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Jumbo   Listen
adjective
jumbo  adj.  Very large.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Jumbo" Quotes from Famous Books



... his way to the football field, he went into a shop and bought a pennyworth of J pens. He carried them loose in his pocket and enjoyed feeling them. Presently Singer found out that he had them. Singer had given up his nibs too, but he had kept back a very large one, called a Jumbo, which was almost unconquerable, and he could not resist the opportunity of getting Philip's Js out of him. Though Philip knew that he was at a disadvantage with his small nibs, he had an adventurous disposition ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... the iron—but just the same the germ'd be carried along with the filing and feel its acceleration and all, provided he could hold on—but for that purpose you could imagine a tiny cabin in the filing. "That's what we are," Pop added. "Three germs, jumbo size." ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... was but folklore, he said to himself. Nothing more than that. Every one knew it. All intelligent people were nowadays of one religion. The thing was manifestly absurd—the Hebrew fetich was dead—dead as Mumbo Jumbo. "Thank God!" he added inconsequently. He walked faster and faster, and on more than one occasion he brushed hurriedly against some of the brutal frequenters of that part of the world on foggy evenings. A rough lout growled belligerently at him, but shrank from ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett

... dashing them aside as she rushed onward on her course. There was something very exhilarating in the movement. The air, too, was bracing, and everybody seemed in high spirits. As I happened to pass the caboose, however, I heard Potto Jumbo, the black cook, grumbling greatly. Some one had told him that he would have to roast one of the albatrosses for dinner. Although generally a very merry, good-natured fellow, this ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... now the chief attraction to them in the library, and yesterday, when father went there with the boys, he supplied Ian, as usual, with "The Uncivilized Races of Man," which always opens of itself at the Mumbo Jumbo picture, and as a great treat for Richard, took down the three quarto volumes of Audubon's "Quadrupeds," and ranged them on a low stand with a stool in front of it. Then, being tired after a hard morning's ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright

... correctly said to have as much truth as poetry. It is a graceful summary of the curiosities which Barnum had brought before the world up to his sixtieth year. It does not include the Sacred White Elephant of Siam, the mammoth Jumbo and other wonders of nature which he was yet to reveal to astonished and delighted millions. Nor does it indicate that grand genius of aggregation by which in later years he surpassed all his previous performances—masterly as they were. Not till the veteran had reached ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton

... seemed to darken. "Ten years," he said in a low voice. "Ten years that inhuman monster has been loose on Earth. He's become a legend. He's replaced Satan, the Bogeyman, Frankenstein's monster, and Mumbo Jumbo, Lord of the Congo, in the public mind. Read the newsfacs, watch the newscasts. Take a look at popular fiction. He's everywhere at once. He can do anything. He's taken on the attributes of the djinn, the vampire, the ghoul, the werewolf, and every other horror and hobgoblin that the ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett

... a scientific telescope, it needs to be reinterpreted and artificially brought near us, before we can so much as know that it was a Sun. So likewise a day comes when the Runic Thor, with his Eddas, must withdraw into dimness; and many an African Mumbo-Jumbo and Indian Pawaw be utterly abolished. For all things, even Celestial Luminaries, much more atmospheric meteors, have their ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... The parking lot attendant knows there's a new weapon being produced in there. The waitress at the Jumbo Burger Grill across the street knows it. Everybody I reached knows it. But not one knows ...
— The Very Secret Agent • Mari Wolf

... way I was reading this letter when in come Shaffer the bird that was mixed up in that little gag about the fake spy and he come up to me and says "Well you big snake who's male are you reading now?" Well Al him calling me big is like I would say hello Jumbo to a flee. But any way I says "My own male and who and the he—ll male would I be reading?" So he said "Well its hard to tell because you stole some of mine and read it and not only that but you showed ...
— The Real Dope • Ring Lardner

... seemed fully four times the size of the largest black bear they had ever seen in any zoological garden. Had his legs been longer, Fred Greenwood would have pronounced him the equal of Jumbo himself. ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis

... No mumbo-jumbo of superstition, no awe of strangers who had suddenly descended upon them from the sky. Lord answered, "We landed in order to repair our ship, but I hope we can make a trade treaty with ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox

... that in the numerous skirmishes which took place in that quarter between the Reds and the Whites, Big Black Burl played a rather conspicuous part; proving himself for deeds of warlike prowess a signal illustration of African valor—a worthy representative, indeed, of his great countryman Mumbo Jumbo, the far-famed giant-king of Congo. In testimony whereof, there were the scalps of his enemies taken by his own hand in secret ambush and in open fight, and which, strung together like pods of red pepper, or cuttings of dried pumpkin, hung blackening ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady

... aim, The Monkeys threw, but all the same; Though Jumbo streams of water poured, The enemy ...
— The Animals' Rebellion • Clifton Bingham

... working crab lines and hauling baskets around until noon, Rick wondered what Harris would consider hard work. Having spent a dollar for six steamed crabs a few nights before, he was also amazed to hear the crabber report that he received only six dollars a bushel for "jumbo" crabs and three dollars a bushel for "culls," or medium ones. All under four and a half inches from tip to tip ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin

... turn out en masse, and run away, exactly as if the visitors were English explorers or brave Marines, bent upon retaliating for the theft of a knife by nobly burning down King Tom's town or King Jumbo's capital. Then the negroes wait in the jungle till the little black army has passed on, after clearing out the huts by the way of everything eatable. When they return they find their calabashes and saucepans licked clean, but they also find every rat, mouse, lizard, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... experimenting. You simply look into a crystal globe the size of a five-shilling piece, or a water-bottle which is full of clear water, and is placed so that too much light does not fall upon it, and then simply look at it. You make no incantations and engage in no mumbo-jumbo business; you simply look at it for two or three minutes, taking care not to tire yourself, winking as much as you please, but fixing your thought upon whoever it is you wish to see. Then, if you have the faculty, the glass will cloud over with a milky ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead

... private affair. To appeal to the Pasteur. That he had not tried but, unpromising as the venture seemed to be, by Jove! he would. In his imminent peril there was nothing to which he would have appealed, even Mumbo-Jumbo itself if it gave him the slightest hope of ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard

... there would have been neither Miracles nor Mosaic Law, Ten Commandments nor Vicarious Atonement. Talmage and other industrious exploiters of intellectual tommyrot, now ladling out saving grace for fat salaries, might be as unctuously mouthing for Mumbo Jumbo, fanning the flies off some sacred bull or bowing the knee to Baal. The Potiphar-Joseph episode deserves the profoundest study. It was an awful crisis in the history of the human race! How thankful ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... tent and some temporary sheds, with one or two side-shows. They went quite early, and Doctor Joe paid a man to stand guard over some seats while they walked around and inspected the cages. There was a smaller trick elephant, but even Columbus was not as big as the famous Jumbo. ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas

... travel for which he had insatiable relish: but the notices of all this in his letters were few. "By the bye, I observe, reading that wonderful book the French Revolution again, for the 500th time, that Carlyle, who knows everything, don't know what Mumbo Jumbo is. It is not an Idol. It is a secret preserved among the men of certain African tribes, and never revealed by any of them, for the punishment of their women. Mumbo Jumbo comes in hideous form out of the forest, or the mud, or the river, or where not, and flogs some woman who has been ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... earl and Gower Woodseer to their lunatic talk. He still had his ideas about the association of the pair. 'Hard-headed player of his own game, that Woodseer, spite of his Mumbo-Jumbo-oracle ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... mountains like maenads, or to worship some monstrous goddess, I will make a note of your request. If you are quite sure that the ladies in Brixton, the moment they give up cooking, will beat great gongs and blow horns to Mumbo-Jumbo, then I will agree that the occupation is at least human and is more or less entertaining. Women have been set free to be Bacchantes; they have been set free to be Virgin Martyrs; they have been set free to be Witches. Do not ask them now to sink so ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton

... head, and an ould skinny carrot for a trunk. I'll stick them on with a hair pin. (Does so.) Now, I'll stick on the ears and put in the shoe-button eyes, and with this wee bit of black paper for a tailpiece, and there ye are. Mr. Mumbo Jumbo Mulligan as natural as life and twice as ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare

... see, perhaps," replied the quack doctor, for such the reader must have already ascertained to be his profession; "but the wagon has stopped, and the driver will bait his horses. If inclined to eat, now is your time. Come, Jumbo, get up; Philotas, waken him, ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat

... like Hurlothrumbo, They aim their clubs at any creed on earth, That by the simple accident of birth They might have been high priests to Mumbo Jumbo." ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... Heaven," jabbers this Phantasm, itself a phosphorescence and unclean! The worst, it is written, comes from corruption of the best:—Semitic forms now lying putrescent, dead and still unburied, this phosphorescence rises. I say sometimes, such a blockhead Idol, and miserable White Mumbo-jumbo, fashioned out of deciduous sticks and cast clothes, out of extinct cants and modern sentimentalisms, as that which they sing litanies to at Exeter Hall and extensively elsewhere, was perhaps never set up by human folly before. Unhappy creatures, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... "Jumbo," he said, "you're right. I was crazy. Watch me from now on. Mental suggestion is the dope. The ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... 'Leap-a-Death's' husband is goin' to jump his job soon, if he gets enough saved up, 'cause him and Barker can't hit it off no more. We got a good deal o' trouble among the animals, too. None o' the snakes is sheddin' like they ought to, and Jumbo's a-carryin' a sixteen foot bandage around that trunk a' hisn, 'cause he got too fresh with Trixy's grub the other night, and the new giraffe's got the croup in that seven-foot neck o' his'n. I ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo

... without him, and we wish him a prosperous career in foreign parts. But Governor Wise no longer proposes to seize the Treasury at Washington,—perhaps because Mr. Buchanan has left so little in it. The old Mumbo-Jumbo is occasionally paraded at the North, but, however many old women may be frightened, the pulse of the stock-market remains provokingly calm. General Cushing, infringing the patent-right of the late Mr. James, the novelist, has seen a solitary horseman on the edge of the horizon. The ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell

... how moved by whim Trumpeting Jumbo, great and grim, Adjusts his trunk, like a cravat, To noose that individual's hat. The sacred Ibis in the distance Joys to observe ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to a village where a curious custom prevailed. Hanging on a tree, he found a sort of masquerading dress made out of bark. He discovered that it belonged to a strange bugbear known to all the natives of the neighbourhood as Mumbo Jumbo. The natives or Kafirs of this part had many wives, with the result that family quarrels often took place. If a husband was offended by his wife he disappeared into the woods, disguised himself in the dress of Mumbo Jumbo, and, armed ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... the negro to destroy these birds or get the Indian to let fly his arrow at them. They are birds of omen and reverential dread. Jumbo, the demon of Africa, has them under his command, and they equally obey the Yabahou, or Demerara Indian devil. They are the receptacles for departed souls, who come back again to earth, unable to rest for crimes done in their days of nature; or they are expressly sent ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... said the man in black, staring at me; "but, in connection with this Mumbo Jumbo, I could relate to you a comical story about a fellow, an English servant, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow



Words linked to "Jumbo" :   gargantuan, giant, elephantine, big, mumbo jumbo



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