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More "Sibilant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... species. Iora spreads its tail in a wonderful manner, and comes spinning round and round towards the ground looking more like a round ball than a bird. All the time it descends it utters a strange note, something like that of a frog or cricket, a protracted sibilant sound. This bird is close to Liothrix and Stachyrhis, although ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... too, afforded him hardly less pleasure, as he always had to let go at the fourth ring, if not the third, whence he plunged into the water with a sound that, curiously enough, was more resonant than sibilant. ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... emergency—" Then a gluey mass cut across my mouth, and, as though carried on huge soft springs, I was hurried away, with the sibilant, whispering sounds louder and closer than ever. With me, as nearly as I could judge, went every man who had not been on ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... insult," said she, in a sibilant voice, "to talk to me as you are doing, when you have just told me that you love another woman, and ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... by a curious sibilant sound, which, on acquaintance, proved to be a whistled tune. During the interview which followed, except when he was speaking, the ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... drew a quick, sibilant breath, and turned, planting his back against the door and ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... the sailors of the trader had to catch him as he tottered, take the young woman from his arms, and help him struggle up the ladder on deck, like a man whose every bone and muscle is racked by rheumatism. Attempting to speak, he could produce only an asthmatic, sibilant wheeze. On deck, he groaned, burst into a senseless, cackling laugh, and spread out his purple, frozen hands. His lips, too, were purple, and his sunken eyes glowed feverishly from a face crusted with dirt and brine. He seemed to want ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... he was tightening his obnoxious coils about her all the time. Even now she could feel his hand upon her arm, could hear his sibilant whisper, could see his intense eyes full of suggestion and threat. Now she found herself face to face with the crisis of all these years. Her only hope lay in the thought that neither could afford the scandal of an open declaration. ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... the words were a signal, the crowd about them surged up suddenly, with the harsh scrape of many chair-legs and an odd, sibilant sound, caused by a multitude of quick-drawn breaths. Like a flash Buck pulled his gun and leveled it on the ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... unaccustomed organs. As in popular parlance the Dal supplants the Zal; e.g. Dahaba (for zahaba) he went (v. 277 and passim); also T takes the place of Th, as Tult for thulth one third (iii. 348) and Tamrat (for thamrat) fruit (v. 260), thus generally ignoring the sibilant Th after the fashion of the modern Egyptians who say Tumm (for thumma) again; "Kattir (for kaththir) Khayrak" God increase thy weal, and Lattama (for laththama) he veiled. Also a general ignoring of the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... the right, and they heard the muffled trickling of water, falling on mossy stones hard by, from a spring so slight as to be only a silver thread. The trees far below waved in the wind, and a faint dryadic sibilant singing sounded a measure or so, and grew fainter in the lulling of the breeze, and ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... breeches. The room wavered and blurred in his weary vision—squat, rush-bottomed Dutch chairs seemed to revolve about a table with apparently a hundred legs, a bearskin floated across the floor.... He secured the banian; and, swathing himself in its cool, sibilant folds, he fell, his face hid in an angle of his arm, into ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... desolate sound another—sibilant, clearer, uncannily human. Nicholas had heard, too, for he threw down the tattered deerskin, and went to the other side of the fire. Voices in the tunnel. Nicholas held back the flap and gravely waited there, till one Pymeut after another crawled in. They were the men the Boy had seen ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... expressed it in their fragrance just as the peach and other trees did in their flowers. And it was also expressed in the new sound they gave out to the wind. The change was really wonderful when the rows on rows of immensely tall trees which for months had talked and cried in that strange sibilant language, rising to shrieks when a gale was blowing, now gave out a larger volume of sound, more continuous, softer, deeper, and like the wash of the sea on a ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... evening. Cora thought the Shoreham rooms beautiful, though she took care not to let the room-clerk know she thought so. Ray, always a silent, inarticulate man, was so wordless that Cora took him to task for it in a sibilant aside. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... Pound and jar, whistle and whine, long, broken rumble, and the rattling concatenation of quick shots like metallic cries, exploding hail-storm of iron in the air, a desert over which thousands of puffs of smoke shot up and swelled and drifted, the sliding crash far away, the sibilant hiss swift overhead. Boom! Weeeee—eeeeooooo! from the east. Boom! Weeeee—eeeeooooo! from ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... he said, his voice low, sibilant, menacing. "I have laid my plans, and shall pursue them with a complete detachment. Others may suffer—so shall I. I have practically reached the limit of my resources. In a month or less I shall be penniless. What money I could ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... wild, great west wind abroad, flapping above one like an immense banner, and every now and again swooping furiously against my windows. The wind is too strong perhaps, and the trees are certainly too leafless for much of that wide rustle that we both remember; there is only a sharp, angry, sibilant hiss, like breath drawn with the strength of the elements through shut teeth, that one hears between the gusts only. I am in excellent humour with myself, for I have worked hard and not altogether fruitlessly; and I wished before ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Anzan, Anshan, and, by assimilation of the nasal with the sibilant, Ashshan. This name has already been mentioned in the inscriptions of the kings and vicegerents of Lagash and in the Book of Prophecies of the ancient Chaldaean astronomers; it also occurs in the royal ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... brought them there walked up to Arcot and spoke to him in a softly musical language, a language that was sibilant and predominated in liquid sounds; there were no gutturals, no nasals; it was a more musical language than Earth men had ever before heard, and now Arcot started in surprise, for he understood it perfectly; the language was ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... sleeping,' he said, in the craftily-qualified tone of the experienced one who thoroughly understands the difference in a time of danger between the carefully subdued tone and the penetrating, sibilant ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... This sibilant monologue was so nicely attuned by Trix that Miss Georgiana (nor many of the girls besides Agnes herself) did not hear it. But it got on Agnes' nerves and one afternoon, before the first week of school was over, she turned suddenly ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... the shores of the lonely fiord or in the pine forests, Elizabeth's bright, speaking face seemed to move before him like a will o' the wisp; even in the rustle of the summer breeze in the leaves he could hear her voice, with its odd breaks and sibilant pauses, so curiously sweet to his ear. "I am possessed," he would say to himself—"I am possessed!" and indeed with all his strength of will he was powerless to resist ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... blossoming curtain, alive with the minute, multitudinous, swift-moving, glittering forms, some nobler form will be hidden in a hole or fissure in the wall. Here on many a night I have listened to the sibilant screech of the white owl and the brown owl's ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... from the ceiling shone clearly upon the dying man's lifeless visage. All standing there gazed upon it, holding their breath as if fearing to disturb something infinitely solemn; and in such silence the laboured, sibilant breathing of ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... clad according to her wont in a dark gown, this time of peacock-blue, was nervous, with wicked eyes and sibilant voice. And as she ragefully drew up her little figure, her deformity, her left shoulder higher than the right one, became more apparent than ever. "No," she rejoined, "she was unable. She had something to try on at her dressmaker's. We stopped too long at the Exposition du Lis, and she requested ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... at work; our emissaries gave us enough to do: we knew what spoil the robbers in the March had made, the decree issued in Vienna, the order of the day in Paris, the last word exchanged between the Cardinals, what whispers were sibilant in the Vatican; we mined deeper every day, and longed for the electric stroke which should kindle the spark and send princes and principalities shivered widely into atoms. But, friend, this was not to be. We knew one thing more, too: we knew at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... morning (I quote from his essay): "Beneath in the water the little fishes darted about the boat; above the little birds twittered in the branches; while off on a sunny log in the pond the soft, sibilant croak of the mud-turtle was heard on the shore." If we could happen upon the mud-turtle mad with love, I am sure we should find that he had a voice—a "soft, ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... around at the word, having heard the sibilant whisper. She likewise stared at the rusty-coated gentleman who had just passed the gate, having come from the main entrance of the Central ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... he remained rooted to the spot, his ears strained to catch a repetition of the fancied sound. It had been only a faint murmur; he might have been mistaken ... yes, there it was again, a sort of choked, sibilant whisper coming from the adjoining room. Hardly had he made sure of it when there fell on his ears a small crash, sharp, as of some object dropped on the parquet. It was followed by a smothered exclamation in a man's voice, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... his toilet in the little stable of the manse above which he slept. As he scrubbed himself he kept up a constant sibilant hissing, as though he were an equine of doubtful steadiness with whom the hostler behooved to be careful. First he carefully removed the dirt down to a kind of Plimsoll load-line midway his neck; then he frothed the soap-suds into his red rectangular ears, which stood out ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... tidying up bachelor confusion. The wind suffed through the evergreens in dream voices, pansy-soft to the touch. The slow-swaying evergreens rocked to a rhythm old as Eternity, Druid priests standing guard over the sacrament of love and night. From the purpling Valley came the sibilant hush of the River. Somewhere, from the branches below the Ridge, a water thrush gurgled a last joyous note that rippled ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... my announcement came in a quick exclamation from Wright, a sibilant intake of breath, that did not seem to denote surprise so much as certainty. Wright might have emitted ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... under the stars. Should they go on, or back? This was far above the benches of wash-gravel. Going up one of the nameless peaks, they stepped out on a ledge and viewed the white, silent mountain-world. Marmots stabbed the lonely solitude with echoing whistle. Wind came up from the valley in the sibilant sigh of a sea. It was doubtful if even Indians had ever hunted this ground. The game was so tame, it did not know enough to be afraid. The men {43} could see another creek shining in the sunrise on the other side of the ridge. It seemed to go down to a valley benched by gravel flanks. ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... the world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent; and the name of the serpent is Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you hear its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and sting and poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some hydra-headed infamy endangering ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... English, in vivid French, or sibilant Tahitian, Lovaina issued her orders to the girls, shouted maledictions at the cook, or talked with all who came. Through that porch flowed all the scandal of the South Seas—tales of hurricanes and waterspouts, of shipwrecks, of accidents, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... I was introduced. Two of them spoke neither French nor English, but the third man spoke French fluently. He had, by the way, a somewhat peculiar accent, different from that to which I was accustomed in the Turks. It was softer, more sibilant, and impressed me as that of a man who was accustomed to speak Italian. He was a good-looking chap, about my height and build, and were it not for his brown skin, one would not have regarded him as a Turk. One side of his face was deeply scarred with a sword-cut, but, if anything, this did not ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... midst of the commotion that followed and while Mrs. Saumarez, attended by the doctors, was being carried out of the Court-room, Tansley, at Brent's elbow, drew in his breath with a sharp sibilant sound that came near being a whistle. Brent turned from the withdrawing figures ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... another yard nearer, and then he uttered that low noise, sibilant and warning, which the woman, the product of the border, knew to be made by a human being. She raised herself a little, although it was difficult with her bound hands to sit upright, and saw a dark shadow approaching her. That dark shadow she knew to be the ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... happenings of those last days, let her presence bring a sort of healing to his tortured mind. But though he was conscious of no tiredness, he was tired to the point of exhaustion, and he had hardly got into bed, when he fell fast asleep. Outside, hushing him to rest, there sounded the sibilant rain, and from the sea below ripples broke gently and rhythmically on the pebbly beach. Nature, too, it seemed, was exhausted by that convulsion of the elements that had turned the evening into a clamorous ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... man showed his teeth in a wolfish snarl. "She is my wife," he said, in his slow, sibilant way. "I shall not set her free. And—wherever I go, she ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... folks, water would be worth more to this here world than gold. Water makes things grow and—and keeps a fella from gettin' thirsty. And mud makes things grow, too, but I dunno what rocks are for. Just to sit on when you're tired, I reckon." The sibilant burring of a rattler in the brush set his neck and back tingling. "And what snakes was made for, gets me! They ain't good to eat, nohow. And they ain't friendly like some of the bugs and things. I'm thinkin' that that there snake what clumb the tree and got Mrs. Eve ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... English "Thug," often pronounced moreover by the Briton with the sibilant "th." It means simply a cheat: you say to your servant "T bar Thag hai" thou art a precious rascal; but it has also the secondary meaning of robber, assassin, and the tertiary of Bhawni-worshippers who offer indiscriminate human sacrifices to the Dess of Destruction. The word and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Her brother, with watchful eyes, Piercing, shameless, and indiscreet, With