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Rotund   /roʊtˈənd/   Listen
Rotund

adjective
1.
Spherical in shape.
2.
(of sounds) full and rich.  Synonyms: orotund, pear-shaped, round.  "The rotund and reverberating phrase" , "Pear-shaped vowels"
3.
Excessively fat.  Synonyms: corpulent, obese, weighty.



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"Rotund" Quotes from Famous Books



... old darling!" cried Genevieve, giving the rotund, gayly-clad figure a bear-like hug. "You look just as good as you used to—and my, my! just see all this new finery to welcome me," she added, holding off her beaming-faced old nurse at arms' length. "I reckon you'll think something has come, Mammy Lindy, when we all get settled," ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter

... ball together. She and the courtly President were always the star couple. I can see her doing the Sir Roger de Coverley. But the virgin zone was loosed long ago, and she has expanded with the British Empire. Not rotund, but rather imposingly cubic. Our hallway is a very narrow one, and when you come to visit us of an evening, after red-cheeked Emily has gone off to better tilting grounds, it is a prime delight to see Mrs. Beesley backing down the passage (like a stately ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... the rotund giant swayed with something in his arms, something which he crushed in his fists and brutally shook, something which he held off at arm's length and hammered ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie

... assays to take a ride on it; but the best he can do is to wabble around a vacant space in front of the hotel, the awkward motions of the old bone-shaker affording intense amusement to the crowd. After supper this chatty and entertaining gentleman brings his wife, a rotund, motherly-looking person, to see the bicycle; she is a Levantine Greek, and besides her own lingua franca, her husband has improved her education to the extent of a smattering of rather misleading English. Desiring to ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... was wrapped in flames. All egress from my chamber, except through a window, was cut off. The crowd, however, quickly procured and raised a long ladder. By means of this I was descending rapidly, and in apparent safety, when a huge hog, about whose rotund stomach, and indeed about whose whole air and physiognomy, there was something which reminded me of the Angel of the Odd—when this hog, I say, which hitherto had been quietly slumbering in the mud, took ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various

... emptied the cut tobacco into a clean tin box. It was clear that the day's work was almost at an end for all present. At that moment Fischelowitz entered with jaunty step and smiling face, jingling a quantity of loose silver in his hand. He is a little man, rotund and cheerful, quiet of speech and sunny in manner, with a brown beard and waving dark hair, arranged in the manner dear to barbers' apprentices. He has very soft brown eyes, a healthy complexion and a nose the inverse of aquiline, for it curves upwards to its sharp point, ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford

... surety of the loosed arrow. In the present instance she did not want any interference; she did not want the doctor's wisdom to edge in between these two young fools and spoil the drama. So she brought upon the stage the Reverend Henry Dolby, a preacher of means, worldly-wise and kindly, cheery and rotund, who, with his wife and daughter, had arrived at the Victoria that morning. Ruth met him in the hall as he was following his family into the dining room. She recognized the cloth at once, waylaid him, and with that directness of speech particularly ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath

... people of all others with whom I would like to worship to-day," I thought; "and I hope that that rotund old lady, whose face beams under the shadow of her deep bonnet like a harvest moon through a fleecy cloud, will feel moved to speak." I plucked a few buds from the sweet-briar bush, fastened them in my button-hole, and promptly ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe

... appeared a young man, rotund of form and with a chubby face. He was partly dressed, his night-robe being stuffed hastily into his trousers, and he held the camp axe ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor

... voice behind us, "do you happen to have seen Judge Henry?" It was the reverend gentleman in his meadow, come to the fence. As we turned round to him he spoke on, with much rotund authority in his eye. "From his answer to my letter, Judge Henry undoubtedly expects me here. I have arrived from Fetterman according to my plan which I announced to him, to find that he has been absent all day—absent ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister

... similar fragments. Carefully Holmes held each separate shard to the light, but in no way did it differ from any other shattered piece of plaster. He had just completed his examination when the hall lights flew up, the door opened, and the owner of the house, a jovial, rotund figure in shirt and ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... but not as a husbandry. The forcing system had been generally applied to plants and animals. Wonder-working nitrogenous fertilizers made at Niagara and by the wave motors of the coast made all vegetation to grow with artificial luxury. Corn-fed hogs and the rotund carcasses of stall-fed cattle were produced on mammoth ranches for the edification of mankind, and fowl were hatched by the billions in huge incubators, and the chicks reared and slaughtered with scarcely a touch of a human hand. And all ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings

... if solicited to patronise. I was shocked by the change that had taken place in all three of them. In five weeks they had grown five years older. Emilie had lost her freshness, her eye its sparkle; and the melancholy smile with which she welcomed me made my heart ache. Madame Sendel's rotund checks had collapsed, she looked cross and jaundiced, and more snuffy than ever. Van Haubitz was thin and haggard, his hair and mustaches, formerly glossy and well-trimmed, were ragged and neglected, his dress, once so smart and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various

... age of three, when my father resigned his Boston pulpit for the professorship of Rhetoric in Andover Seminary. I remember distinctly our arrival at the white mansion with the large, handsome grounds, the distant and mysterious grove, the rotund horse-chestnut trees, venerable and solemn, nearly a century old—to this day a horse-chestnut always seems to me like a theological trustee—and the sweep of playground so vast, so soft, so green, so fragrant, so clean, that the ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various

... individuality and charm. At first they have been known to disappoint the traveller, but one has only to live among them or near them, within the influence of their varying moods, and they surely conquer. They are the smoothest things in England, gigantic, rotund, easy; the eye rests upon their gentle contours and is at peace. They have no sublimity, no grandeur, only the most spacious repose. Perhaps it is due to this quality that the Wealden folk, accustomed to be overshadowed by this unruffled range, are so deliberate in their mental processes and so ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... benignity in her, looks, appeared on the scene, followed quickly by a man and several maid servants, all of whom added to the confusion, in the midst of which Cousin Milly was conveyed to her room and deposited on her bed. The family doctor, a rotund little man of fifty-five, was ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne

