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Sirocco   Listen
Sirocco

noun
(pl. siroccos)
1.
A windstorm that lifts up clouds of dust or sand.  Synonyms: dust storm, duster, sandstorm.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Sirocco" Quotes from Famous Books



... mild, wet winters with hot, dry summers along coast; drier with cold winters and hot summers on high plateau; sirocco is a hot, dust/sand-laden wind especially ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... your heart, give me a rich brogue and the least taste in life of blarney! There's nothing like it, believe me,—every inflection of your voice suggesting some tender pressure of her soft hand or taper waist, every cadence falling on her gentle heart like a sea-breeze on a burning coast, or a soft sirocco over a rose-tree. And then, think, my boys,—and it is a fine thought after all,—what a glorious gift that is, out of the reach of kings to give or to take, what neither depends upon the act of Union nor the Habeas Corpus. No! they may starve us, laugh at us, tax us, transport ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... agreed further, and well understood, that this is the regular effect of the traffic, and manufacture, and use of this article. It is not casual, incidental, irregular. It is uniform, certain, deadly, as the sirocco of the desert, or as the malaria of the Pontine marshes. It is not a periodical influence, returning at distant intervals; but it is a pestilence, breathing always—diffusing the poison when men sleep and when they wake, by day and by night, in seed-time and harvest—attending the manufacture and ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... olives on the Apennines; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that variegated mosaic of the world's surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference between the district of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the swallow see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind. Let us, for a moment, try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun; here and there an angry ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous

... somewhat too much inflamed visage, to requite which courtesy, I said, casting my features into a smiling, yet melancholy fashion, O divinest Urania! receive again that too fatal gift, which not like the Zephyr cooleth, but like the hot breath of the Sirocco, heateth yet more that which is already inflamed. Whereupon, looking upon me somewhat scornfully, yet not so but what the experienced courtier might perceive a certain ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... kindred features in that other world and this. The difference of this winter climate and that of the United States has hitherto been an unfavorable one to me; for I have been extremely unwell ever since I have been here—the sirocco destroys me body and soul while it lasts, and there is a sultry heaviness in the atmosphere that gave me at first perpetual headaches, and still continues to disagree extremely with me. Now, of these abatements ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... the Spirit of Noon might have come. She led me in, well refreshed, and in the cool north rooms of the palace the warm hours of the day slipped like beads from a leash. It scarcely seemed her fingers that touched the harp to tune, but as if some herald of sirocco, some faint, hot breeze, had brushed between the strings. It scarcely seemed her voice that talked to me, but something distant as the tone in a sad sea-shell. What I said I knew not; I was in a maze, bewildered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... appeared and disappeared again among the fleecy slow-sailing clouds. The languor of the sirocco lay ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio

... morning Maurice put to sea with Gaspare and Salvatore. He knew the silvery calm of dawn on a day of sirocco. Everything was very still, in a warm and heavy stillness of silver that made the sweat run down at the least movement or effort. Masses of white, feathery vapors floated low in the sky above the sea, concealing the flanks of the mountains, but leaving their summits clear. And these vapors, ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens

... INDICATED.—(1) "The works that I do shall he do also."—What a blessing Christ's ministry must have been to thousands of sufferers! He passed through Galilee as a river of water of life. In front of Him were deserts of fever blasted by the sirocco, and malarious swamps of ague and palsy, and the mirage of the sufferer's deferred hope; but after He had passed, the parched ground became a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water, the eyes of the blind were opened, and the ears ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer

... Tunis-man prowling about, between Stromboli and Sicily; but, Ali di San Michele! he might better have chased the cloud above the volcano than run after the felucca in a sirocco!" ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper

... when upon a silent, sullen day, With a Sirocco, for example, blowing, When even the sea looks dim with all its spray, And sulkily the river's ripple's flowing, And the sky shows that very ancient gray, The sober, sad antithesis to glowing,— 'T is pleasant, if then ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... breathed o'er the infernal regions whipped up clouds of dust, and spun them into fantastic shapes, filling eyes and lungs, but no discomfort could dull the joy he felt on coming into his kingdom. He had turned his back to the wind to wait the passing of a sirocco of sand, when a double-seated American waggon, drawn by two steaming horses, flashed on him out of the storm, driving him headlong to the ground, and coming to a standstill within a few feet. The bag had served as a buffer, and the deeply-ploughed roadway ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson

... feeling is more evenly distributed. In those few hours, since she had heard from Devenish that another woman was claiming the attentions of Traill's mind, Sally had aged—withered almost—in the fierce stress of her passion of jealousy. It had passed over her like the sirocco of the desert, leaving her parched, dried, shrivelled, as a child grown old before its years. No colour was there in her cheeks, no vestige of the sign that beneath a mere fraction's measurement of that white skin, the blood was ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston

... Here, since Tuckey's time, the trees have made way for grass and stones; the only remnants are clumps in the south-eastern, which is not only the highest point, but also the windy and watery direction. On the Congo course the foul weather is mostly from the "sirocco," where the African interior is a mass of swamps. At the mouth tornadoes come down the line of stream from the north-east, and I heard traditions of the sea-tornado, which blows in shore instead of offshore as usual. ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... literally in those days,—an angel came to him on Christmas night and said that he might go thence and cool himself for an hour. "Why this mercy?" asked Judas Iscariot. Then the angel said to him, "Remember the leper in Joppa," and poor Judas recalled how once when the hot wind, called the sirocco, swept through the streets of Joppa, and he saw a naked leper by the wayside, sitting in agony from the heat and the drifting sand, Judas had thrown his cloak over him for a shelter and received his thanks. In reward for this, the angel now told ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... that such harmless visionaries as Paul and his company might be allowed to go their own way, and he did not know that they carried with them a solvent and constructive power before which the solid-seeming structure of the Empire was destined to crumble, as surely as thick-ribbed ice before the sirocco. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... deeps, where the mermaid sleeps, In chambers of coral and gold— Where the Sirocco sweeps and Loneliness weeps O'er temples all silent, where dark ivy creeps, And places that never ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various

... hot, sultry, and enervating to the whole constitution of man, physically and mentally, is the atmosphere we have been breathing so long! The miasma of the swamp, the simoom of the desert, the merciless sirocco, are healthful when compared to such an atmosphere. And, hark! what formidable being is that who, with black expanded wings, flies about from place to place, and from person to person, with a cup of fire in his hands, which he applies ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton

... native of Southern Europe, growing all the way from Southern Spain to the Taurus Mountains in Asia Minor. In its native habitat it has become accustomed to the hot winds that often sweep across the Mediteranean, the burning sirocco of the Great Sahara. The dwarf mountain pine, Pinus Montana, grows in the Pyrenees, in the Alps, in the Carpathians and in the Balkan Mountains, so that it, too, often encounters the hot winds that come across from the African deserts. It is probable that the ability ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... while; but at length even this excitement failed. And "owing to the heat, fasting, and privation, the limbs of the weaker refused the task, and after the first two miles they dropped fast into the rear. Under the fiery blast of the midnight sirocco the cry for water, uttered feebly and with difficulty by numbers of parched throats, now became incessant; and the supply for the whole party falling short of a gallon and a half, it was not long to be answered. A tiny sip of diluted vinegar for a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... has acted always with the greatest kindness to me and to us. You have no right to suppose that she says unkind things of you when you are not present. I cannot imagine what has come over you to-day. It must be the weather. It is sirocco." ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford

... and those with him, in that little rocky outpost of Empire, carried on as cheerfully as a wet sirocco wind and an ever-present heart-burning to be in France would ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile

... us together without design? Ought I not to be her consolation, and ought she not to be my repose? Life is not a sport. It does not force two souls together like the grains of sand in the desert, which the sirocco whirls together and then asunder. We should hold fast the souls which friendly fate leads to us, for they are destined for us, and no power can tear them from us if we have the courage to live, to struggle, and to die for them. She would despise me if I deserted her ...
— Memories • Max Muller

... those who will oppose thee. Remember," he added, "the army of the Naya possesses many pom-poms[A] of the English, each of which is equal in power to the fire of one of thy battalions. With them our people will sweep away thine hosts like grains of sand before the sirocco." ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... death, deprivation, long days of famine, long days of drought and thirst; parching sun-baked roads; bitter chilly nights; fiery furnace-blasts of sirocco; killing, pitiless, northern winds; hunger, only sharpened by a snatch of raw meat or a handful of maize; and the probabilities, ten to one, of being thrust under the sand to rot, or left to have their skeletons picked clean by the vultures. But ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... very reason that he is a bore. A tale must aim at condensation, but a bore acts in solution. It is only on the long-run that he is ascertained. Then, indeed, he is felt; he is oppressive; like the sirocco, which the native detects at once, while a foreigner is often at fault. Tenet occiditque. Did you hear him make but one speech, perhaps you would say he was a pleasant, well-informed man; but when he never comes to an end, or has one and the same prose every time you meet him, or keeps ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman

... flower. A hundred people sat down to dinner at the hotel, among whom were one or two old friends. When dinner was over we all adjourned on board the 'Sunbeam,' and later Tom took them back to their steamer, the 'Sirocco,' the largest vessel ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... is no escape. But besides these numerous fortifications, the whole coast of the island is protected by forts and batteries, towers and redoubts. We name those of the Red Tower, the Melleha, St. Paul, St. Julien, Marsa Sirocco, and St. Thomas; only to show how thoroughly the knights had guarded their convent, and how totally different the protection of the Maltese was under their rule, from what it was when they first landed; and found them with their inconsiderable fort, with one cannon and two falconets, which, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various

... house for three days, partly by indisposition, and partly by a vile sirocco, which brought, as usual, vapours, clouds, and blue devils in its train—this most lovely day tempted me out; and I walked with V. over the Monte Cavallo to the Forum of Trajan. After admiring the view from the summit of the pillar, we went on towards the Capitol, which presented ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... Sacred Way that leads to the Forum, or on his way home struggles against the crowd as it pushes its way down town amid the dust and din of the busy city. He shrugs his shoulders in good-humored despair as the sirocco brings lassitude and irritation from beyond the Mediterranean, or he sits huddled up in some village by the sea, shivering with the winds from the Alps, reading, and waiting for the first swallow to ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman



Words linked to "Sirocco" :   windstorm



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