ears wide open for soft replies And sounds that are sibilant and sweet! With light approach (not a lynx so still), With figure meanly invisible, With threatening voice and iron will, And shrill demands ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... account of his belonging to so highly musical a family. But he was never accused of not being noisy enough, while we have one bird who, though he is classed with the oscines, passes his life in almost unbroken silence. Of course I refer to the waxwing, or cedar-bird, whose faint, sibilant whisper can scarcely be thought to contradict the foregoing description. By what strange freak he has lapsed into this ghostly habit, nobody knows. I make no account of the insinuation that he gave up music because it hindered his success in ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... eucalyptus will ruin the fairest landscape. No plant on earth rustles in such a horribly metallic fashion when the wind blows through those everlastingly withered branches; the noise chills one to the marrow; it is like the sibilant chattering of ghosts. Its oil is called "medicinal" only because it happens to smell rather nasty; it is worthless as timber, objectionable in form and hue—objectionable, above all things, in its perverse, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... put off her investment of tragedy, and, laying her arm round the child's shoulders, drew her close. Gwen was somewhat reassured, but not satisfied. With an earnest face upturned to the impassive countenance of her mother, she began to whisper, sibilant, ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... do not exist. It is typical, therefore, not of isolated experiments on the part of Nature, but of conditions and processes repeated in similitude wheresoever in the region raw sand heals the wounds inflicted by the sea or the grumbling sea retreats before the sibilant, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... a snake rose to them from the depths. That is a sound never forgotten when once heard. It is like unto no other. Indeed, the term "hiss" is a misnomer for the quick sibilant expulsion of the breath by an ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... found a retired sunny field, full of them. To judge from appearances, not a soul had been near it. But I noticed that, while the almost ripe fruit was abundant, there was scarce any that had taken on the final tinge and flavor. Then I began to be aware of faint, sibilant noises about me, and, glancing up, I saw that the ground was already "pre-empted" by a company of cedar-birds, who, naturally enough, were not a little indignant at my poaching thus on their preserves. They showed so much concern (and had gathered the ripest of the berries so thoroughly) ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... buckskin breeches. The room wavered and blurred in his weary vision—squat, rush-bottomed Dutch chairs seemed to revolve about a table with apparently a hundred legs, a bearskin floated across the floor.... He secured the banian; and, swathing himself in its cool, sibilant folds, he fell, his face hid in an angle of his arm, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... ebbed with an ebb of the ocean of life, As I wended the shores I know, As I walked where the sea-ripples wash you, Paumanok, Where they rustle up, hoarse and sibilant, Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways, I, musing, late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, Alone, held by the eternal self of me that threatens to get the better of me and stifle me, Was seized by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot, In the ruin, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... down the yard to the wood shed. It was so intensely cold that the snow did not yield to his tread, but gave out quick sibilant sounds. It seemed to him like a whispering multitude called up by his footsteps, and as if his ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... own heart, Tessa," and then Maoni, who sat smoking a cigarette in a corner of the room, discreetly turned her back as certain sibilant sounds were frequently repeated for a minute ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... his belonging to so highly musical a family. But he was never accused of not being noisy enough, while we have one bird who, though he is classed with the oscines, passes his life in almost unbroken silence. Of course I refer to the waxwing, or cedar-bird, whose faint, sibilant whisper can scarcely be thought to contradict the foregoing description. By what strange freak he has lapsed into this ghostly habit, nobody knows. I make no account of the insinuation that he gave up music because it ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... was the dominant note now in the muscular, supple body, the keen-edged nostrils, and the intent gaze of the liquid eyes. These latter were fixed with the fixity of a savage on Charm. She was giving, in a sweet sibilant murmur, the man seated next her—Monsieur d'Agreste, the man who refused to bear his ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... A sibilant hiss rose in the back of the room. The girls were more angry at this outburst of the teacher than all of them ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... His voice has a quality so strange as to be startling. To see that broad chest, that robust and muscular frame, one would expect to hear rolling waves of sound, roarings as of thunder. But not so. The voice is shrill and sibilant, yet with a sonority so powerful that it vibrates on the eardrums and penetrates to the farthest corners of ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... seemed to appear out of the ground like snails after rain and who might have been part of the undertaker's permanent stock-in-trade. Henrietta hated the mournful looks of these ancient cousins, the shaking of their black beads, their sibilant whisperings, and in their presence she was dry-eyed and rather rude. Aunt Caroline would have laughed at them and their dowdy clothes that smelt of camphor, but it seemed as though no one would ever laugh again in ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... of a light step, a swishing, sibilant, delightful rustling—the caress of sound is the rustling of a well-groomed woman's skirts—and of an afterthought of violets, of a mere reminiscence of orris, all of which came toward him through the dimness of ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... bed was only a few yards below when, at the last sharp twist in the descent, the still air vibrated with a sibilant rattle. Slade's pony snorted and jumped sideways, leaving Lennon a clear view of the big diamond-back rattlesnake that lay coiled in the middle of the trail. The gaping jaws of the angry snake and the peculiar billowing of its body so fixed Lennon's gaze that he only half glimpsed ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter, who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars: Stephen's higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... was very cool and dusky. The lights of the town twinkled out below them, and the prairie bluffs behind them were dark and sibilant. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... said, his voice low, sibilant, menacing. "I have laid my plans, and shall pursue them with a complete detachment. Others may suffer—so shall I. I have practically reached the limit of my resources. In a month or less I shall be penniless. What money I could scrape together I devoted to the ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... the body of the house Sally heard nothing—only the crepitation of rain on the roof and the sibilant splatter of drops trickling from her saturated skirts into the puddle that had formed ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... present, but it is paroxysmal and incomplete. Auscultation and percussion greatly aid us in a diagnosis. A normal sound is given on percussion. On auscultation, in the early stages, rhonchus rales are detected if the larger tubes are affected, and sibilant rales if the smaller ones are affected. Later mucous rales are noted, and sometimes all sounds in certain parts are absent, owing to the plugging up of the tubes. This plugging, if extensive enough, is sometimes the cause of death, or death may result from extension of the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... such times that we discover what music there is in the souls of the little slate- colored snowbirds. How they squeal, and chatter, and chirp, and trill, always in scattered troops of fifty or a hundred, filling the air with a fine sibilant chorus! That joyous and childlike "chew," "chew," "chew" is very expressive. Through this medley of finer songs and calls, there is shot, from time to time, the clear, strong note of the meadowlark. It comes from some field or ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... the trail through more ancient ruins, into a cottonwood grove and then on to a sandy flat. Sitting low in my saddle, almost dozing, I revived suddenly at a never-to-be-mistaken B-u-u-z-z-z! The horses recognized it instantly and froze in their tracks. Sibilant, wicked, it sounded again, and then a yellow streak slid across the trail and disappeared under a low bush. We waited, and pretty soon a coffin-shaped head came up and waved slowly to and fro. The Chief shot him with his forty-five and the snake ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... marked by a curious sibilant sound, which, on acquaintance, proved to be a whistled tune. During the interview which followed, except when he was speaking, the visitor whistled softly ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... low, delightfully broken English, in vivid French, or sibilant Tahitian, Lovaina issued her orders to the girls, shouted maledictions at the cook, or talked with all who came. Through that porch flowed all the scandal of the South Seas—tales of hurricanes and ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... when I was introduced. Two of them spoke neither French nor English, but the third man spoke French fluently. He had, by the way, a somewhat peculiar accent, different from that to which I was accustomed in the Turks. It was softer, more sibilant, and impressed me as that of a man who was accustomed to speak Italian. He was a good-looking chap, about my height and build, and were it not for his brown skin, one would not have regarded him as a Turk. One side of his face was deeply scarred with a sword-cut, but, if anything, this ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... impatiently to make it go faster. The great empty church looked cold and lonely. The little group of spectators only added to the loneliness of the scene. An occasional cough resounded harshly amid the universal stillness. The sibilant sounds of whispers struck sharply ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... peculiar, quaint, little, chatty, sibilant, hissing, whistling chuckle, there emerged from a regular cave that he, or an ant-bear, or some other burrower had constructed under an ancient bush, a beast—a most ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... of kinds, though the dirty, sickening-looking, stump-tailed moccasin predominated. There must have been thousands of serpents in the mass which covered a space twenty by thirty feet, from which came the sibilant hiss of puff adders, and a strong, ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... organs. As in popular parlance the Dal supplants the Zal; e.g. Dahaba (for zahaba) he went (v. 277 and passim); also T takes the place of Th, as Tult for thulth one third (iii. 348) and Tamrat (for thamrat) fruit (v. 260), thus generally ignoring the sibilant Th after the fashion of the modern Egyptians who say Tumm (for thumma) again; "Kattir (for kaththir) Khayrak" God increase thy weal, and Lattama (for laththama) he veiled. Also a general ignoring of the dual, e.g. Haza 'usfurayn ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... him. One by one, then by sixes, then by dozens they grew aware of him; and as that happened they grew silent, until the whole street was more still than a forest. They held their breath, and let it out in sibilant whispers like the voice of a little wind moving among leaves; and he did not speak until they ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... them in woven tapestries of living green. There opened from this road dim forest aisles, veiled in dusk in which sunbeams quivered, paths of mystery, winding toward strange twilight worlds where wild wood-creatures wandered. Warm earth-scents drenched the air; soft sibilant whisperings stirred overhead, and hidden birds chattered ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... tobacco-smoke, tar, and some acrid odor. Facing Gavrilo at another table sat a drunken man in the dress of a sailor, with a red beard, all over coal-dust and tar. Hiccupping every minute, he was droning a song all made up of broken and incoherent words, strangely sibilant and guttural sounds. He was unmistakably not ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... nodded to the party. Of course, it could only be Mrs. Lewis, as she at once said, in a honey-sweet voice, and with what seemed to me a foreign accent; but then I had never heard the Southern accent, which is full of music, and seems somehow to avoid the sibilant tone as well as the nasal drawl ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... there was a long silence... silence broken only by that softly sibilant detonation which belongs most properly to the month of June, but confines itself to no season... to a long, long silence born of and blessed by the gods... until one Percival Sheridan, coming stealthily home from ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... downtown, that evening. Cora thought the Shoreham rooms beautiful, though she took care not to let the room-clerk know she thought so. Ray, always a silent, inarticulate man, was so wordless that Cora took him to task for it in a sibilant aside. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... more than three minutes. The frightened household clustered at the top of the stairway. From below, as from out an abyss of blackness, came up a gurgling sound, as of air bubbling through water. Sometimes this gurgle became sibilant, almost a whistle. But this, too, quickly died down and ceased. Then naught came up out of the blackness save a heavy panting of some creature struggling sorely ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... sound of j in jest is spelt with the single sign j, whilst the compound sibilant sound in chest is spelt ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... to camp to start their dinner, and Murphy finished spiking the windlass to the platform on which it rested. He still whispered a sibilant "a-ah!" with every blow of the hammer, and the perspiration trickled down his seamed temples in little rivulets to his chin that looked smaller and weaker than it should because he had lost so many of his teeth ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... exclamation ran back the line of the safari, the sibilant hissed excitedly. Kingozi's heart bounded, and his knuckles whitened as ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... through the opening feet first. It was a tight squeeze, or else some one held him back. There came a crashing of wood; Ancliffe's body whirled in the aperture and he struggled violently. Allie heard hissing, sibilant Spanish utterances. She stood petrified, certain that Durade had attacked Ancliffe. Suddenly the Englishman crashed through, drawing a supple, twisting, slender man with him. He held this man by the throat with one hand and by the wrist with ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... flapping above one like an immense banner, and every now and again swooping furiously against my windows. The wind is too strong perhaps, and the trees are certainly too leafless for much of that wide rustle that we both remember; there is only a sharp, angry, sibilant hiss, like breath drawn with the strength of the elements through shut teeth, that one hears between the gusts only. I am in excellent humour with myself, for I have worked hard and not altogether fruitlessly; and I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... language were two different beings—as Sir Lucien was aware. Now, as the one-eyed Chinaman resumed his seat and the one-eyed raven sank into slumber, Pyne suddenly spoke in Chinese, a tongue which he understood