... in San Severino," grimly announced the rotund visitor. "You know what that means. Cubans who enter the Castillo seldom come out. Have you noticed the big sharks that swim about under the walls of it? Do you know what bait keeps them there? Well, I'll tell you! It's the bodies of ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... respect—he positively refused to learn anything from books, and it was in sheer despair that his father, Filipepe, apprenticed the boy to a goldsmith, who rejoiced in the nickname of Botticello—'the little tun'—perhaps on account of his rotund figure, and it was from this first master of his that the boy came to be called 'Botticello's Sandro.' The goldsmith soon saw that the boy was a born painter, and took him to Lippo Lippi to be taught. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... barracks, with the fixed intention of taking part in the worship as fully as might be permitted. On their arrival Jim was utterly surprised to find that the uniformed Captain in command was the fat little fury of the street episode; and still more astonished when that rotund person peremptorily ordered him out of the building. As the rest of the Salvationists dutifully supported their Captain, Jim had no choice, and with a feeling of sadness that was not shared by Belle, he turned ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton

... dynamic, order, have often been seen by astronomers. Of course it may be that the phenomena that we shall now consider are not angels at all. We are simply feeling around, trying to find out what we can accept. Some of our data indicate hosts of rotund and complacent tourists in inter-planetary space—but then data of long, lean, hungry ones. I think that there are, out in inter-planetary space, Super Tamerlanes at the head of hosts of celestial ravagers—which have come here and pounced upon civilizations ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... little officer made a rush at Jack, who, instead of meeting it, ducked and caught the other by his wrist. The fellow's sword went flying, and, at the same instant, Jack made a quick turn. As he did so, the pudgy man's rotund little body was seen to rise from the ground and describe an aerial semi-circle. He came crashing to the ground with a thud, his thick neck almost driven into his shoulders by the force of ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering

... civilization; a railway station is not far off. Colonel Long's is a typical Southern establishment: a white house, or rather three houses, all of one story, built on to each other as beehives are set in a row, all porches and galleries. No one at home but the cook, a rotund, broad-faced woman, with a merry eye, whose very appearance suggested good cooking and hospitality; the Missis and the children had gone up to the river fishing; the Colonel was somewhere about the place; always was away when he was wanted. Guess he'd take us in, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... don't. I mean to have some of those rotund berries of yours. Don't you, Edna? I'll wager she hasn't thrown them in with this common lot. Have ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham

... an instant; her legs had a fidgety, nervous movement in them, and in moments of excitement, which were not infrequent, she was given to executing a sort of war-dance. Old she was not; but her peculiar graces of person, her rotund form, her badly-made front of flaxen curls, which was rarely in its place, made her appear so. A bold, scheming, unscrupulous, vulgar-minded woman, who had never considered other people's feelings in her life, whether equals or inferiors. In her day she must have been rather tall—nearly ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood

... themselves in narration. There were ten of us, and we started in a grand yellow brake with four horses and a surly coachman. The morning was excessively warm, and some of the party were of such rotund proportions, that the thin ones were nearly lost sight of, if they chanced to sit between them, while the warmth approached to that of a cucumber frame with the sun on it. We attracted a good deal of attention as ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough

... company never ceased to have a charm for both poets. Mrs. Browning loved him almost as a brother: her husband told Bayard Taylor, on the day when that good poet and charming man called upon them, and after another visitor had departed—a man with a large rosy face and rotund body, as Taylor describes him—"there goes one of the most splendid men living—a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as Kenyon ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp

... Look at that Queen of Spades! Why, Dr. Slop's abdominal sesquipedality was sylph-like grace to the Lambertian girth she displays. And note the pattern of her dress, if dress it can be called,—that rotund expanse of heraldic, bar-sinistered, Chinese embroidery. Look at that Jack of Diamonds! What a pair of collar-bones he must have! That little feat of Atlas would be child's-play to him; for he could step off with a whole orrery on those ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... basket was open. She held a tumbler in one hand and a bottle in the other, from which a stream of brandy gurgled. That rotund impostor came toward ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... said good-night again and left the room. Dona Casiana continued to grumble, then ensconced her rotund person in the rocker and dozed off into a dream about an establishment of the same type as that across the way; but a model establishment, with luxuriously appointed salons, whither trooped in a long procession all the scrofulous youths of the clubs and fraternities, mystic and mundane, ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja

... perishing ruling class in the world's history. Fat with power and possession, drunken with success, and made soft by surfeit and by cessation of struggle, they are like the drones clustered about the honey vats when the worker-bees spring upon them to end their rotund existence. ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... and bestowed upon them many kine, O perpetuator of Yadu's race, Then the Vrishni dame (Kunti), comforted a little, addressed the daughter of Virata, saying,—O faultless daughter of Virata, thou shouldst not indulge in grief. For the sake of thy husband, O thou of rotund hips, protect the child in thy womb.—Having said these words, O thou of great splendour, Kunti ceased. With her permission I have brought Subhadra here. It was even thus, O giver of honours, that thy daughter's son met with his death. Cast off thy burning grief, O irresistible one. Indeed, do not ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... Bark, with no particular intent, drew forth from the pouch in his skin cloak a string of sinew, and drawing the ends of the strong twig somewhat nearly together, attached the cord to each, thus producing accidentally a petty bow of most rotund proportions. He found that the string twanged joyously, and, to the delight of Beechleaf, kept twanging it for such time as his boyish temperament would allow a single occupation. Then he picked from the ground a long, ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo

... stately cavaliers. The "decorative impulse" is here at its topmost. In his second period we get the Decameron series, the episodes from Faust, the Don Quixote—recall, if you can, that glorious tableau with its Spanish group and the long, grave don and merry, rotund squire entering on the scene, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... earth With his young blood, that blossomed into flowers. And now, instead of these fair deities Dread demons haunt the earth; hermits inhabit The leafy homes of sylvan Hamadryads; And jovial friars, rotund and rubicund, Replace the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... no fault with the sentimentalists," answered the severe critic, "but that of exceeding feebleness. They have no bone and muscle in their genius—all is flaccid and rotund in its feminine symmetry. They seem to think that vigour consists in florid phrases and little aphorisms, and delineate all the mighty tempests of the human heart with the polished prettiness of a miniature-painter on ivory. No!—these two are children of another kind—affected, tricked-out, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... ox, and ass, the three abreast, drag piles of country produce, jingling their fantastic harness, and primitive carts laden with red-soaked wine-casks rattle recklessly along; where bare-footed, girdled, and tonsured monks plod on their no-business, and every third man one passes is a rotund ecclesiastic, who never in his life walked at more than a mile an hour; where, at evening, carriages returning from the Villa Nazionale cram the thoroughfare from side to side, and make one aware, if one did not previously know ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing

... tramp on a ringing December afternoon, through snow-drifted meadows down to the icy Chaloosa River. She was exotic in an astrachan cap and a short beaver coat; she slid on the ice and shouted, and he panted after her, rotund with laughter.... Myra Babbitt never slid ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... expression of his very red face indicated that his briskness was spurred by anxiety, and a fattish groan he emitted on the top step added the impression that his comfortable body protested against the mental spur. In the hall he removed his narrow-brimmed straw hat and presented a rotund and amiable head, from the top of which his auburn hair seemed to retire with a sense of defeat; it fell back, however, not in confusion, but in perfect order, and the sparse pink mist left upon his crown gave, by a supreme effort, an effect of arrangement, so that ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington

... a rotund man, bald, with red hair that had a faded, washed-out appearance. His eyes were large, pale blue in color, with a singularly ingratiating expression which was made almost yearning ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer

... of his opinion of the cause of the grand effect of the rotund questioned, i. 150. his fine lines on ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke

... fast as cramped limbs could carry his rotund corporation, to the gate of the monastery, where he loudly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various

... of a bloodthirsty buccaneer. I mean the Captain, of course. And all because I had the forethought to tell Cleone her nose was red,—which it was,—sunburn you know, and because I remarked that the Captain was growing as rotund as a Frenchman, which he is,—I mean fat, of course. All Frenchmen are fat—at least some are. And then he will wear such a shabby old coat! So here I am, Mr. Beverley, very lonely and very sad, but industrious you see, quite as busy as Penelope, who used to spin webs all ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... In rotund, elastic bounders, Plainly the great joy of men is, Witness cricket, billiards, rounders, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various

... the tinsel gleaming grotesquely on his white sodden cloak, his naked legs rigid and cold. From afar the rumors of revelry, the brouhaha of a mad population, saluted his deaf ears, the distant music of lutes and viols. The captain of the soldiers went hot and cold. He had harried the heels of the rotund runner in special amusement, but he had not designed murder. A wave of compunction traversed the spectators. But the Judge ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... whose loyalty to her minister, which was as much a part of her as her breathing, contended in a vigorous fight against her much too solid flesh. It was a certain aid to wakefulness that her two children, deep in audible slumber, kept her in a state of active concern lest their inert and rotund little masses of slippery flesh should elude her grasp, and wreck the proprieties of the hour by flopping on the floor. There was also a further sleep deterrent in the fact that immediately before her sat Mr. McFettridge, whose usually erect form, yielding to the soporific influences of the ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor

... me. I shared the prepossession, common at that time, that the naval history of the past was wholly past; of no use at all to the present. I well recall, during my first term at the College, a visit from a reporter of one of the principal New York journals. He was a man of rotund presence, florid face, thrown-back head, and flowing hair, with all that magisterial condescension which the environment of the Fourth Estate nourishes in its fortunate members; the Roman citizen ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan

... five in the morning. Then, as we could take in no more, the stream was diverted to the other clearing station up the road. Before the war the deep hoot of a car always seemed to say: 'Here am I, rich and rotund, rolling comfortably on my way; I have laid up much goods and can take mine ease'; but after that night it had another meaning: 'Slowly, tenderly, oh! be pitiful. I am broken and in pain,' as the cars crept along over the uneven roads. These were our share of the wounded from Loos, ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan

... of actors and other theatrical celebrities range from Elizabeth, from the melodramatic costumes and faces of the contemporaries of Shakespeare, to the conventional costumes, the rotund expression, of the age of the Georges, masking a power of imaginative impersonation probably unknown in Shakespeare's day. Edward Burbage, like Shakespeare's own portrait, is, we venture to think, a trifle stolid. Field—Nathaniel ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater

... 'Cards,' repeated he thoughtfully, stroking his hairy chin. 'Cards,' added he, for the third time, as he conned Facey's rotund visage, and wondered if he was a sharper. If the cards were fair, Sponge didn't care trying his luck. It all depended upon that. 'Well,' said he, in a tone of indifference, as he picked up his Mogg, thinking he wouldn't ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... guessed that Mr. Jones's placid countenance and rotund frame concealed an imagination that was almost boyish in its unsatisfied craving for adventure? Humdrum year had succeeded humdrum year, yet he had never despaired. Some day would come that great moment when the limelight of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various

... and made demoniac signs. Coleman half-turned to survey the main body, and then paid his attention swiftly to the front. The white road sped to the top of a hill where it seemed to make a rotund swing into oblivion. The top of the curve was framed in foliage, and therein was a horseman. He had his carbine slanted on his thigh, and his bridle-reins taut. Upon sight of them he immediately wheeled and galloped down ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane

... swords and advanced to the middle of the lawn, and stood opposite one another, with flowing linen shirts open at the throat, and bared heads. They were indeed a contrast. Mr. Riddle, tall and white, with closed lips, glared at his opponent. Mr. Darnley cut a merrier figure,—rotund and flushed, with fat calves and short arms, though his countenance was sober enough. All at once the two were circling their swords in the air, and then Nick had flung open the shutter and leaped through the window, and was running and shouting towards ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... was twenty-two years old. He was happy and good-natured, and it was easy for him to smile. While his body was slim in the Asiatic way, his face was rotund. It was round, like the moon, and it irradiated a gentle complacence and a sweet kindliness of spirit that was unusual among his countrymen. Nor did his looks belie him. He never caused trouble, never took part in wrangling. He did not gamble. His soul was not harsh enough for the ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London

... rotund monk with his shining face, his vast abdomen, standing on this pedestal of comestibles which he watched with the eye of a gormand, one would have called him the ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue

... occasion, he looked Lark up and down with his usual rotund complacency, Carol only gritted her teeth and reminded her heaving soul that he was ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston

... Trundle grew up to be "Tim", A rotund, jolly chunk of a lad, The hoop that he played with looked slim, beside him, Such a sphere of a shape as he had; And folks on the street lost all signs of a frown, To see ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various

... and began to talk at length. He spoke with rotund delivery. He chose his words carefully. He mingled wisdom and nonsense in the most astounding manner, gravely making fun of his hearers at one moment, and at the next playfully giving them sound advice. He talked of art, and literature, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... rotund little real estate agent, who came forward to greet us, a look of surprise on his round face, I looked through the window at the woman from whose sight ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison

... horseman, when he saw us, pulled up his steed with much difficulty, and joined us. The horse was small but beautiful, a sorrel with long mane and tail; had he been hoodwinked he might perhaps have been mistaken for a Cordovese jaca; he was broad-chested, and rotund in his hind quarters, and possessed much of the plumpness and sleekness which distinguish that breed, but looking in his eyes you would have been undeceived in a moment; a wild savage fire darted from the restless orbs, and so far from exhibiting the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... heard fragments of conversations—"They never trouble the Bordeaux route"—"Absolutely safe, je t'assure"; and in the accents of Iowa the commanding advice, "Now, don't worry!" "Good-bye, Jim! Good-bye, Maggie!" cried a rotund, snappy American drummer, and was answered with cheery, honest wishes for "the success of his business." Two young Americans with the same identical oddity of gait walked to and fro, and a little black Frenchman, with a frightful star-shaped scar at the corner of his mouth, ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan

... throw off his overcoat. At the third corner, he tore at the long garment, it swung under his feet, and he pitched headlong——. He heard a cry of savage joy and a rush of feet, a sudden great soft whirr, and he arose to see an automobile halted between him and his pursuers. A gentleman of a rotund person, clothed in correct evening dress and whose speech was of a thickness to indicate recent indulgence in intoxicating ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis

... prisoner had been pinioned and resolutely held by his escort, otherwise he would undoubtedly have fallen also upon Van Wandenberg, who choking with a tempest of passion that was too great to find utterance in words, had gathered up his rotund figure, and with an agility wonderful in a man of his years and vast obesity, so heavily armed, in a buff coat and jack-boots ribbed with iron, a heavy sword and cloak, clambered on the back of his horse, as a clown ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... house was always out. What with the coming and the going, it was never still. The rafters of the great living-room shook with the roar of wassail and of song. At table sat men from all the world and chiefs from distant tribes—Englishmen and Colonials, lean Yankee traders and rotund officials of the great companies, cowboys from the Western ranges, sailors from the sea, hunters and dog-mushers of a ...
— Lost Face • Jack London

... quietly out into the night. He alone noticed, but there was the faintest shadow of a queer smile upon his own lips as he turned back to the big notebook open on his knees—a vaguely unpleasant smile that was not in keeping with the rotund jollity of ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans

... curates had been far from happy, but Romley promised to be the bright exception in a long list of failures. (It was he who discovered and introduced Johnny Whitelamb to the household.) He was sociable; had pleasant manners, a rotund figure not yet inclining to coarseness, a pink and white complexion, and a mellifluous tenor voice. To his voice, alas! he owed most of his ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... arrival in the past was the rear of a large supermarket, more specifically between two packing cases which had once contained breakfast foods. The excursion through time had evidently been a smooth one for the smile had not once left Mrs. Mimms' rotund countenance ...
— The Amazing Mrs. Mimms • David C. Knight

... hurriedly, and trying to assume an easy stride in spite of the uncomfortable addition to his already rotund figure, he slipped into the hotel, where avoiding the lighted elevator, he laboured quickly, up ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo

... into a less rasping routine than that of the early years, grew rotund and comfortable in expression, and though the festivities of training days, and the more solemn one of ordination or Thanksgiving day, meant sermon and prayers of doubled length, found this only ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... their places at the table reserved for them. Waiters stood aloof, effacing themselves, prepared to pounce upon their smallest need and annihilate it. Dupontel breathed a number as he sat down, and the rotund and reverend wine-waiter, wearing a chain of office, tried to express in his face respectful esteem for a man who could ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... of Eriochloa polystachya, all the vascular bundles are more or less peripheral in position leaving a wide area of parenchymatous cells in the centre. The outline of the stem in cross section is rotund or ovate-rotund with the front side somewhat flattened and straight. The epidermal cells alone are thickened. A well developed continuous ring of sclerenchyma is present and this is connected with the ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar

... snapped the doctor, his glance straying wrathfully toward the rotund clergyman, who all at once assumed an abjectly apologetic air and interested himself in a ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco

... an "English syndicate," an elusive sort of commercial sea-serpent with its head in London and its tail around the globe. The "inquiry" which had so gladdened the colonel's heart the morning ofthe breakfast with aunt Nancy had proceeded from this rotund negotiator. ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith

... respectable-looking individual was never seen," writes his erstwhile pupil; "he really looked what he was, a gentleman of the law—there was nothing of the pettifogger about him: somewhat under middle size, and somewhat rotund in person, he was always dressed in a full suit of black, never worn long enough to become threadbare. His face was rubicund, and not without keenness; but the most remarkable thing about him was his head, which was bald, and shone like polished ivory, nothing more ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt

... affair seemed to exasperate him. Denslow alone, of the men, was in his element. Pompous and soft, he "cottoned" to the grandeur with the instinct of a born satellite, and his eyes grew brighter, his body more shining and rotund, his back more concave. His bon-vivant tones, jolly and conventional, sounded a pure barytone to the clear soprano of Honoria, in the harmony of an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various

... account in four figures and a credit that was gilt edged. An even half-century of summers and winters had passed over his head, and, in the passing, fattened him comfortably and snugly. Short of stature, his full front was as rotund as a water-melon seed. His face was moon- faced. His garb was dignified and silken, and his black-silk skull-cap with the red button atop, now, alas! fallen on the ground, was the skull-cap worn by the successful and dignified merchants ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London

... western tribes make use of a javelin, pointed with bone, worked into different forms; but their general weapons are bows and arrows, and clubs. The club is made of a very hard wood, and the head of it fashioned round like a ball, about three inches and a half in diameter. In this rotund part is fixed an edge resembling that of a tomahawk, either of steel or flint. The dagger is peculiar to the Naudowessie nation. It was originally made of flint or bone, but since they have had communication with the European traders they have formed it of steel. The length of it is about ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... instance, fairly shouted his, while Rodd hesitated, seeming to search for an even smaller word. Carpenter's "here," was little more than a whisper, as might come from one who was making an admission which he wished circumstances had ordered otherwise. And the rotund little McWilliams answered in a manner that convinced McGee that Mac was really ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke

... press agent, advance man, had a genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, Sid Hahn, with the eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a comic ol'-clo'es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber

... said a rotund voice from, one of the side tables, "I would suggest that a case like this of grievous moral delinquency comes directly within the dispensation of the chaplain, and if he has done his duty by the unhappy girl (as no doubt he has) he must have a statement to make to ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... root. Retic'ulated. Marked with cross lines like a net. Rev'olute. Rolled upward or backward. Ri'mose. Cracked. Rim'ulose. Covered with small cracks. Ring. Annulus. Riv'ulose. Marked with lines like rivers in maps. Rotund'. Round. Ru'gose. Wrinkled. ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin

... mosaic-work of subdued reds, browns, greys, and crystals, held together by a rectangular frame of deep green. To the level eye of humanity it stood as an indistinct mass behind a dense stockade of limes and chestnuts, set in the midst of miles of rotund down and concave field. The mass became gradually dissected by the vision into towers, gables, chimneys, and casements, the highest glazings shining bleared and bloodshot with the coppery fire they caught from the belt of sunlit ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... the children beat a retreat together into the outer office, where he bent over Arthur's desk and began to dictate in a low voice, catching, as he did so, an occasional rotund phrase from the disquisition in the other room. ". . . the glorious spirit of manly independence of the Green Mountain Boys . ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... near, and Maya got a better view of him. He looked as though he were swinging in the air, his rotund little body hung so high on his monstrously long legs, which groped for a footing on all sides like a movable scaffolding of threads. He stepped along cautiously, feeling his way; the little brown sphere of his body rose and sank, rose and sank. His legs were so very long ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels

... twinkle and a laugh, as if to say, "I'm well out of it, though. The ocean doesn't have any mercy on a body's bones, but tosses you about as if you were an India-rubber ball made on purpose;" added he, bursting into a hearty roar as he caught Mrs. Bates' eye fastened upon his rotund proportions, as if to ascertain where the bones were. "Oh! well, my good woman," continued he, "even a porpoise couldn't stand the bumping and thumping that we poor mortals are subject to when we trust ourselves on shipboard. Why, I solemnly protest that I've been pitched ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... most delightfully absurd and amusing," said she, watching the group nearest her. This consisted of a very short and rotund man with hair a la Paderewski and a frilled evening shirt, a thin man of incredible stature and lank black locks, and a pretty young girl in a tunic, a tam o' shanter, enormous green hairpins, and tiny patent-leather shoes decorated with three inch heels. To her the lank ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... cherubic in the smoothness and the fullness of his face, the clear gray of his eyes, the fine-spun blond of his short-cropped hair, and the plumpness of his hands and half-bared arms. He was a priestly, well-fed looking man, was this Jolly Roger, rotund and convivial in all his proportions, and some in great error would have called him fat. But it was a strange kind of fatness, as many a man on the trail could swear to. And as for sin, or one sign of outlawry, it could not be found ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... restful pictures. We are weary, very weary." This hectic, restless, incessant phase in which we travail—fin-de-siecle, "decadent," and all the rest of it—will pass away. A chubby, sleepy literature, large in aim, colossal in execution, rotund and tranquil will lift its head. And this Crichton will become a classic, Messrs. Mudie will sell surplus copies of his works at a reduction, and I shall cease to be worried ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... his native village. What! Was this Catskill? Was this the place that he left yesterday? Had all these houses sprung up overnight, and these streets been pushed across the meadows in a day? The people, too: where were his friends? The children who had romped with him, the rotund topers whom he had left cooling their hot noses in pewter pots at the tavern door, the dogs that used to bark a welcome, recognizing in him a kindred spirit of vagrancy: ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... The rotund woman with a short waist, sketched in No. 54, may improve her figure, as shown in No. 55, by choosing belts and collars the exact shade of her shirt-waists in summer, and by not cutting off her height by any sort of outside ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley

... paid his tribute, having momentarily withdrawn himself from mamma, whose loyal escort he was once more. Willie was a shade balder than last year, when he had played his great part in Cally's life and then sunk below her horizon; a shade more rotund; a shade rosier in the face. But he was as genial as ever, being well lined now with a menu to his own taste and an ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... came to the surface and partially recovered his senses, he found himself facing McLaughlin, president of McLaughlin & Perkins, Inc. McLaughlin sat at his desk, rotund, red-faced, and pig-eyed, his stubbly hair bristling with chronic antagonism. Those pig eyes and that stubbly hair were a great asset to McLaughlin when it came to an "argument." They could do more fighting than his tongue or his fists, ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge

... hearty Madame Vinet! She has the frankness of a man and the tenderness of a mother. There is something of her youth still left at forty-six; not her figure—that is rotund simplicity itself—but in the clearness of her brown eyes and the finely cut profile before it reaches her double chin, and the dimples in her hands, ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith

... commercial basis?" demanded Flint, while Waldron, now a trifle less scornful, seemed to listen with more interest as his eyes rested on the rotund form of the scientist. ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... Martir, San Vicente Ferrer, La Virgin de los Desamparados and the Cristo del Grao—would appear the smoking paella, a vast, circular dish of rice upon whose surface of white, swollen grains were lying bits of various fowls. The cook loved to surprise his following by distributing rotund, raw onions, with the whiteness of marble and an acrid surprise that brought tears to the eyes. They were a princely gift maintained in secret. One had only to break them with one blow and their sticky juices would gush forth and ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... turned his back than Nicky began to unwrap his bundle in a fumbling haste. He watched the rotund figure as it waddled away over the rise; and so, dropping on his knees, fell to work furiously. The sun was already making its warmth felt. In less than five minutes the sweat trickled off his forehead and dropped on his wrists as he dug with ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)

... places, each tavern being in itself "a broacher of more news than hogsheads, and more jests than news." Those of good standing and fair renown could boast rows of bright flagons ranged on shelves round panelled walls; of hosts, rotund in person and genial in manner; and of civil drawers, who could claim good breeding. The Bear, at the bridge-foot, situated at the Southwark side, was well known to men of gallantry and women of pleasure; and was, moreover, famous as the spot where the Duke of Richmond awaited ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy

... see a family of rich bourgeois enter, just in from the country, for the Montparnasse station is opposite. The fat, sunburned mama, and the equally rotund and genial farmer-papa, and the pretty daughter, and the newly married son and his demure wife, and the two younger children—and all talking and laughing over a good dinner with champagne, and many toasts to the young couple—and to mama ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith

... again, old fellow," she exclaimed, before breakfast one morning after the recusant batrachian had been transported the night before. This time the old lady seized the tongs herself, and marched out into the yard, holding toady with no gentle pinch on his rotund body. ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... of course did take her in, by no means belied her husband's description of him; he was a rotund man with a high complexion, and his bulging eye was on the menu before his soft body had sunk into his chair. His conversation proved limited, but strictly to the point; he told Rachel what to eat, and once or twice what to avoid; lavished impersonal praise upon one dish, impartial criticisms ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung

... House, watching the gambols of the celebrated seals. These, like the big trees, were named after distinguished statesmen. One very black fellow was named Charles Sumner, in honor of his love of the black race; another, with a little squint in his eye, was called Ben Butler; a stout, rotund specimen that seemed to take life philosophically, was named Senator Davis of Illinois; a very belligerent one, who appeared determined to crowd his confreres into the sea, was called Secretary Stanton. Grant and Lincoln, on a higher ledge of the rocks, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... neighbour the large mug—a huge vessel of brown ware, having its upper edge worn away, like a threshold, by the rub of whole genealogies of thirsty lips that had gone the way of all flesh, and bearing the following inscription burned upon its rotund side in ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various

... delay the inner apartments adorned with many precious gems of pure rays. Entering those apartments, everybody, O Bharata, began to sport, according to his pleasure. The women of the party, all of full rotund hips and deep bosoms and handsome eyes, and gait unsteady with wine began to sport there at the command of Krishna and Partha. Some amongst the women sported as they liked in the woods, some in the waters, and some within the mansions, as directed by Partha and Govinda. Draupadi and Subhadra, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)

... the chase over again; I dashed through the magueys, I leaped the zequia, and galloped through the affrighted herd; I beheld the spotted mustang stretched lifeless upon the plain, its rider bending and weeping over it. That face of rare beauty, that form of exquisite proportion, that eye rotund and noble, that tongue so free, and heart so bold—all were again encountered in dreamland. A dark face was in the vision, and at intervals crossed the picture like a cloud. It ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... house, the chart told us—close to the northern point of entrance. After tea we called on the pilot. Patriarchally installed before a roaring stove, in the company of a buxom bustling daughter-in-law and some rosy grandchildren, we found a rotund and rubicund person, who greeted us with a hoarse roar of welcome in German, which instantly changed, when he saw us, to the funniest broken English, spoken with intense relish and pride. We explained ourselves and our mission as well as we could through ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... close embraces clung, And towards the centre conglobating sunk. And as the bond grew firmer, ampler forth Pressed they the fluid essences that reared Sun, moon, and stars, and main, and heaven's high wall. For those of atoms lighter far consist, Subtiler, and more rotund than those of earth. Whence, from the pores terrene, with foremost haste Rushed the bright ether, towering high, and swift Streams of fire attracting ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... never expected anything else, but what's that got to do with it? Why shouldn't I be in love with her too? Though I admit," he added sadly, contemplating his rotund form, "the chances are in his favour, especially as he's ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard

... and rotund men, rode up in the elevator with him and went into Marston & Waller's office ahead of him, for he had modestly stepped to one side to allow ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... the worship of a pupil and the affections of an older brother for the young artist. Everyone in Rome knew him, laughing at his pictures on the rare occasions when he painted, and appreciated his accommodating nature that to some extent dignified his parasite's existence. Short, rotund, bald-headed, with projecting ears and the ugliness of a good-natured, merry satyr, Signor Cotoner, when summer came, always found refuge in the castle of some cardinal in the Roman Campagna. During the winter he was a familiar ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... was thinking, his hands crossed upon his rotund stomach and his bowed legs as near crossed as they could ever be without an operation. He was pretty well satisfied that the man upstairs, who that pretty little nurse had said would be down in a few minutes, ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... was setting one day when Ten-teh reluctantly took up his propelling staff and began to urge his raft towards the shore. It was a season of parched crops and destitution in the villages, when disease could fondle the bones of even the most rotund and leprosy was the insidious condiment in every dish; yet never had the Imperial dues been higher, and each succeeding official had larger hands and a more inexorable face than the one before him. Ten-teh's hoarded resources had already followed the snows of the ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah

... Allan, rotund and smiling, was always ready for a crack with the ladies, and to recommend the brand new Pamela, the support of virtue, or some contemporary work of lesser genius. Though the general costume was like that worn in the other parts of the island, perhaps a little ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... came into the dining room a rotund, middle-aged Jewish gentleman, coated with dust and wearing ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson

... was after all the weaker of the two sides in conflict. And if that was so, how did it affect him? Several times he hesitated on the verge of fundamental questions. Once he turned and walked for a long way after a little man of rotund inviting outline, but he was unable to master confidence to ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... was not Mrs. Fitch's pale countenance, with its crown of gray hair, which appeared in the doorway; it was a rotund ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson

... the old story, he recognized, that the woman must pay, and it occurred when the two of them, one day, were catching the unclassified and unnamed little black fish, an inch long, half-eel and half-scaled, rotund with salmon-golden roe, that frequented the fresh water, and that were esteemed, raw and whole, fresh or putrid, a perfect delicacy. Prone in the muck of the decaying jungle-floor, Balatta threw herself, clutching his ankles with her hands kissing his feet and making ...
— The Red One • Jack London

... the room; his rotund shadow rested on the wall of the passage. He held a travelling-bag ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

... rock by the side of the spring, cushioned with mosses, afforded us a comfortable resting-place. Elder Staples, in his faded black coat and white neck-cloth, leaned his quiet, contemplative head on his silver-mounted cane: right opposite him sat the Doctor, with his sturdy, rotund figure, and broad, seamed face, surmounted by a coarse stubble of iron-gray hair, the sharp and almost severe expression of his keen gray eyes, flashing under their dark penthouse, happily relieved by the softer lines of his mouth, indicative of his really genial and generous ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... tied closely round the waist with one of those parti-colored worsted sashes, we have, on a former occasion described as peculiar to the bourgeois settlers of the country. Next, suffering his eye to descend on and admire the rotund and fleshy thigh, let it drop gradually to the stout and muscular legs, which he must invest in a pair of closely fitting leathern trowsers, the wide-seamed edges of which are slit into innumerable small strips, much after the fashion of ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson

... out again. The Speaker rapped for order and glanced expectantly at the officers in the doorways. There were cries of "Sedition!" and a great, rotund New York member began shouting "Anarchist!" at Ernest. And Ernest was not pleasant to look at. Every fighting fibre of him was quivering, and his face was the face of a fighting animal, withal he was ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London

