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Balloon   /bəlˈun/   Listen
noun
Balloon  n.  
1.
A bag made of silk or other light material, and filled with hydrogen gas or heated air, so as to rise and float in the atmosphere; especially, one with a car attached for aerial navigation.
2.
(Arch.) A ball or globe on the top of a pillar, church, etc., as at St. Paul's, in London. (R.)
3.
(Chem.) A round vessel, usually with a short neck, to hold or receive whatever is distilled; a glass vessel of a spherical form.
4.
(Pyrotechnics) A bomb or shell. (Obs.)
5.
A game played with a large inflated ball. (Obs.)
6.
(Engraving) The outline inclosing words represented as coming from the mouth of a pictured figure.
Air balloon, a balloon for aerial navigation.
Balloon frame (Carp.), a house frame constructed altogether of small timber.
Balloon net, a variety of woven lace in which the weft threads are twisted in a peculiar manner around the warp.


verb
Balloon  v. t.  To take up in, or as if in, a balloon.


Balloon  v. i.  
1.
To go up or voyage in a balloon.
2.
To expand, or puff out, like a balloon.





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Balloon" Quotes from Famous Books



... Seen from a balloon, Moonstone would have looked like a Noah's ark town set out in the sand and lightly shaded by gray-green tamarisks and cottonwoods. A few people were trying to make soft maples grow in their turfed lawns, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... assuming alarming proportions, and still on-coming troops were pouring into that Bloody Bend, where they must accept, with what fortitude they could command, their awful baptism of fire. Fifty feet above their heads floated the observation balloon of the engineers, betraying their exact position and forming an admirable focus for the enemy's fire, which, after awhile, to the vast relief of every one, shot the balloon to pieces so that it dropped from sight ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... perhaps ten times as great as that which a carrier-pigeon or a swallow could have traversed in the same time. Some vague delusion of this description seems even still to crop up occasionally. I remember hearing of a proposition for balloon travelling of a very remarkable kind. The voyager who wanted to reach any other place in the same latitude was simply to ascend in a balloon, and wait there till the rotation of the earth conveyed the locality which happened to be his destination directly beneath him, whereupon he was ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... doubting poet and the believing preacher, as well as the mobile dreamer, who, in the midst of all these various existences, allows himself to be swayed by every passing breath, and delights, stretched along the car of his balloon, in floating aimlessly through all the sounds and shallows of the ether, and in realizing within himself all the harmonies and dissonances of the soul, of feeling, and of thought. Idleness and contemplation! Slumber of the will, lapses of the vital force, indolence ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Emma called in from the hall. "Remember the temperamental family on the floor below!" A silence—then: "I'm coming. Shut your eyes and prepare to be jarred by the Buck balloon-petticoat!" ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber


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