as it is understood by few Englishmen; that strange, sibilant speech which is alien from all Western conceptions of oral intercourse as the Chinese institutions and ideals are alien from those of the ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... according to her wont in a dark gown, this time of peacock-blue, was nervous, with wicked eyes and sibilant voice. And as she ragefully drew up her little figure, her deformity, her left shoulder higher than the right one, became more apparent than ever. "No," she rejoined, "she was unable. She had something to ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... be understood as French or English z, not in its German use. Strictly speaking, this "z" (intervocalic -s-) was not voiced but was a soft voiceless sound, a sibilant intermediate between our s and z. In modern North German it has become voiced to z. It is important not to confound this s—z with the voiceless intervocalic s that soon arose from the older lisped ss. In Modern German (aside from certain dialects), old s and ss are not ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... fragrance just as the peach and other trees did in their flowers. And it was also expressed in the new sound they gave out to the wind. The change was really wonderful when the rows on rows of immensely tall trees which for months had talked and cried in that strange sibilant language, rising to shrieks when a gale was blowing, now gave out a larger volume of sound, more continuous, softer, deeper, and like the wash of the sea on a ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... the word, having heard the sibilant whisper. She likewise stared at the rusty-coated gentleman who had just passed the gate, having come from the main entrance of the ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... not hang on our motions! But, as I said, all this time we were at work; our emissaries gave us enough to do: we knew what spoil the robbers in the March had made, the decree issued in Vienna, the order of the day in Paris, the last word exchanged between the Cardinals, what whispers were sibilant in the Vatican; we mined deeper every day, and longed for the electric stroke which should kindle the spark and send princes and principalities shivered widely into atoms. But, friend, this was not to be. We knew one thing more, too: we knew ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... was without a break; nor might he have said it was in motion or of any depth. A sound came from the direction not unlike that of a sibilant wind. Presently out of the perspective, which reduced the many to one and all sizes to a level, the line developed into unequal divisions, with intervals between them; about the same time the noise became recognizable as the voices fiercely strained and inarticulate ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... began, "but he is less civilised than Denis." Mary's pronunciation of "civilised" gave the word a special and additional significance. She uttered it meticulously, in the very front of her mouth, hissing delicately on the opening sibilant. So few people were civilised, and they, like the first-rate works of art, were mostly French. "Civilisation is most important, ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... a move," said Jimmie Dale, in a low sibilant way, "and I'll drop you where you stand! Put your hands ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... late honey-gathering insect that will not be here to feed on the ivy's sweetness. And behind the blossoming curtain, alive with the minute, multitudinous, swift-moving, glittering forms, some nobler form will be hidden in a hole or fissure in the wall. Here on many a night I have listened to the sibilant screech of the white owl and the brown ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... train suddenly slackened, and Mrs. Shiffney and Madame Sennier, leaning down and up, exchanged sibilant and ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... again, a sibilant sound, as if out of a throat through clenched teeth. It had a mocking ring. It was impossible to say whence it ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... stand confirmed. To-day, as I was passing through a corridor of the main building, I twice heard the word "coo-coo" repeated in a sibilant undertone. Spinning upon my heel, I detected a group of our seniors who with difficulty stifled their merriment; and I saw, too, Miss Hamm, her face illumined by a smile, with one hand upraised as though in gentle admonition of them. ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... preceding and modifying the sibilant, which is, however, the stronger of the two consonants; e.g. hsing ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... altigi. Shudder tremeti. Shuffle (cards) miksi, enmiksi—igi. Shuffle (prevaricate) cxikani. Shun eviti. Shut fermi. Shutter, window fenestra kovrilo. Shuttle naveto. Shy timeta, hontema. Shyness timeteco, honteco. Si (music) B. Si (flat) Bes. Sibilant sibla, sibla sono. Sick (ill) malsana. Sick vomema. Sicken malsanigxi. Sickle rikoltilo. Sickly malsanema. Side flanko. Sideboard telermeblo. Side face profilo. Siege siegxo. Sieve kribrilo. Sift kribri. Sigh ekgxemi. Sigh after—or for sopiri ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... out of Boulogne when there was a sudden explosion underneath the car, followed by a sibilant sound that I knew only ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... wonderful manner, and comes spinning round and round towards the ground looking more like a round ball than a bird. All the time it descends it utters a strange note, something like that of a frog or cricket, a protracted sibilant sound. This bird is close to Liothrix and Stachyrhis, although it ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... to observe an alteration in the language spoken; it had become less sibilant, and more guttural; and, when addressing each other, the speakers used the Spanish title of courtesy usted, or your worthiness, instead of the Portuguese high flowing vossem se, or your lordship. This is the result of constant communication ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... a signal, the crowd about them surged up suddenly, with the harsh scrape of many chair-legs and an odd, sibilant sound, caused by a multitude of quick-drawn breaths. Like a flash Buck pulled his gun and leveled it ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... another warble in the same locality, and experience a like difficulty in getting a good view of the author of it. It is quite a noticeable strain, sharp and sibilant, and sounds well amid the the old trees. In the upland woods of beech and maple it is a more familiar sound than in these solitudes. On taking the bird in hand, one can not help exclaiming, "How beautiful!" So tiny and elegant, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... only smile," they used to exclaim in sibilant whispers, as they passed on the way to the laundry. "If he'd come in an' joke while ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... bent head that his lips touched her hair, and though Jolly Roger could understand no word that was spoken he knew Porter was whispering the exciting secret of his identity to Josephine Tavish. He could see, for a moment, a shadow of protest in her face, he could hear the quick, sibilant whisper of her voice, and Porter cautioned her with a finger at her lips, and made a gesture toward the sleeping Tavish. Then his fingers closed about her uncoiled hair as he drew her to him. McKay watched the long kiss between them. The girl drew away quickly then, ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... wondered and pushed his boat slowly in on the gravel, a low pr-r-r and a sibilant ripple of water caused him to look behind. A high-bowed, shining mahogany cruiser, seventy feet or more over all, rounded the point and headed into the bay. The smooth sea parted with a whistling sound where her brass-shod stem split it like a knife. She slowed down from this ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... slightest hesitation, on her part, before speaking the last name? My lord's eyes fell; an odd expression appeared on his face. He murmured a few last perfunctory words; then—"They'll get him yet. He can't get away," he repeated. The words had a singular, a sibilant sound; he bowed deferentially and strode off, not toward his own chamber, however, but toward the great stairway leading ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... great variety of them in the swamps and thickets beneath through the noises that they made—heart-quaking cries, squealing sounds, gruntings, and, most trying of all, a loud, piercing whistle whose sibilant pulsations penetrated the ear like thrusts of a needle. I pictured to myself a colossal serpent as the most probable author of this terrifying sound, but the error of my fancy was demonstrated by a tragedy which shook even ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... vaguely if I would ever hang my hat on its nail again, when the door closed behind me. It shut firmly, without any particular amount of sound, and I was left in the dark. I groped my way to it, irritably, to find it locked on the outside. I shook it frantically, and was rewarded by a sibilant whisper through the keyhole. ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... saengerfest of the goldfinches—one of the prettiest episodes in the lives of any of our birds, a real musical reunion of the goldfinch tribe, apparently a whole township, many hundreds of them, filling scores of the tree-tops along the road and in the groves with a fine, sibilant chorus which the ear refers vaguely to the surrounding tree-tops, but which the eye fails adequately to account for. It comes from everywhere, but from nowhere in particular. The birds sit singly here and there amid the branches, and it is difficult to identify ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... souls who never have any secret to hide, either from each other or from heaven, and of whom Ruskin nobly said, 'These are our holiest.' I do not know what words her heart is murmuring: I hear only at moments that soft sibilant sound, made by gently drawing the breath through the lips, which among this kind people is a token of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... step back sixty years into the lives of Miss Mitford and her "dear young friend Miss Barrett," when the -esses of "authoresses" and "poetesses" and "editresses" and "hermitesses" make the pages sibilant; when 'Books of Beauty,' and 'Keepsakes,' and the extraordinary methods of "Finden's Tableaux" make us wonder that literature survived; when Mr. Kenyon, taking Miss Mitford "to the giraffes and the Diorama," called for "Miss ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... old, the world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent; and the name of the serpent is Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you hear its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and sting and poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some hydra-headed infamy endangering whole nations and even races with its deadly breath, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... of undreamed-of hopes. The white world was tearing itself to pieces. White solidarity was riven and shattered. And—fear of white power and respect for white civilization together dropped away like garments outworn. Through the bazaars of Asia ran the sibilant whisper: 'The East will see the West to bed.'" At last comes the inevitable conclusion pleading for a better understanding between England and Germany and for everything else that would make for racial solidarity. The pitiful thing about this book is that it is so thoroughly representative ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... On the shores of the lonely fiord or in the pine forests, Elizabeth's bright, speaking face seemed to move before him like a will o' the wisp; even in the rustle of the summer breeze in the leaves he could hear her voice, with its odd breaks and sibilant pauses, so curiously sweet to his ear. "I am possessed," he would say to himself—"I am possessed!" and indeed with all his strength of will he was powerless ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... woman's instinct warned her to be wary. The shutters were flung open, and the young soldier stepped flamboyantly into the room. "I am here, cara, cara mia!" he cried. "I, Vibrato Adagio!" With a sibilant cry she fell into his out-stretched arms. "Mio, mio," she echoed in ecstasy, "I am yours and you are mine!" So lightly was the first stepping-stone passed on her reckless path of immorality and vice. Her fickle heart soon tired ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... scream from Ruth; there was softly sibilant rustling all about her. I saw her leap the crevice, drop ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... duc," she cried at another moment, "forward! Are you afraid? you know I promised your wife to bring you safe home." Thus her voice keeps ringing through the din, her white armour gleams. "Sus! Sus!" the bold cry is almost audible, sibilant, whistling amid the whistling ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... The reedy notes of the robin, and a musical passage of two parts, one a clear delicious gurgle, with several other birds I cannot place. To which is join'd, (yes, I just hear it,) one low purr at intervals from some impatient hylas at the pond-edge. The sibilant murmur of a pretty stiff breeze now and then through the trees. Then a poor little dead leaf, long frost-bound, whirls from somewhere up aloft in one wild escaped freedom-spree in space and sunlight, and then dashes down to the waters, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the lake, Willet leading and Tayoga bringing up the rear. It was hard and painful work for Grosvenor, but again he succeeded in advancing without noise, and he began to think they would elude the vigilance of the savage scouts, when a sibilant whisper from Willet warned them to fall flat again. His command was just in time as a rifle cracked in the bushes ahead of them, and Grosvenor distinctly heard the bullet as it hissed over their heads. Willet threw his rifle to his shoulder but quickly took it down again. The Indian who ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... lingered a moment, fastening her dearly-bought bauble around her neck and gathering her books, while a maid came scudding from the house to bundle rugs and cushions away in face of the thunder-heads looming in the southwest. A sudden sibilant ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... to front shop, bearing trays of cakes and steaming cups of coffee. There was a rumble and clatter of German. Every one seemed to know every one else. A game of chess was in progress at one table, and between moves each contestant would refresh himself with a long-drawn, sibilant mouthful of coffee. There was nothing about the place or its occupants to remind one of America. This dim, smoky, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... her neat grey glove respectfully. Then, lifting his flattened head with serpentine deliberation, he coiled his great folds slowly, slowly, with sinuous curves, round the girl's soft arm till he reached her neck in long, winding convolutions. There he held up his face, and trilled his swift, sibilant tongue once more with evident pleasure. He knew his place. He was perfectly at home at once with the pretty, olive-skinned lady. His master ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... or repeating such as we found in the vocabularies of former voyages, took great pains to teach us, and were much delighted when we could catch the just pronunciation of a word. For my own part, no language seemed easier to acquire than this; every harsh and sibilant consonant being banished from it, and almost every word ending in a vowel. The only requisite, was a nice ear to distinguish the numerous modifications of the vowels which must naturally occur in a language ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... to the door of the third house, and their heads were together; and a few sibilant consonants escaped them. The breath of the men that stood out under the starlight went up like smoke in the air. It was ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... broken rumble, and the rattling concatenation of quick shots like metallic cries, exploding hail-storm of iron in the air, a desert over which thousands of