... waistcoats, plush or fustian shorts, and yellow leggings, standing bareheaded with watering-pails at the "'osses' 'eads;" trunks great and small going up and down; village boys in high excitement; village grandfathers looking very animated; the landlord, burly, bland, and happy, with a face as rotund and genial as the full moon shining upon the scene; and those round, rosy, sunny, laughing faces peering out of the windows with delightful wonderment and exhilaration, winked at by the driver, and saluted with a graceful motion of his whip-handle ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... to loathe the sight, so common alas! in England, of the affluent spinster, "growing pointlessly rotund on rich food at one of the smug hotels or boarding-houses for parasitic nonentities, which are distributed so plentifully all over the land," while thousands of promising young men had to wait too long before they were able to take their bride to the altar. It was ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici

... a citizen, rotund, comfortable, home-hurrying, unknowing of the delights of waving silken scarfs on the borders of ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry

... belonged to an older generation and a statelier school of manners and scholarship. Mr. Kenyon was a schoolfellow of Browning's father, and occupied towards his son something of the position of an irresponsible uncle. He was a rotund, rosy old gentleman, fond of comfort and the courtesies of life, but fond of them more for others, though much for himself. Elizabeth Barrett in after years wrote of "the brightness of his carved speech," which would appear to suggest that he practised that urbane and precise order of wit ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... of fox-hounds, now a pauperized gourmand, who, in consideration of his coarse wit and "gentlemen's stories," was permitted to have the run of his teeth at Crompton. This Falstaff to the Squire's Prince Hal was a rotund and portly man, like his great prototype, but singularly handsome. His smile was winning yet, and, in spite of his load of years and fat, he still considered himself ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn

... expansion about the throat and stomach, and they fit into the different cavities of the body at the wings, shoulders, rump and thighs with wonderful exactness; so that, in stuffing the bird, if you make an even, rotund surface of the skin where these cavities existed, in lieu of re-forming them, all symmetry, order and ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... weeds grew in the shelters of the fences. Many of the level fields were in alfalfa. Others, following the rotations, bore crops planted the previous fall, or were in preparation for the spring-planting. Still others, close to the brood barns and pens, were being grazed by rotund Shropshire and French-Merino ewes, or were being hogged off by white Gargantuan brood-sows that brought a flash of pleasure in his eyes as he rode ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... encumbering. Impossible to take a flying leap into the train! He missed the train. And then he reflectively stroked his short grey beard (he had no moustache, and his upper lip was very long), and then he smoothed down his new overcoat over his rotund form. ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... were now nation-wide. Just as Harriman built up a transcontinental railroad system, so did the rotund little manager now set up an empire all his own. The building of the Empire Theater had given him a closer link with Rich and Harris. Through them he acquired an interest in the Columbia Theater, in Boston, and subsequently ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... blue greens and black greens of our northern pines. The lofty or normal type with the umbrella-formed top is almost peculiar to Central and Southern Italy. In other parts of the south of Europe, though often attaining large dimensions, it remains more dwarf and rotund ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her rotund flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests—and that never returned. It had known the ships and the ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... the business man, and was rough and plain and blunt—a man of no genius and with loads of common sense. He made a specialty of unpalatable truths and discarded sentiment. Indeed, he was so good a business man that he got possession of a rotund interest in a group of coal mines without the outlay of a dollar, and later became the owner of sundry sheaves of railway stocks on ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis

... streamer of bunting, but waited comfortably for the hammer to be fetched to him. And scarcely had the fetcher started to climb before there came the voice of a woman from across the stage: "Comrade Higgins, has the Ypsel banner come?" And from the rear part of the hall came the rotund voice of fat Comrade Rapinsky: "Comrade Higgins, will you bring up an extra table for the literature?" And from the second tier box Comrade Mary Allen spoke: "While you're downstairs, Comrade Higgins, would you mind telephoning and making sure the Reception ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... body is at these seasons astonishing, the spine of its back becomes pointed, the flesh of its sides adhere to each other, and apparently form one united subsance, when it will, in a few hours, at pleasure, resume its rotund state; and this appears to me to be a most extraordinary circumstance in the construction of this animal, which invites the minutest research ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry

... in the dining-room yet, but just as we entered, the rotund figure of Egbert Bunbury obtruded itself upon the otherwise pleasant scene, and ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry

... the floor in the ocean waves—the lost soul who was to be saved by someone, anyone would do, so far as Grace was concerned. All she had to worry about apparently was the roll. Had she been a little older, and just a little more rotund, one might have suspected her indulging in a treatment; but it required, finally, the combined strength of Cleo and Jennie to extricate the "lost soul" from the meshes into which that roll and a couple of fine silkoline ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis

... but one, if the most striking, of a long row of villas that overlook the river, each with its comfortable-looking and rotund trees and trim plat in front, with sometimes a summer-house snuggling down to the ripples. These riverside colonies, thrown out so rapidly by the metropolis, have no colonial look. We cannot associate the idea of a new settlement with rich turf, graveled walks and large trees devoid of the gaunt ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... he seated himself in a capacious chair, substantially fitted to receive and sustain its burden of divinity, and began to read. My letters were from men high in authority, purple-robed and rotund supporters of our good Alma Mater, and met with all due respect. Clearing his sonorous throat of the obstructing phlegm, with which there seemed to be danger that he should sometime or other be suffocated, he welcomed me to London, rejoiced to hear that ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... to conceive of a man between thirty-eight and forty years of age, big-bodied, rapidly acquiring that rotund shape which is thought becoming to bishops, about six feet high though stooping a little, prodigiously active, walking with incredible rapidity, having large limbs, large feet, large though well-shaped and very ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent

... a profound calm, the silence of terrified suspense, fell over the city. Many a rotund bourgeois, emasculated by a purely commercial life, awaited the arrival of the victors with anxiety, trembling lest their meat-skewers and kitchen carving-knives should come under the category ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... pleasant, somewhat rotund-looking man was seen engaged in conversation with Old Dut in a corner of the schoolyard. At the close of the afternoon session that same man stepped into the schoolroom, accepting the principal's offer of a chair ...
— The Grammar School Boys in Summer Athletics • H. Irving Hancock

... Meanwhile I had already ascended Mount Millischau once with my wife, and in her company I now made the journey to Prague in an open carriage. There I stayed once more at my favourite inn, the Black Horse, met my friend Kittl, who had now grown fat and rotund, made various excursions, revelled in the curious antiquities of the old city, and learned to my joy that the two lovely friends of my youth, Jenny and Auguste Pachta, had been happily married to members of ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... call-boy, press agent, advance man, had a genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a comic ol' clo'es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber

... an early work of the interesting case of the Marquis of Cortona, a subchieftain under the Duke of Alva, and a fine fat old butcher he must have been, too, by all tellings. Finding himself grown so rotund that no longer could he enter with zest into the massacre bees and torture outings which the Spaniards were carrying on in the harried Netherlands, the marquis had recourse to vinegar; and so efficacious was the treatment that, as the tradition runs, ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb

... paced the floor earnestly, a small, active, already rotund young man, his hands thrust unnaturally into his ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... appeared, amid palms and chrysanthemums, a long, rotund man like a bolster. He held a paper in his hand and wore a platform smile. His attitude was that of one who hesitated to demand silence from so well-bred a throng. His high, narrow forehead shone in the light of ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman

... very similar. Tom first stopped in a dry-goods house, and asked whether they could give him anything to do. A short "No" was the reply, and the proprietor instantly turned his back upon him. Then he tried a drug-store, where he was treated in the same manner. In a hat and cap store, the rotund clerk tried to chaff him, but he didn't make much of a success of it. In answer to his question, the clerk replied that he didn't need a boy just then, but when he did he would send his carriage around to the Metropolitan ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis

... suspicion, not wholly unjustified, for the patent respectability of Cherry's Derby hat was no compensation for the armoury belted about his rotund middle. ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace

... his position as organist and the gentleman who led the orchestra that played during the evening at the hotel was chosen in his stead. At the end of the third month a red flag was seen hanging at the door of Mr. Strout's store and Mr. Beers the auctioneer whose once rotund voice had now become thin and quavering, sold off the remaining stock and the fixtures. Then the curtains were pulled down and the door locked. The next day Mr. and Mrs. ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin

... instance, the English scenery with that of New England,—Hawthorne is usually as fair, discriminating, and dispassionate as any one could wish, and perhaps more so than some would desire. His judgment cannot be questioned in preferring the American elm, with its wine-glass shape, to the rotund European species; but he admires the English lake country above anything that he has seen like it in his own land. "Centuries of cultivation have given the English oak a domestic character," while American trees are still to be classed ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... of those called gallant, was famous for her precocious embonpoint which had earned her the nickname of "Boule de Suif" (ball of tallow). Short and rotund all over, fat enough to supply lard, with puffed fingers constricted at the joints and looking like strings of small sausages, a shiny and tight skin, an enormous bust which protruded from under her gown, she was yet attractive and much coveted, her fresh appearance being pleasant ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant

... beginning. But for the complete comfort and well-being of puppies at this age, certain maternal attentions, apart from the provision of nourishment, are requisite. For several minutes the foster-mother plied her own offspring with every good office, and severely ignored the rotund and would-be playful Finn. Then the sheep-dog lay flat on her side, and breathed out through her nostrils a statement to ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... island in the midst of an arable plain sufficiently accounted for this lack of visitors. Few unaccustomed to such places can be aware of the insulating effect of ploughed ground, when no necessity compels people to traverse it. This rotund hill of trees and brambles, standing in the centre of a ploughed field of some ninety or a hundred acres, was probably visited less frequently than a rock would have been visited in a lake ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy

... smiled as Shoop waddled from the office with Bondsman at his heels. There was something humorous, almost pathetic, in the gaunt and grizzled Airedale's affection for his rotund master. And Shoop's broad back, with the shoulders stooped slightly and the set stride as he plodded here and there, often made the clerk smile. Yet there was nothing humorous about Shoop's face when he flashed to anger or studied some one who tried to mask a lie, or when ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert

... short, rotund man. His close-cropped hair was graying, although his face was unlined, with the smooth complexion of a child. His irises were ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville

... continue that uninterrupted progression, which alone can stamp on bounded objects the character of infinity. It is in this kind of artificial infinity, I believe, we ought to look for the cause why a rotund has such a noble effect.[20] For in a rotund, whether it be a building or a plantation, you can nowhere fix a boundary; turn which way you will, the same object still seems to continue, and the imagination has no rest. But the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... rotund, good-humoured man with a shining red nose and a husky voice. He grew so much interested in telling me about his lodges that I think (I think) he forgot momentarily that he was selling corn-planters, which was certainly ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson

... divided me from this cynosure of warmth and luxury, as a poor, draggled moth might do, to bask in the revivifying light of an astral lamp, attracted beyond my power to resist, to pause before the resplendent window, rich in green and purple and amber rotund vases, whose transparent contents were set forth and revealed by fiery jets of gas, toward which I feebly stretched my ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... "Joy-bells pealed and bonfires blazed," is a phrase of the Doctor's which sets all the caverns of the mind ringing, even though its historical setting is long forgotten. But unction is the chief feature of the history: there is a rotund finality about the author's spacious utterances, and a dodging of investigation by means of pious generalisations. The book has all the effect of a benediction. When it is really too tiresome to inquire into all the authorities on some affair of magnitude, it is so respectable to ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... sense in which Webster, Clay, and Calhoun were orators. He was not a rhetorician; he had neither grace of manner nor a fine presence, neither an imposing delivery, nor even pleasing tones. On the contrary, he was exceptionally lacking in all these (p. 228) qualities. He was short, rotund, and bald; about the time when he entered Congress, complaints become frequent in his Diary of weak and inflamed eyes, and soon these organs became so rheumy that the water would trickle down his cheeks; a shaking of the hand grew upon him to such an extent that in time he ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse

... world not precisely intimidating, perhaps, yet in the ultimate a very curious place where one trod gingerly. Still, this Nelchen was a practical body, prone to laughter,—as in nature, any person would be whose mouth was all rotund and tiny scarlet curves. Why, it was, to a dimple, the mouth which Francois Boucher bestowed on his sleek goddesses! Louis Quillan was sorry for poor Boucher painting away yonder at a noisy garish Versailles, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... in the middle of the street and looked straight at me. The heavy face, greasily moist on the cheeks and nose, was serious. His rotund fist went up to the dark yellow mustache, so carefully pointed, and smoothed it tenderly. Then he continued to lay bare his heart to me "I want her; but, you know, I shall marry her all right, I shall. She's ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse



Words linked to "Rotund" :   rounded, full, fat



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