with tremendous energy and eagerness, as if felling that ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert

... canal, aqueduct, gutter, runway, alveus, conduit, duct; strait; furrow, chamfer, chamfret, groove, fluting; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... laid in the water or fastened to the stems of water plants. See that damsel fly, the slender, smaller, pretty-colored darning-needle? Well, it goes entirely under water, cuts a slit in the stem with the sharp end of the abdomen, and lays the eggs in the groove it has made. And ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody

... always had enough for creature comforts and as for adventure I had had my fill during the Boer War and my world wanderings. No, I had joined the German Secret Service for quite a different reason. I was thinking of the influences that had pressed me out of my destined groove, by every human right my own. I remember how sanguine Count Reitzenstein was that through the Service I ought to gain the power I had lost. But as I sat in the hotel room had occult powers been given me, I never would have taken up Secret Service work. But one is not ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... which formed the road, and to which they are fitted, being so constructed as to slide along without any danger of hitching or becoming displaced, on the same principle as a thing sliding on a concave groove. The carriage was set in motion by a mere push, and, having received this impetus, rolled with us down an inclined plane into a tunnel, which forms the entrance to the railroad. This tunnel is four hundred yards ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various

... touch of Sri Yukteswar's holy feet. Yogis teach that a disciple is spiritually magnetized by reverent contact with a master; a subtle current is generated. The devotee's undesirable habit-mechanisms in the brain are often cauterized; the groove of his worldly tendencies beneficially disturbed. Momentarily at least he may find the secret veils of MAYA lifting, and glimpse the reality of bliss. My whole body responded with a liberating glow whenever I knelt in the Indian fashion before ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... lower half of arm. Here the vessel is more superficial, lying in the groove between the flexor carpi radialis and supinator longus. An incision two inches in length, and parallel with these tendons, easily exposes the artery. The nerve is still on ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... of confidence in the big athlete's manner, and his voice had that subtle shade of authority which carried the remark in its proper groove. For these ancient servitors are to be approached in only one way if results ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre

... be a surveyor and he set to work energetically to perfect himself in that science so far as it could be done by books. He was embarrassed by the want of even the most simple instruments. A semi-circle for measuring angles was made by cutting a groove the required shape on a piece of soft wood, and filling it by melting and running in a pewter spoon, making an arc of metal on which the graduated scale was etched. A pair of dividers was improvised from a piece of hickory, by making the centre thin, bending it over, putting pins at ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin

... composed of two parts: the HEADPIECE, which was strengthened within by several circles of iron, and the VISOR, which, as the name implies, was a sort of grating to see through, so contrived as, by sliding in a groove, or turning on a pivot, to be raised or lowered at pleasure. Some helmets had a further improvement called a BEVER, from the Italian bevere, to drink. The VENTAYLE, or "air-passage," is ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... pieces of wood to a horizontal bar, one end of which presses against the trunk, while the bullock is harnessed to the outer end. The yoke-bar hangs about a foot from the ground, the inner end resting in a groove of the trunk, while the outer is supported by the poles connecting it with the churning-post. From the top of this latter a rope is also tied to the bullock's horn to keep the animal in position. The press is usually ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... hardest task in the world to keep my hands off their pretty laughing faces. It was a foolish impulse, but the devil begotten of fear and blind anger was ill curbed and still eager to take advantage of my perplexity. The turf gave better counsel. I found a groove ripped in it, about midway between the pedestal of the sphinx and the marks of my feet where, on arrival, I had struggled with the overturned machine. There were other signs of removal about, with queer narrow footprints like ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... the lane-side in search of the once familiar herbs: these too belonged to the past, from which his life had shrunk away, like a rivulet that has sunk far down from the grassy fringe of its old breadth into a little shivering thread, that cuts a groove for itself ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot

... appearance of the third and youngest would hardly have been sufficient to characterize him; there was an uncribbed, uncabined aspect in his eyes and attire, implying that he had hardly as yet found the entrance to his professional groove. That he was a desultory tentative student of something and everything might only have been ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... away, I go into my lodgings to take what food may be prepared, as coffee, when I have it, or roasted maize infusion when I have none. The door is shut, all save a space to admit light. It is made of the inner bark of a gigantic tree, not a quarter of an inch thick, and slides in a groove behind a post on each side of the doorway. When partially open it is supported by only one of the posts. Eager heads sometimes crowd the open space, and crash goes the thin door, landing a Manyuema beauty ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie



Words linked to "Groove" :   depression, furrow, anatomy, fissure, modus operandi, body part, striation, mill, dado, grooving, track, incise, cut into, imprint, fluting, quirk, dig, stria, delve, vallecula, rabbet, general anatomy, impression, routine, washout, flute, turn over, rebate



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