puffs of smoke shot up and swelled and drifted, the sliding crash far away, the sibilant hiss swift overhead. Boom! Weeeee—eeeeooooo! from the east. Boom! Weeeee—eeeeooooo! from ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... of the Countess's confession Roma sat in her own room with a tremor of the heart which she had never felt before. Something personal and very intimate was creeping over her soul. She heard the indistinct murmur of the priest's voice at intervals, followed by a sibilant sound as of whispers ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... out in the open and seated himself upon a piece of mossy rock where he could gaze in the direction where he had last seen his visitor. But it was all dull and misty now. There was the distant murmur of the great fall, the sharp, sibilant chirrup of crickets. The great planet which had seemed like a friend to him before had risen from behind the distant mountain, and there was a peculiar sweet, warm perfume in the air that made ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... read in melodious tones of voice, as is done in recitativo, or in chaunting, it must depend on the speaker, not on the writer: for though words may be selected which are less harsh than others, that is, which have fewer sudden stops or abrupt consonants amongst the vowels, or with fewer sibilant letters, yet this does not constitute melody, which consists of agreeable successions of notes referrable to the gamut; or harmony, which consists of agreeable combinations of them. If the Chinese language has many words of similar articulation, which yet signify different ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... increased. Like the ghost of a great wind it moaned and sighed about us. Little by little a new note crept in—a sibilant, metallic note as of a tense sheet of silk drawn rapidly over ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... the matter of chasing sticks hurled abroad. On seeing a billet seized and held aloft with that sibilant sound which stirs his ingenuous spirit to prodigies of pursuit, his eyes were flame, his heart was apoplexy. The stick flew aloft and curved into the pond, and he rushed to the water's edge. But there, like the recreant knight in the Arthurian ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... advanced into the bushes, and were received by a veritable rain of stones and spears. Not an enemy was in sight. On all sides they heard the snapping sound of the slings, the whistling of the stones, the sibilant hiss of the spears that at every step fell in increasing numbers, but they could not see whence they came, and no whisper or rustle of underbrush ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... dawn of a spring morning (I quote from his essay): "Beneath in the water the little fishes darted about the boat; above the little birds twittered in the branches; while off on a sunny log in the pond the soft, sibilant croak of the mud-turtle was heard on the shore." If we could happen upon the mud-turtle mad with love, I am sure we should find that he had a voice—a "soft, ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... and in our afternoon rambles we have listened, underneath its boughs, to the plaintive note of the Green Warbler, who selects it for his abode, and who has caught a melancholy tone from the winds that from immemorial time have tuned to soft music its long sibilant leaves. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... flickered in the wind cast an uncertain gleam upon the slushy whiteness under foot, and the blurred outline of a towering water-tank showed dimly through the sliding snow. He could also just discern the great locomotive waiting on the side-track, and the sibilant hiss of steam that mingled with the moaning of the wind whirling a white haze out of the obscurity. Beyond the track, and showing only now and then, the lights of the wooden town blinked fitfully; on the other hand and behind ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... was sufficiently made up to baffle recognition; but there remained his voice. To dissemble this he had availed himself of the fact that Figaro was a Spaniard. He had known a Spaniard at Louis le Grand who spoke a fluent but most extraordinary French, with a grotesque excess of sibilant sounds. It was an accent that he had often imitated, as youths will imitate characteristics that excite their mirth. Opportunely he had bethought him of that Spanish student, and it was upon his speech ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... and the sailor's voice, putting to sea at Okotsk; I hear the wheeze of the slave-coffle, as the slaves march on—as the husky gangs pass on by twos and threes, fastened together with wrist- chains and ankle-chains; I hear the entreaties of women tied up for punishment—I hear the sibilant whisk of thongs through the air; I hear the Hebrew reading his records and psalms; I hear the rhythmic myths of the Greeks, and the strong legends of the Romans; I hear the tale of the divine life and bloody death of the beautiful God, the Christ; I hear the Hindoo teaching his favourite ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... at his heels, the morio slowly made his way up the stairs. Goaded by the taunts of the outlaws, his face was distorted with ferocity; through his lips came a fierce, sibilant breathing; in the dim light his colossal figure and enormous head seemed in no wise human, but rather a murderous phantasm. With head rolling from side to side, stabbing in the air with his knife, he continued to approach,—an object calculated to ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... swiftly towards the bank on which Darrell reclined. He had evidently made friends with them, and they rested their white breasts close on the margin, seeking to claim his notice with a low hissing salutation, which, it is to be hoped, they changed for something less sibilant in that famous song with which they depart ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... they raised a shout when they saw their Duke. He bowed, and the Landhofmeisterin also bent her head in dignified salutation. Immediately the shouting ceased, and a low ominous groan went up, intermingled with sibilant hissings. Wilhelmine grew pale, and shot a glance of hatred towards the peasants. His Highness spoke rapidly in a low tone to the cadet who rode at his elbow. The youth galloped back along the line of the cortege, and delivered an order to the captain of ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... stirred. He drew a quick, sibilant breath, and turned, planting his back against the ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... sound another—sibilant, clearer, uncannily human. Nicholas had heard, too, for he threw down the tattered deerskin, and went to the other side of the fire. Voices in the tunnel. Nicholas held back the flap and gravely waited there, till one Pymeut after another crawled in. They were the men the ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... and quite deliberately he took aim—making assurance doubly sure throughout what seemed an age made sibilant by the singing past his head of the infuriated ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... for the poor service and humble surroundings. "It is the doings of miss," she whispered, in her native sibilant Mexican, when Nola found an excuse to leave ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... its own, had stormed upon the Skeaton promenade, and worried and lashed and soaked that hideous structure to within an inch of its unnatural life. Behind the town the woods had swayed and creaked, funeral black against the grey thick sky. Across the folds the rain fell in slanting sheets with the sibilant hiss of relentless power ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... if they weren't no folks, water would be worth more to this here world than gold. Water makes things grow and—and keeps a fella from gettin' thirsty. And mud makes things grow, too, but I dunno what rocks are for. Just to sit on when you're tired, I reckon." The sibilant burring of a rattler in the brush set his neck and back tingling. "And what snakes was made for, gets me! They ain't good to eat, nohow. And they ain't friendly like some of the bugs and things. I'm thinkin' that that there snake what clumb the tree and got Mrs. Eve interested ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... regularly formed by adding s; but if the word end in a sibilant sound (sh, zh, z, s, j, ch, x), the plural is formed by adding es, which is pronounced as a separate syllable. If the word end{s} in a sibilant sound followed by silent e, that e unites with the s to form a separate syllable. ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... Mrs. Woodbridge, who was hovering between life and death, a reason which would serve as an excuse for not "attending on the stated ordinances of the gospel," the present Sabbath. But now from those whose position enabled them to command a view of the front door of the meeting-house, rose a sibilant whisper, distinct above the noise of boots and shoes upon ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... sure effect of my announcement came in a quick exclamation from Wright, a sibilant intake of breath, that did not seem to denote surprise so much as certainty. Wright might have emitted a curse ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... had tied the little grey horse to a tree he unroped his luggage and carried the most of it back to the point where the others had left the road. He called out cautiously and received a sibilant answer. He and the dragoman bunted among the trees until they came to where a forlorn company was seated awaiting them lifting their faces like frogs out of a pond. His first question did not give them any assurance. He said at ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... I have paid my debt to the McKayes," she declared, and in her calm voice there was a sibilant little note of passion. "Indeed, I have a slight credit-balance due me, and though Mrs. McKaye and her daughters cannot bring themselves to the point of acknowledging this indebtedness, I must insist upon collecting it. In view of the justice ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... six. The daughter moves aside, and yet the finger points. "It's nowhere near six, father dear!" she says. "Not one o'clock yet!" But still the finger points. And now a wave of clearer articulation overcomes a sibilant that has been the worst enemy of speech, and leaves the tongue free. "Wix!" That's ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... had evoked it, a storm of rifle bullets swept through the car, smashing windows, breaking the remaining gas globes and splintering the wood-work. Again and again the flashes leaped out of the surrounding shadows and the air was sibilant with ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... it were broad daylight. The tread of a man impelled her to glance below once more before fleeing to her room. Marlanx was coming toward the verandah. She fled swiftly, pausing at the window to lower the friendly but forgotten umbrella. From below came the sibilant hiss of a man seeking to attract her attention. Once more she stopped to listen. The "hist" was repeated, and then her own name was called softly but imperatively. It was beyond the power of woman to keep from laughing. It struck her as irresistibly ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... poised a swiftly changing form, With filmy mantle falling musical, And colors of the floating bubble's ball, Fair and elusive as the sprites that play, Bright children of the sun-illumined spray, 'Mid rainbows of a mountain waterfall. Then mingling with the falling waters came In whispers sibilant Winona's name; So indistinct and low that voice intense, That she, half frightened, cowering in the grass In much bewilderment at what did pass, Till thrice repeated noted ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... accordingly. She had the street laid knee-deep with straw; and the knocker put by with Mr. Bowls's plate. She insisted that the Doctor should call twice a day; and deluged her patient with draughts every two hours. When anybody entered the room, she uttered a shshshsh so sibilant and ominous, that it frightened the poor old lady in her bed, from which she could not look without seeing Mrs. Bute's beady eyes eagerly fixed on her, as the latter sate steadfast in the arm-chair by the bedside. They seemed ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... grown the tender calm of a flowing melody, on which wordless dreams of happiness glittered like rainbow bubbles on foam, shining for a moment and then vanishing at a breath; it had caught the voices of the rain and wind,—and the pattering drops and sibilant hurricane had whizzed sharply through the scale of sound till the very notes seemed alive with the wrath of nature,—and then it had rolled all the wild clamour away into a sustained magnificence of prayerful chords which seemed to plead for all things grand, all things true, all things ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... she replied, speaking the universal language with a sibilant accent that was very fascinating, "to speak with ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... a little, it is true; but, thank goodness, no longer in numbers. I only lisp a little when any occasion arises to utter sibilant sounds; on such occasions this little girl, the only child of her mother, and she a widow, mimics my infirmity. The widow is silly and laughs nervously, as people with a fine sense of humour laugh in church when a book falls. This laugh of the widow is not easy to bear; for she ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... this most stilly night are almost wholly of the faintly pulsing sea—sibilant and soft. Twice have the big-eyed stone plovers piped demoniacally. Once there were flutterings among the nutmeg pigeons in the star-proof jungle of the crowded inlet to the south. A cockatoo has shrieked out in dismay at some grim nightmare ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... Wayland Hall, Marjorie was throwing fearless defiance in the faces of her captors. Her contemptuous arraignment, ending with an allusion to the affair on the campus of the previous March, was highly displeasing to her masked listeners. Angry murmurs arose from behind masks and several sibilant ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... away into a peace indescribable, unlike anything she had ever known before, she heard a woman's voice, hushed to a sibilant whisper, remark, "My, Nap! You're too smart to be human. I always ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... sibilant assurance before putting back the receiver. He went round to the garage himself. This was the first time he had driven Joan in his car. ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... roughly, William!" said the prompter in a sibilant whisper. "Don't make so much noise. They can't hear ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... lighted her pale, haggard face, and her white hands that clenched themselves in distress. She looked down at the giant who was slowly lifting himself from his knees, with his clear-cut face upturned; and the hollows, vibrant with silence, caught her whispered words and multiplied the sound to a sibilant wail. ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... to the trap-door and cautiously attempted to lift it an inch or so, the better to hear what was going on, but try as he would he could not budge the covering. The murmur of voices went on for a few minutes longer, and then he heard the soft, light pad of feet on the floor below; sibilant, penetrating whispers; a suppressed feminine ejaculation followed by the low laugh of a man, a laugh that might well have ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... heem on he's head," he approved, "dat pret' good place." He bent lower and a sibilant sound reached the ears of Endicott and the girl. After a moment the man stood up and came toward them smiling. "A'm fin' out if she dead," he explained, casually. "A'm speet de tobac' juice in he's eye. If she ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... the floor above, and a rumour of feminine voices drifted down, interrupted by an occasional sibilant rustle of silk, or a brief patter of high-heeled feet: noises which bore out the conjecture that madame's maid was undressing and putting her to bed; a ceremony apt to consume a considerable time with a woman of Liane's age and disposition, passionately bent ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... suddenly over the sibilant Miss Sidonia Sabrina a quieting down, a lessening of twinkle and shimmer and swish. She moved slowly toward the huddle on the cot, parasol leading, and her hands crossed ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... the heads of the worshippers through the blue fog of incense! KO-NGAI!