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Harmonica   /hɑrmˈɑnɪkə/   Listen
noun
Harmonica  n.  
1.
A musical instrument, consisting of a series of hemispherical glasses which, by touching the edges with the dampened finger, give forth the tones; it is now called the glass harmonica, to distinguish it from the common harmonica, formerly called the harmonicon.
2.
A toy instrument of strips of glass or metal hung on two tapes, and struck with hammers.
3.
A small wind musical instrument shaped like a flat bar with holes along the thin edges, held in the hand and producing notes from multiple vibrating reeds arranged inside along its length; it was formerly called the harmonicon. See harmonicon.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Harmonica" Quotes from Famous Books



... streets of Boston, not far from Scollay Square. It was a very hot afternoon in June, but the young professor had forgotten the heat and the grime of the workshop. He was wholly absorbed in the making of a nondescript machine, a sort of crude harmonica with a clock-spring reed, a magnet, and a wire. It was a most absurd toy in appearance. It was unlike any other thing that had ever been made in any country. The young professor had been toiling over it for three years and it ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson

... leaned back in her rocking-chair and closed her eyes. Primmie drew a long breath and the first bars of the "Sweet By and By" were forcibly evicted from the harmonica. Zach Bloomer, the irrepressible, leaned over and ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln

... after her along the aisles, leaving a trace of her presence in the ashes that she shook from her dress. Her bones rattled as she walked, like the bones of a skeleton; and as we went I heard behind me the tinkling of a little bell, a thin, sharp sound that rang through my head like the notes of a harmonica. ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac

... little children cooed with pleasure on the turf by the side of the grain fields where their mothers had left them in the shade of a chance bush, along with the jug and the tin dinner pail, while they industriously helped their husbands. Even in the weary evening the harmonica resounded and maidens ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... Pa's losses in the silver mine have made him crazy, haven't they?" said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came in the store with his eye winkers singed off, and powder marks on his face, and began to play on the harmonica, as he sat down on the end of a stick of stove wood, and ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck

... by the wedding bed and before the great mirror, he sees his daughter in the arms of an armed man; he knows the flashing eye and broad brow of the exile; he hears her familiar voice, sweet, sonorous, and penetrating as the tones of the harmonica. A glittering blade is in the hand of the man; his daughter ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... he was inconsistent in his lessons. He dragged in all that came to his hand for the astonishment of Liubka. Once he brought along for her a large self-made serpent—a long cardboard hose, filled with gunpowder, bent in the form of a harmonica, and tied tightly across with a cord. He lit it, and the serpent for a long time with crackling jumped over the dining room and the bedroom, filling the place with smoke and stench. Liubka was scarcely amazed and said that this was simply fireworks, that she had already seen this, and that you ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... been long. This evening the girl had errands to do for me. She came in here after her Sunday walk in the Campagna. I said: "Shall we read?" (Just then a band of young people passed along the street with a harmonica and a lot of castanets, and commenced a song in honour of Garibaldi. With all its simplicity, it sounded unspeakably affecting; I was quite softened.) She replied: "With pleasure." I thought to myself: "Now to see whether she remembers a word ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... about with a comb and a piece of tissue-paper at my lips like any kid. I once made a banjo out of a cigar-box and bale wire, and while I was in the Kougarok I walked ten miles to hear a nigger play a harmonica. I did all sorts of things to coax music into this country, but it is silent and unresponsive, absolutely dead and discordant." He made a gesture which in a woman would ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach



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