—What a thunder tone was that! All the lacquered goblins on the palace cornices wriggle their fire-colored tongues! And after each huge shock, how wondrous the multiple echo and the great golden moan and, at last, the sudden sibilant sobbing in the ears when the immense tone faints away in broken whispers of silver,—as though a woman should whisper, "Hiai!" Even so the great bell hath sounded every day for well-nigh five hundred years,—Ko-Ngai: first ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... possibility of escape from them. We became aware that there was a great variety of them in the swamps and thickets beneath through the noises that they made—heart-quaking cries, squealing sounds, gruntings, and, most trying of all, a loud, piercing whistle whose sibilant pulsations penetrated the ear like thrusts of a needle. I pictured to myself a colossal serpent as the most probable author of this terrifying sound, but the error of my fancy was demonstrated by a tragedy which ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... afternoon rambles we have listened, underneath its boughs, to the plaintive note of the Green Warbler, who selects it for his abode, and who has caught a melancholy tone from the winds that from immemorial time have tuned to soft music its long sibilant leaves. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... trail through more ancient ruins, into a cottonwood grove and then on to a sandy flat. Sitting low in my saddle, almost dozing, I revived suddenly at a never-to-be-mistaken B-u-u-z-z-z! The horses recognized it instantly and froze in their tracks. Sibilant, wicked, it sounded again, and then a yellow streak slid across the trail and disappeared under a low bush. We waited, and pretty soon a coffin-shaped head came up and waved slowly to and fro. The Chief shot him with his forty-five and the ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... neither French nor English, but the third man spoke French fluently. He had, by the way, a somewhat peculiar accent, different from that to which I was accustomed in the Turks. It was softer, more sibilant, and impressed me as that of a man who was accustomed to speak Italian. He was a good-looking chap, about my height and build, and were it not for his brown skin, one would not have regarded him ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... various qualities (as they are called) of impure voice, the Aspirate, the Sibilant, and the Guttural are defined with sufficient clearness, by their names. Though these modes can be appropriately used only occasionally, nevertheless they are of great value to the reader, and the voice should ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... again, when the door closed behind me. It shut firmly, without any particular amount of sound, and I was left in the dark. I groped my way to it, irritably, to find it locked on the outside. I shook it frantically, and was rewarded by a sibilant whisper through ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in from the twilight of the south door and looked distractedly about him in the full light before he saw his vacant place. The galleries at the lower end were occupied too, down there, where she had failed to obtain a seat. Yet from all the crowded interior there was no sound but a sibilant whispering; from the passages behind she could hear again the quick bell-note repeat itself as the lobbies were cleared; and from Parliament Square outside once more came the heavy murmur of the crowd that had been inaudible for ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... tied the little grey horse to a tree he unroped his luggage and carried the most of it back to the point where the others had left the road. He called out cautiously and received a sibilant answer. He and the dragoman bunted among the trees until they came to where a forlorn company was seated awaiting them lifting their faces like frogs out of a pond. His first question did not give them any assurance. He said at once: "Are any ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... of the inside facts, it would have been evident that Kingham Manor was throwing its weight about a bit tonight. Lights shone in the windows, music was in the air, and as I drew nearer my ear detected the sibilant shuffling of the feet of butlers, footmen, chauffeurs, parlourmaids, housemaids, tweenies and, I have no doubt, cooks, who were busily treading the measure. I suppose you couldn't sum it up much better than by saying that there was a sound of ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... "the polonaise! When you hear it, does there not recur to you some dream of bygone happy hours, the sibilant murmur of fragrant night winds through the crisp foliage, the faint call of Diana's horn from the woodlands, moon-fairies dancing on the spider-webs, the glint of the dew on the roses, the far-off music of the surges tossing impotently on the sands, the forgetfulness of time ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... sufficiently made up to baffle recognition; but there remained his voice. To dissemble this he had availed himself of the fact that Figaro was a Spaniard. He had known a Spaniard at Louis le Grand who spoke a fluent but most extraordinary French, with a grotesque excess of sibilant sounds. It was an accent that he had often imitated, as youths will imitate characteristics that excite their mirth. Opportunely he had bethought him of that Spanish student, and it was upon his speech that to-night he modelled ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... went bowlegging to camp to start their dinner, and Murphy finished spiking the windlass to the platform on which it rested. He still whispered a sibilant "a-ah!" with every blow of the hammer, and the perspiration trickled down his seamed temples in little rivulets to his chin that looked smaller and weaker than it should because he had lost so many ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... cabinets, dark and heavy; and tall windows, bare of curtains at this season, opening upon a court—a wide stone-eaved court, planted with fantastic-leaved eucalyptus-trees, in the midst of which a brown old fountain, indefatigable, played its sibilant monotone. ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... pine woods I heard the soughing of the tree-tops. They were entreating the rain to come—to come quickly. How well I knew that soft, sibilant invocation! Higher up the few tufts of bunch grass that remained rustled in anticipation. On the top of the mountain, in ordinary years a sure sign of a coming storm, floated a veil of opaline sea ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... about thirty miles out of Boulogne when there was a sudden explosion underneath the car, followed by a sibilant sound that I knew only ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... there is a noble view of hill and plain. The inner slope of the green fosse is inclined at an angle pleasant to recline on, with the head just below the edge, in the summer sunshine. A faint sound as of a sea heard in a dream—a sibilant 'sish, sish'—passes along outside, dying away and coming again as a fresh wave of the wind rushes through the bennets and the ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... "Is always a covert thing. We betray each other in the dark, with silent foot-steps and sibilant voices. We whisper our lies. We concoct our intrigues with carefully closed doors. I did so. I was a priest of the Roman Church as I am now; it would never have done for a priest to be a social sinner! I therefore took every precaution to hide my fault;—but out of my ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... be japers!" was the conjecture that dropped from the ship-carpenter's lips, while the same thought occurred simultaneously to the others; for they could think of no living thing, other than a serpent, capable of sending forth such a sibilant ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... a rapid, sibilant whisper, leaning forward so as to bring her eyes directly before Mrs. Thayer's face, and the effect was electrical. Mrs. Thayer struggled for a moment, as if she would rise, and then fell back and burst ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... light hiss of a snake rose to them from the depths. That is a sound never forgotten when once heard. It is like unto no other. Indeed, the term "hiss" is a misnomer for the quick sibilant expulsion of the breath by an alarmed ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... a fine sibilant chorus audible in the sod, and in the dust of the road, and in the porous plowed fields. Every grain of soil and every root and rootlet purrs in satisfaction, Because something more than water comes down when it rains; you cannot produce this effect by simple water; the good-will of ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... enmiksi—igi. Shuffle (prevaricate) cxikani. Shun eviti. Shut fermi. Shutter, window fenestra kovrilo. Shuttle naveto. Shy timeta, hontema. Shyness timeteco, honteco. Si (music) B. Si (flat) Bes. Sibilant sibla, sibla sono. Sick (ill) malsana. Sick vomema. Sicken malsanigxi. Sickle rikoltilo. Sickly malsanema. Side flanko. Sideboard telermeblo. Side face profilo. Siege siegxo. Sieve kribrilo. Sift ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... a sibilant duet from Grace and Jock. "Not now. She's sleeping. We were up with her for three hours last night. It was the new food. She's not used ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... from the cafe. At about the same hour as before—according to the report—someone called up the establishment, asking for "Miguel." This was the quadroon, and I heard his thick voice replying. The other voice—which had first spoken—was curiously sibilant but very distinct. Yet it did not sound like the voice of a Frenchman or of any European. ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... the sibilant murmur ran down the line, and the voice of Sliver Waldron brought it faintly ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... said Jimmie Dale, in a low sibilant way, "and I'll drop you where you stand! Put your hands behind your ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... blurred in his weary vision—squat, rush-bottomed Dutch chairs seemed to revolve about a table with apparently a hundred legs, a bearskin floated across the floor.... He secured the banian; and, swathing himself in its cool, sibilant folds, he fell, his face hid in an angle of his arm, into ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the lonely fiord or in the pine forests, Elizabeth's bright, speaking face seemed to move before him like a will o' the wisp; even in the rustle of the summer breeze in the leaves he could hear her voice, with its odd breaks and sibilant pauses, so curiously sweet to his ear. "I am possessed," he would say to himself—"I am possessed!" and indeed with all his strength of will he was ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... on, or back? This was far above the benches of wash-gravel. Going up one of the nameless peaks, they stepped out on a ledge and viewed the white, silent mountain-world. Marmots stabbed the lonely solitude with echoing whistle. Wind came up from the valley in the sibilant sigh of a sea. It was doubtful if even Indians had ever hunted this ground. The game was so tame, it did not know enough to be afraid. The men {43} could see another creek shining in the sunrise on the other side of the ridge. It seemed to go down to a valley benched by gravel flanks. They began ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... swimmers fighting for another moment's breath, and one by one dragged down by many hidden hands: then the sharp hiss of swift-quenched flames, then darkness, and the stifling of sobbing groans into silence, and after that only the sibilant undertone of waters rushing swiftly past ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... accused of not being noisy enough, while we have one bird who, though he is classed with the oscines, passes his life in almost unbroken silence. Of course I refer to the waxwing, or cedar-bird, whose faint, sibilant whisper can scarcely be thought to contradict the foregoing description. By what strange freak he has lapsed into this ghostly habit, nobody knows. I make no account of the insinuation that he gave up music because ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... the desolate sound another—sibilant, clearer, uncannily human. Nicholas had heard, too, for he threw down the tattered deerskin, and went to the other side of the fire. Voices in the tunnel. Nicholas held back the flap and gravely waited there, till one Pymeut after another ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... majority of the plants do not exist. It is typical, therefore, not of isolated experiments on the part of Nature, but of conditions and processes repeated in similitude wheresoever in the region raw sand heals the wounds inflicted by the sea or the grumbling sea retreats before the sibilant, incessant sand. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... wound showed on the wrist; and a certain puffiness was becoming observable in the injured hand and arm. Smith bent down and drew a quick, sibilant breath. ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... at his lips the cook gave us a warning glance. He then laid hold of the rope that was made fast to a shears overhead, swung out, and slid down to the very keelson. Silently, one at a time, we followed. The only sound was our sibilant breathing and the very faint shuffle of feet. Now we could see, almost midway between the hatches, the dim light of a candle and a man at work. While we watched, the man cautiously struck several blows. Was he ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... being less tense than that of the larynx. I suppose the stream of air is in both cases frequently interrupted by the closing of the sides or mouth of the passages or aperture; but that this is performed much slower in the production of sibilant sounds, than in ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... poor only of this world—those simple souls who never have any secret to hide, either from each other or from heaven, and of whom Ruskin nobly said, 'These are our holiest.' I do not know what words her heart is murmuring: I hear only at moments that soft sibilant sound, made by gently drawing the breath through the lips, which among this kind people is a token of humblest ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... we were at work; our emissaries gave us enough to do: we knew what spoil the robbers in the March had made, the decree issued in Vienna, the order of the day in Paris, the last word exchanged between the Cardinals, what whispers were sibilant in the Vatican; we mined deeper every day, and longed for the electric stroke which should kindle the spark and send princes and principalities shivered widely into atoms. But, friend, this was not to be. We knew one thing more, too: we knew ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the attacks which had been announced came on. Pascal came out of this panting, haggard, his speech sibilant and painful. Low moans escaped him, in spite of his courage. Good God! would this torture never end? And yet his most ardent desire was to prolong his agony, to live long enough to embrace Clotilde a last time. If he might only be deceiving himself, as Ramond persisted in declaring. If ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... flying overhead with a queer, sibilant noise. Somewhere in the darkness there was a steady rattle in the throat of ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... get through the opening feet first. It was a tight squeeze, or else some one held him back. There came a crashing of wood; Ancliffe's body whirled in the aperture and he struggled violently. Allie heard hissing, sibilant Spanish utterances. She stood petrified, certain that Durade had attacked Ancliffe. Suddenly the Englishman crashed through, drawing a supple, twisting, slender man with him. He held this man by the throat with one hand and by the wrist with the other. Allie recognized ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... whistle and whine, long, broken rumble, and the rattling concatenation of quick shots like metallic cries, exploding hail-storm of iron in the air, a desert over which thousands of puffs of smoke shot up and swelled and drifted, the sliding crash far away, the sibilant hiss swift overhead. Boom! Weeeee—eeeeooooo! from the east. Boom! ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... was presently here, with mystery and doubt and dark presage. The voice of Hoho-hebee Falls seemed to him louder, full of strange, uncomprehended meanings, and insistent iteration. Vague echoes were elicited. Sometimes in a seeming pause he could catch their lisping sibilant tones repeating, repeating—what? As the darkness encroached yet more heavily upon the cataract, the sense of its unseen motion so close at hand oppressed his very soul; it gave an idea of the swift gathering of ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... paid my debt to the McKayes," she declared, and in her calm voice there was a sibilant little note of passion. "Indeed, I have a slight credit-balance due me, and though Mrs. McKaye and her daughters cannot bring themselves to the point of acknowledging this indebtedness, I must insist upon collecting it. In view of the justice of my claim, however, I cannot ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... back! Close the emergency—" Then a gluey mass cut across my mouth, and, as though carried on huge soft springs, I was hurried away, with the sibilant, whispering sounds louder and closer than ever. With me, as nearly as I could judge, went every man who had not been ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... rattle! "Who is there?" she cried, yet not too loudly, because her woman's instinct warned her to be wary. The shutters were flung open, and the young soldier stepped flamboyantly into the room. "I am here, cara, cara mia!" he cried. "I, Vibrato Adagio!" With a sibilant cry she fell into his out-stretched arms. "Mio, mio," she echoed in ecstasy, "I am yours and you are mine!" So lightly was the first stepping-stone passed on her reckless path of immorality and vice. Her fickle heart soon tired of ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... canon bed was only a few yards below when, at the last sharp twist in the descent, the still air vibrated with a sibilant rattle. Slade's pony snorted and jumped sideways, leaving Lennon a clear view of the big diamond-back rattlesnake that lay coiled in the middle of the trail. The gaping jaws of the angry snake and the peculiar billowing of its body so fixed Lennon's ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... undreamed-of hopes. The white world was tearing itself to pieces. White solidarity was riven and shattered. And—fear of white power and respect for white civilization together dropped away like garments outworn. Through the bazaars of Asia ran the sibilant whisper: 'The East will see the West to bed.'" At last comes the inevitable conclusion pleading for a better understanding between England and Germany and for everything else that would make for racial solidarity. The pitiful ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... matted,—stuck out in tufts beneath the faded, greenish kerchief that was soiled with scurf; despite the shouts and the disputes of the gamblers she did not so much as blink; only from time to time she would give a prolonged snore, which, at the start was sibilant, but ended in a rasping snort. At her side Paloma, huddled on the floor near Valencia, held a tot of three or four in her arms,—a pale, delicate creature who blinked incessantly,—to whom she was ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... seconds he remained rooted to the spot, his ears strained to catch a repetition of the fancied sound. It had been only a faint murmur; he might have been mistaken ... yes, there it was again, a sort of choked, sibilant whisper coming from the adjoining room. Hardly had he made sure of it when there fell on his ears a small crash, sharp, as of some object dropped on the parquet. It was followed by a smothered exclamation in a man's ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... end of the room, he saw one of the well-known portraits of Philip IV projected by a lantern upon a huge sheet of canvas. The widening shaft of light that traversed the intervening space dimly disclosed the audience as a series of heads, from which arose a sibilant wave of amused comment as the portrait of the king melted into that of his daughter, a serious infant with corkscrew curls, all unconscious of the monstrous absurdity of her voluminous skirts. This transition from one picture to another was ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... and Tayoga bringing up the rear. It was hard and painful work for Grosvenor, but again he succeeded in advancing without noise, and he began to think they would elude the vigilance of the savage scouts, when a sibilant whisper from Willet warned them to fall flat again. His command was just in time as a rifle cracked in the bushes ahead of them, and Grosvenor distinctly heard the bullet as it hissed over their heads. Willet threw ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... cast an uncertain gleam upon the slushy whiteness under foot, and the blurred outline of a towering water-tank showed dimly through the sliding snow. He could also just discern the great locomotive waiting on the side-track, and the sibilant hiss of steam that mingled with the moaning of the wind whirling a white haze out of the obscurity. Beyond the track, and showing only now and then, the lights of the wooden town blinked fitfully; on the other hand and behind the depot was an empty waste of snow-sheeted ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... Sibilant, rougher, with a hint of menace as it issued forth the signal was answered this time, and with a thrill of wonder the mantle of the old life fell upon Michael once more. He was Mikky—only grown more wise. Almost the old ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... for some little distance, and again heard, more than once, the same peculiar sibilant sound, as of something flying past them with great velocity; but they saw nothing, and could not account for ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Equatorial, West and South Africa the terminal vowel may be elided in rapid pronunciation, or be dropped, or absorbed in the terminal consonant, generally a nasal). No two consonants can come together without an intervening vowel, except in the case of a nasal, labial or sibilant.[8] No consonant is doubled. Apparent exceptions occur to this last rule where two nasals, two r's or two d's come together through the elision of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... time after that narrow scrape at the gates the man roused up to peer back through the rear window of the limousine, Sofia heard a harshly sibilant intake of breath between shut teeth, and surmised the discovery that the car which had so narrowly missed blocking their escape had picked up the trail, and ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... he whispered. He drew his automatic swiftly from his pocket, and, pressed against the wall beside the window, looked about him as a man looks who finds himself surrounded by enemies. Not a sound disturbed the stillness of the garden except for sibilant rustlings of the leaves, occasioned by a ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... bachelor confusion. The wind suffed through the evergreens in dream voices, pansy-soft to the touch. The slow-swaying evergreens rocked to a rhythm old as Eternity, Druid priests standing guard over the sacrament of love and night. From the purpling Valley came the sibilant hush of the River. Somewhere, from the branches below the Ridge, a water thrush gurgled a last joyous note that rippled liquid gold through ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... painful cough is present, but it is paroxysmal and incomplete. Auscultation and percussion greatly aid us in a diagnosis. A normal sound is given on percussion. On auscultation, in the early stages, rhonchus rales are detected if the larger tubes are affected, and sibilant rales if the smaller ones are affected. Later mucous rales are noted, and sometimes all sounds in certain parts are absent, owing to the plugging up of the tubes. This plugging, if extensive enough, is sometimes the cause of death, or death may result from extension of the disease ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... something of timidity in the repulsive faces of the waiting creatures, this newcomer was of a different type. He opened flabby thin lips to give one sharp note of command. It was as sibilant as the hissing of a snake. The man with the weapon returned it to a holder at his side; the whole group cringed before the power and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... and, by assimilation of the nasal with the sibilant, Ashshan. This name has already been mentioned in the inscriptions of the kings and vicegerents of Lagash and in the Book of Prophecies of the ancient Chaldaean astronomers; it also occurs in the royal preamble of Cyrus and his ancestors, who like ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... and artistic. One day, in the early 'Forties, the proprietor, to his amazement, heard one of his oysters whistling—a continuous shrill little whistle, doubtless through a hole in its shell. The fact was at once noised abroad, and crowds visited his shop to listen to the sibilant mollusc, which not only whistled, but, it was said with some truth, drew the town as effectively as old Drury herself, on the other ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... God could not explain the power by which a tree pumps its sap from roots to leaves, or why a baby rabbit rejects the grasses that would harm it, or why a puling infant divines its mother among the motley and multitudinous mass of sibilant saints at a sewing society which is discussing the last wedding and the next divorce. He "who admits only what he understands" would have to look on himself as a conundrum and then give the conundrum up. He would have the longest doubts and the shortest creed on record. Agnosticism is part of the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... low, sibilant sound is that? And then what confused, angry words from the tribunal? He turns to his friends, his eyes ablaze with anger, opera-glass in hand. And now again the terrible "Hiss-s-s!" taken up by the other box, and the words repeated loudly and more ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... and private cars were moving out of the area, haste evident in their spinning wheels and hunched drivers. The movement was like a scurry of ants. Rick watched, taking in everything. He didn't even notice when the massive door was swung shut, closing against its airtight cushion with a sibilant hiss. ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... of a spring morning (I quote from his essay): "Beneath in the water the little fishes darted about the boat; above the little birds twittered in the branches; while off on a sunny log in the pond the soft, sibilant croak of the mud-turtle was heard on the shore." If we could happen upon the mud-turtle mad with love, I am sure we should find that he had a voice—a "soft, sibilant ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... left out when there was any exchange of sentiments. He had a great admiration for the gifts of Ned Nestor, and wanted every one to understand what his sentiments were. So he started to open his mouth to say something, when Ned lifted a hand and gave a low sibilant hiss. ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... the State of Connecticut! The little cocks were incessant singers, their favorite perches being the wire fences, or weeds and grass tufts in the pastures. Their voices are weak, but very sweet, and almost as fine as the sibilant buzz of certain kinds of insects. The pretty song opens with two or three somewhat prolonged syllables, running quite high, followed by a trill much lower in the scale, and closes with a very fine, double-toned strain, delivered with the rising inflection and a kind of twist or jerk—"as ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... "Tell her to bring her mother and wake the kid or I'll yell. I've got to hear the little beggar talk." As Philip turned toward the door he flung after him in a sibilant whisper: "Wait! Maybe you know how to ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... against the softness of her arm, and at their touch the arm trembled, and from far away came the quick, sibilant gasp of ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... by a purulent secretion from the bronchi, and the second day does not pass without the characters of pneumonia being completely developed. The respiration is accompanied by a mucous 'rale' which often becomes sibilant. The nasal cavities are filled with a purulent fluid. The dog that coughs violently at the commencement of the disease, employs himself, probably, on the following day, in ejecting, by a forcible ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... the pool that I see in my dreams, dear love, I have sat with you time and again; And listened beneath the dank leaves, dear love, To the sibilant ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... had given place to a series of swishing whistles, merging together into a sound as of water falling, only less regular, more sibilant. Occasionally there was the rending burst of a shell, and at intervals came the swinging detonations of the three guns. In the dugout, except for two men who snored loudly, raspingly, ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... hands that clenched themselves in distress. She looked down at the giant who was slowly lifting himself from his knees, with his clear-cut face upturned; and the hollows, vibrant with silence, caught her whispered words and multiplied the sound to a sibilant wail. ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... the ebbing bayou, we looked and listened. There were sounds of sibilant dripping in the dim sedges; of alewives jumping by the side of our boat; of a sudden rush of blackbird wings; and of the evening breeze as it freshened in the bending blades. We could see the many rivulets, wine-red now in the sunset light; and the graceful swaying of great ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... the same in every individual and their very own. One of them is a clear, soft, musical whistle, slightly inflected; another a kissing sound, usually repeated two or three times or oftener, a somewhat percussive smack; still another, a sharp, prolonged hissing or sibilant but at the same time metallic note, compared by some one to the sound produced by milking a cow into a tin pail—a very good description. There are other lesser notes: a musical, thrush-like chirp, repeated slowly, and sometimes rapidly till it runs to a bubbling sound; also there is a horny ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... replied, speaking the universal language with a sibilant accent that was very fascinating, "to speak with ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... cows from day to day, interesting changes can be discovered during the animal's lifetime. Frequently, the abnormal sounds indicate progressive destruction; but, at other times, portions of the lungs that have been totally impervious to air, become the seat of sibilant rales, and gradually, a healthy respiratory murmur proves that, by absorption of the materials which have been plugging the tissues of the lungs, resolution is fast advancing. Some very remarkable cases of this description have ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... as we found in the vocabularies of former voyages, took great pains to teach us, and were much delighted when we could catch the just pronunciation of a word. For my own part, no language seemed easier to acquire than this; every harsh and sibilant consonant being banished from it, and almost every word ending in a vowel. The only requisite, was a nice ear to distinguish the numerous modifications of the vowels which must naturally occur in a language confined to few consonants, and which, once rightly understood, give a great degree of delicacy ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... comes spinning round and round towards the ground looking more like a round ball than a bird. All the time it descends it utters a strange note, something like that of a frog or cricket, a protracted sibilant sound. This bird is close to Liothrix and Stachyrhis, although ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... his host; and, having relieved that gentleman's apprehensions by sibilant noises, waggled a nervous finger at Dolly. ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... black-beaded relatives who seemed to appear out of the ground like snails after rain and who might have been part of the undertaker's permanent stock-in-trade. Henrietta hated the mournful looks of these ancient cousins, the shaking of their black beads, their sibilant whisperings, and in their presence she was dry-eyed and rather rude. Aunt Caroline would have laughed at them and their dowdy clothes that smelt of camphor, but it seemed as though no one would ever laugh ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... was tightening his obnoxious coils about her all the time. Even now she could feel his hand upon her arm, could hear his sibilant whisper, could see his intense eyes full of suggestion and threat. Now she found herself face to face with the crisis of all these years. Her only hope lay in the thought that neither could afford the scandal ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... came together to the door of the third house, and their heads were together; and a few sibilant consonants escaped them. The breath of the men that stood out under the starlight went up like smoke in the air. It ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... on a shallow slope of sand, leaning against a rock, with her elbow resting on its flat surface and her book propped up in front of her. Gradually the rhythmic rise and fall of the waves on the shore had lulled her into slumber—the plop as they broke in eddies of creaming foam, and then the sibilant hush-sh-sh—like a long-drawn sigh—as the water receded only to gather itself afresh into ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... rose mechanically and quite deliberately he took aim—making assurance doubly sure throughout what seemed an age made sibilant by the singing past his head of the infuriated ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... a blue-flannel dressing gown, and in and out of the spare room with sibilant whispers of anxiety, had, for once, more thoughts than words; her words were only, "I've always expected it!" But her thoughts would have filled volumes! Mrs. Newbolt had put her hair in order for the night, and now ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... beings—as Sir Lucien was aware. Now, as the one-eyed Chinaman resumed his seat and the one-eyed raven sank into slumber, Pyne suddenly spoke in Chinese, a tongue which he understood as it is understood by few Englishmen; that strange, sibilant speech which is alien from all Western conceptions of oral intercourse as the Chinese institutions and ideals are alien from those of the ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Jason catch a syllable of that fervent prayer, reef, and come home to her? Then I need not have written this history, and all would have been well in Dreamland. But he didn't. He heard nothing but the sibilant waters as they rushed under his keel: he thought of nothing but the rose that was withering in the secret locker of his cabin, and of the wound in his heart that was gaping and as fresh as ever. So the night-winds hurried him ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... her twinkling feet had carried her to the centre of the stage an ominous sound broke the silence of expectation. A hiss came from one of the boxes; it was repeated from another, and another. The sibilant sound spread round the house; it swelled into a sinister storm of hisses and boos. The light faded out of the dancer's eyes, the smile from her lips; and as the tumult of disapprobation rose to a deafening climax the curtain was rung down, and Lola ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... break; nor might he have said it was in motion or of any depth. A sound came from the direction not unlike that of a sibilant wind. Presently out of the perspective, which reduced the many to one and all sizes to a level, the line developed into unequal divisions, with intervals between them; about the same time the noise became recognizable as the voices fiercely strained and inarticulate ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... As she passed Elfreda's room she heard her name uttered in a sibilant whisper. Wheeling at the sound, Grace stepped to the stout girl's door. Elfreda drew her in and, closing the door, said nervously: "What do you suppose has happened? I waited and waited for the An—Miss Atkins and she didn't appear, so I went down to her room and found the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... the corridor a gleam of yellow light shone from the open door of an isolation room where a nurse was watching by a patient dying of gangrene. Two comrades who had been to the movies at the Gaumont Palace near the Place Clichy began to talk in sibilant whispers of the evening's entertainment, and one of them said, "That war film was a corker; did you spot the big cuss throwing the grenades?" "Yuh, damn good," answered the other pulling his shirt over his head. It was a strange crew that inhabited these quarters; there were idealists, dreamers, ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... Treasury Cluck, like chicken, Now with small beaks the ravenous Bill opposing;[212:1] With serpent-tongue now stinging, and now licking, 15 Now semi-sibilant, now smoothly glozing— ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... was astir. Thin columns of blue smoke drifted up here and there between the close-set tents, and the sibilant wearing of stone-mills, as they ground the wheat, was heard in many households. The nutty aroma of parching lentils, and the savor of roasting papyrus root and garlic told the stage of the morning meal. The strong-armed women, rich ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... the morning is! It is at such times that we discover what music there is in the souls of the little slate- colored snowbirds. How they squeal, and chatter, and chirp, and trill, always in scattered troops of fifty or a hundred, filling the air with a fine sibilant chorus! That joyous and childlike "chew," "chew," "chew" is very expressive. Through this medley of finer songs and calls, there is shot, from time to time, the clear, strong note of the meadowlark. It comes from some field or ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... the muffled conversation in the kitchen resembled the resonant humming of bees, and again, when it became animated, it sounded like the distant cackling of geese. Then there would come a pause; and it would begin again with sibilant whispers, and end in a chorus of dry laughter that somehow suggested the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... display. "He ought to be here," the younger man declared, consulting his watch. As he spoke Rhoda saw the barouche draw up before the house. She had a glimpse of a figure at Gerrit Ammidon's side in extravagantly brilliant satins; there was a sibilant whisper of rich materials in the hall, and the master entered the library with ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... floor above, and a rumour of feminine voices drifted down, interrupted by an occasional sibilant rustle of silk, or a brief patter of high-heeled feet: noises which bore out the conjecture that madame's maid was undressing and putting her to bed; a ceremony apt to consume a considerable time with a woman of Liane's age and disposition, passionately bent on preserving ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... their anniversary. They were having the Crowd to dinner, downtown, that evening. Cora thought the Shoreham rooms beautiful, though she took care not to let the room-clerk know she thought so. Ray, always a silent, inarticulate man, was so wordless that Cora took him to task for it in a sibilant aside. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... is prompt to expugn, My friend, Such magic-minted conjurings: The brought breeze fainted soon, And then the sense of seamews' wings, And the shore's sibilant tune. ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... fern-brake far in the woods on the right, and they heard the muffled trickling of water, falling on mossy stones hard by, from a spring so slight as to be only a silver thread. The trees far below waved in the wind, and a faint dryadic sibilant singing sounded a measure or so, and grew fainter in the lulling of the breeze, and sunk ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... his boat slowly in on the gravel, a low pr-r-r and a sibilant ripple of water caused him to look behind. A high-bowed, shining mahogany cruiser, seventy feet or more over all, rounded the point and headed into the bay. The smooth sea parted with a whistling sound where her brass-shod stem split it like a knife. She slowed down from this trainlike ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... dash with which the partners rush forward, the clinking and clattering of spurs as heel clashes with heel in mid air, punctuating the staccato of the music, the loud thud of boots striking the ground, followed by their sibilant slide along the polished floor, then the swift springs and sudden bounds, the whirling gyrations and dizzy evolutions, the graceful genuflections and quick embraces, and all the other intricate and maddening movements to the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... different Greek slates at the earliest period z as well as x; afier the symbol for p came Zade (@), which was a strong palatal s, though in name it corresponds to the Greek zera: while lastly Shin (@ follows rhe symbol for r, and was an sh-sound. The Greek name for the sibilant (sigma) may simply mean the hissing letter and be a derivative from sizo; many authorities, however, hold that it is a corruption of the Phoenician Samech. Unfortunately, it is not clear how many sibilants ere distinguished in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... world than gold. Water makes things grow and—and keeps a fella from gettin' thirsty. And mud makes things grow, too, but I dunno what rocks are for. Just to sit on when you're tired, I reckon." The sibilant burring of a rattler in the brush set his neck and back tingling. "And what snakes was made for, gets me! They ain't good to eat, nohow. And they ain't friendly like some of the bugs and things. I'm thinkin' that that there snake what clumb the tree and ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... read the advertisements of tooth-brushes and breakfast foods and underwear in their magazines, written in the language of persuasive, familiar fraternity. It was difficult not to confess this to Mr. Asprey; but I do not think he would have understood me." Mr. Drew spoke in a soft, slightly sibilant voice, with little smiling pauses between sentences that all seemed vaguely shuffled together. He paused now, smiling, and looking down ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... dear Mrs. Morris," said Mrs. Lee, "I think everything is sweet." Mrs. Lee said sweet with an effect as if she stamped hard to emphasize it. She made it long and extremely sibilant. Mrs. Lee always ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... vines clung to them in woven tapestries of living green. There opened from this road dim forest aisles, veiled in dusk in which sunbeams quivered, paths of mystery, winding toward strange twilight worlds where wild wood-creatures wandered. Warm earth-scents drenched the air; soft sibilant whisperings stirred overhead, and hidden birds ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... and after service, it is not decorous to chat sociably along the aisles, or hold a gossiping conference in whispers with some one in the neighboring pew. I have in mind one woman, who ought to have known better, whose sibilant utterances—just five pews distant—came to be a regular part of the five minutes' pause immediately before the service began. Her conversation was usually directed to another woman, who, likewise, should have known better than to listen. The silent vault ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... confession Roma sat in her own room with a tremor of the heart which she had never felt before. Something personal and very intimate was creeping over her soul. She heard the indistinct murmur of the priest's voice at intervals, followed by a sibilant sound as of ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... had carried her to the centre of the stage an ominous sound broke the silence of expectation. A hiss came from one of the boxes; it was repeated from another, and another. The sibilant sound spread round the house; it swelled into a sinister storm of hisses and boos. The light faded out of the dancer's eyes, the smile from her lips; and as the tumult of disapprobation rose to a deafening ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... the people everywhere still reveal the nature of the old discipline. The strangest fact is that the old-fashioned manners appear natural rather than acquired, instinctive rather than made by training. The bow,—the sibilant in drawing of the breath which accompanies the prostration, and is practised also in praying to the gods,—the position of the hands upon the floor in the moment of greeting or of farewell,—the way of sitting or rising or walking in presence of a guest,—the manner of receiving or presenting ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... world—those simple souls who never have any secret to hide, either from each other or from heaven, and of whom Ruskin nobly said, 'These are our holiest.' I do not know what words her heart is murmuring: I hear only at moments that soft sibilant sound, made by gently drawing the breath through the lips, which among this kind people is a token of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... observations and Sunday-school memories when he wrote, describing the dawn of a spring morning (I quote from his essay): "Beneath in the water the little fishes darted about the boat; above the little birds twittered in the branches; while off on a sunny log in the pond the soft, sibilant croak of the mud-turtle was heard on the shore." If we could happen upon the mud-turtle mad with love, I am sure we should find that he had a voice—a "soft, sibilant croak," ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... admitted. He who affected by searching to find out and to equal God could not explain the power by which a tree pumps its sap from roots to leaves, or why a baby rabbit rejects the grasses that would harm it, or why a puling infant divines its mother among the motley and multitudinous mass of sibilant saints at a sewing society which is discussing the last wedding and the next divorce. He "who admits only what he understands" would have to look on himself as a conundrum and then give the conundrum up. He would have the longest doubts and the shortest creed ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... fond and foolish now, just as at one time it all seemed very big and wonderful. And I remember schooling my Poppsy to say "Daddy's all sweet" and how her little tongue, stumbling over the sibilant, converted it into the non-complimentary "Daddy's all feet," which my Dinky-Dunk so scowlingly resented. And I have even compiled a list of Dinkie's earliest "howlers," from the time he was first interested in Adam and Eve and asked to be told about "The Garden of Sweden" until he later explained ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... organ, a careless voluntary that stopped short, rambled, began again. They were early, and the lights were only lighted here and there; women, and now and then a man, drifted up the center aisle. Boots cheeped unseen in the arches, sibilant whispers smote the silence, pew-doors creaked, and from far corners of the church violent coughing sounded with muffled reverberations. Mary Lou would have slipped into the very last pew, but Virginia led the way up—up—up—in the darkness, nearer and nearer the altar, with its ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... a divine world he has dreamed of, peopled by saints and martyrs, where the flowers are quickly woven into crowns and the light streams from the gates of Paradise, and every breeze whispers the sweet sibilant name of Jesus, and there, on the bare but beautiful roads, Christ meets His disciples, or at the convent gate welcomes a traveller, and if He be not there He has but just passed by, and if He has not just passed by He is ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... familiar objects, or repeating such as we found in the vocabularies of former voyages, took great pains to teach us, and were much delighted when we could catch the just pronunciation of a word. For my own part, no language seemed easier to acquire than this; every harsh and sibilant consonant being banished from it, and almost every word ending in a vowel. The only requisite, was a nice ear to distinguish the numerous modifications of the vowels which must naturally occur in a language confined to few consonants, and which, once rightly ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... came down from his mountain retreat. He heard the sibilant hiss of the scorned Persians as he passed among them on the outskirts of the crowd; he observed the threatening attitude of the men who waited and watched; he saw the white, ugly face of Von Blitz quivering with triumph; he felt the breath of disaster upon his cheek. And yet he walked ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... parlance the Dal supplants the Zal; e.g. Dahaba (for zahaba) he went (v. 277 and passim); also T takes the place of Th, as Tult for thulth one third (iii. 348) and Tamrat (for thamrat) fruit (v. 260), thus generally ignoring the sibilant Th after the fashion of the modern Egyptians who say Tumm (for thumma) again; "Kattir (for kaththir) Khayrak" God increase thy weal, and Lattama (for laththama) he veiled. Also a general ignoring of the dual, e.g. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... only a few yards below when, at the last sharp twist in the descent, the still air vibrated with a sibilant rattle. Slade's pony snorted and jumped sideways, leaving Lennon a clear view of the big diamond-back rattlesnake that lay coiled in the middle of the trail. The gaping jaws of the angry snake and the peculiar billowing ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... Presently the sibilant rush of waters forewarns rapids. Indians and voyageurs debark, invert canoes on their shoulders, packs on back with straps across foreheads, and amble away over the portages at that voyageurs' dog-trot which is half walk, half run. So the rapids of ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... passionately walked beside him. On the shores of the lonely fiord or in the pine forests, Elizabeth's bright, speaking face seemed to move before him like a will o' the wisp; even in the rustle of the summer breeze in the leaves he could hear her voice, with its odd breaks and sibilant pauses, so curiously sweet to his ear. "I am possessed," he would say to himself—"I am possessed!" and indeed with all his strength of will he was ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... murmur and awakening. How still the morning is! It is at such times that we discover what music there is in the souls of the little slate- colored snowbirds. How they squeal, and chatter, and chirp, and trill, always in scattered troops of fifty or a hundred, filling the air with a fine sibilant chorus! That joyous and childlike "chew," "chew," "chew" is very expressive. Through this medley of finer songs and calls, there is shot, from time to time, the clear, strong note of the meadowlark. It comes from some field or tree farther away, and cleaves the air like an arrow. The ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... she floated away into a peace indescribable, unlike anything she had ever known before, she heard a woman's voice, hushed to a sibilant whisper, remark, "My, Nap! You're too smart to be ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... reached the tent but the girl made no sign of going in. In the silence the sibilant lisp of the stream ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... sailing swiftly towards the bank on which Darrell reclined. He had evidently made friends with them, and they rested their white breasts close on the margin, seeking to claim his notice with a low hissing salutation, which, it is to be hoped, they changed for something less sibilant in that famous song with ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... my fellow watcher said, interrupting his whispered and sibilant devotions, and turning to me, as it seemed, unwillingly. "Have you not heard it before? Every evening since the death he has played it at midnight in memory of Alresca." Then ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... brilliant face an added accent of vigor. The chien de race was the dominant note now in the muscular, supple body, the keen-edged nostrils, and the intent gaze of the liquid eyes. These latter were fixed with the fixity of a savage on Charm. She was giving, in a sweet sibilant murmur, the man seated next her—Monsieur d'Agreste, the man who refused to bear his title—her views of ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... above, was smoother than she ever saw it afterward on Kon Klayu. There was something sinister in the gently heaving stillness of the vast body of water, for not ten feet from the flap of the tent tiny ripples of the incoming tide were swallowing at the dry sand with sibilant softness. One end of the pile of provisions just below the tent was already a foot deep in the ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... rapid, sibilant whisper, leaning forward so as to bring her eyes directly before Mrs. Thayer's face, and the effect was electrical. Mrs. Thayer struggled for a moment, as if she would rise, and then fell back and burst into tears. This was a fortunate relief, since she would have fainted if she had not ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... with watchful eyes, Piercing, shameless, and indiscreet, With ears wide open for soft replies And sounds that are sibilant and sweet! With light approach (not a lynx so still), With figure meanly invisible, With threatening voice and iron will, And shrill demands or he'll ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... the words—slight, because derivation is a seductive and frequently illusory pilot. Our language is said to have been arraigned by foreigners for its hissing enunciation; but, regardless of the rebuke, our pundits have, of late, unnecessarily increased the whistling by substituting the sibilant s for the vocal z, in all sorts of cases. Happily this same s not being yet acclimatized to the galley, Jack will continue to give tongue to an enterprizing cruize after Portugueze ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... she was almost palsied with recurrent terror: the footfall, stealthy, shuffling, weighty, sounded again. It was never the echo of her own deft, light step! A distinct, sibilant whisper suddenly hissed with warning throughout the place, and as she turned with the instinct of flight she caught a glimpse in the darkling mirror across the dining-room of a fugitive speeding figure, then another, and still another, all frantically, noiselessly fleeing—why ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... cluttering to the Treasury Cluck, like chicken, Now with small beaks the ravenous Bill opposing;[212:1] With serpent-tongue now stinging, and now licking, 15 Now semi-sibilant, now ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... right. For all the world as though they led war dogs, the keepers in brazen armor advanced, the dull metallic clank of their accoutrement clearly discernible above the sibilant hiss of their hideous charges, which hopped along grotesquely like kangaroos, using their long and powerful tails ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... watch a half-dozen times, to hasten its progress. I shook it impatiently to make it go faster. The great empty church looked cold and lonely. The little group of spectators only added to the loneliness of the scene. An occasional cough resounded harshly amid the universal stillness. The sibilant sounds of whispers struck sharply and ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... knees away from the lake, Willet leading and Tayoga bringing up the rear. It was hard and painful work for Grosvenor, but again he succeeded in advancing without noise, and he began to think they would elude the vigilance of the savage scouts, when a sibilant whisper from Willet warned them to fall flat again. His command was just in time as a rifle cracked in the bushes ahead of them, and Grosvenor distinctly heard the bullet as it hissed over their heads. Willet threw his rifle to his shoulder but quickly took it down again. The Indian ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... manner, and comes spinning round and round towards the ground looking more like a round ball than a bird. All the time it descends it utters a strange note, something like that of a frog or cricket, a protracted sibilant sound. This bird is close to Liothrix and Stachyrhis, although it ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... safety valve, tires, air escaping from tires, punctured tire; escaping steam, steam, steam radiator, steam release valve. V. hiss, buzz, whiz, rustle; fizz, fizzle; wheeze, whistle, snuffle; squash; sneeze; sizzle, swish. Adj. sibilant; hissing &c. v.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... ledge to the left, strained up, and, holding thus, reached out with his right. The hand closed about the cluster, and the twig was broken. Grayson gave a great shout then. He turned his head as though to drop them, and, that far away, I heard the sibilant whir of rattles. I saw a snake's crest within a yard of his face, and, my God! I saw Grayson loose his left hand to guard it! The snake struck at his arm, and Grayson reeled and caught back once at the ledge with his left hand. He caught once, I say, to do him full justice; then, without a ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... introduced. Two of them spoke neither French nor English, but the third man spoke French fluently. He had, by the way, a somewhat peculiar accent, different from that to which I was accustomed in the Turks. It was softer, more sibilant, and impressed me as that of a man who was accustomed to speak Italian. He was a good-looking chap, about my height and build, and were it not for his brown skin, one would not have regarded him as a Turk. One side of his face was deeply scarred with a sword-cut, ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... the Grecian Kobalus, whose sole delight consisted in perplexing the human race, and calling up those harmless terrors that constantly hover round the minds of the timid." "The English and Scottish terms, 'Puck,' 'Bogle', are the same as the German 'Spuk' and the Danish 'Spogelse,' without the sibilant aspiration. These words are general names for any kind of spirit, and correspond to the 'pouk' of Piers Ploughman. In Danish 'spog' means a joke, trick, or prank, and hence the character of Robin Goodfellow. In Iceland Puki is regarded as an evil ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... on the wrist; and a certain puffiness was becoming observable in the injured hand and arm. Smith bent down and drew a quick, sibilant breath. ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... more ancient ruins, into a cottonwood grove and then on to a sandy flat. Sitting low in my saddle, almost dozing, I revived suddenly at a never-to-be-mistaken B-u-u-z-z-z! The horses recognized it instantly and froze in their tracks. Sibilant, wicked, it sounded again, and then a yellow streak slid across the trail and disappeared under a low bush. We waited, and pretty soon a coffin-shaped head came up and waved slowly to and fro. The Chief shot him with his forty-five and the snake twisted and writhed into the trail, then lay still. ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... he indrew an inhalation from his pipe with a long sibilant sound: her answer was ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... in the kitchen resembled the resonant humming of bees, and again, when it became animated, it sounded like the distant cackling of geese. Then there would come a pause; and it would begin again with sibilant whispers, and end in a chorus of dry laughter that somehow suggested the crackling of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... complacently Anticipative Visage, of an osseous and ogreish Aspect, gleamed lividly forth therefrom, as the Apparition appeared to Look and Listen through the Mist at one end of the Bridge for the welcome Sight of Disaster, the much desired Sound of Doom. A shrill and sibilant Metallic Shriek seemed to cleave the Shadows into which the Spectre gazed; a Violent Vibratory Pulsation, as of thudding iron nails threshing upon a resonant steel floor, seemed to heat the Roadway, shake the Bridge, and as it appeared to me to widen the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... 'Py-Khan', a corrupt spelling of pakhan, the Sanskrit pashana or pasana, 'a stone'. The compound pashana-murti is commonly used in the sense of 'stone image'. The sibilant sh or s usually is pronounced as kh in Northern India (Grierson, J.R.A.S., ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... my own heart, Tessa," and then Maoni, who sat smoking a cigarette in a corner of the room, discreetly turned her back as certain sibilant sounds were frequently repeated for a minute ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... word, having heard the sibilant whisper. She likewise stared at the rusty-coated gentleman who had just passed the gate, having come from the main entrance of the Central ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... slave-coffle, as the slaves march on—as the husky gangs pass on by twos and threes, fastened together with wrist- chains and ankle-chains; I hear the entreaties of women tied up for punishment—I hear the sibilant whisk of thongs through the air; I hear the Hebrew reading his records and psalms; I hear the rhythmic myths of the Greeks, and the strong legends of the Romans; I hear the tale of the divine life and bloody death of the beautiful God, the Christ; I hear the Hindoo teaching his ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... explosions had given place to a series of swishing whistles, merging together into a sound as of water falling, only less regular, more sibilant. Occasionally there was the rending burst of a shell, and at intervals came the swinging detonations of the three guns. In the dugout, except for two men who snored loudly, ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... from the body of the house Sally heard nothing—only the crepitation of rain on the roof and the sibilant splatter of drops trickling from her saturated skirts into the puddle that had formed beneath ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... that flickered in the wind cast an uncertain gleam upon the slushy whiteness under foot, and the blurred outline of a towering water-tank showed dimly through the sliding snow. He could also just discern the great locomotive waiting on the side-track, and the sibilant hiss of steam that mingled with the moaning of the wind whirling a white haze out of the obscurity. Beyond the track, and showing only now and then, the lights of the wooden town blinked fitfully; on the other hand and behind the depot was an empty waste of ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... there was a great variety of them in the swamps and thickets beneath through the noises that they made—heart-quaking cries, squealing sounds, gruntings, and, most trying of all, a loud, piercing whistle whose sibilant pulsations penetrated the ear like thrusts of a needle. I pictured to myself a colossal serpent as the most probable author of this terrifying sound, but the error of my fancy was demonstrated by a tragedy which shook even ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... its nail again, when the door closed behind me. It shut firmly, without any particular amount of sound, and I was left in the dark. I groped my way to it, irritably, to find it locked on the outside. I shook it frantically, and was rewarded by a sibilant whisper through the keyhole. ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... stilly night are almost wholly of the faintly pulsing sea—sibilant and soft. Twice have the big-eyed stone plovers piped demoniacally. Once there were flutterings among the nutmeg pigeons in the star-proof jungle of the crowded inlet to the south. A cockatoo has shrieked out in dismay at some grim nightmare of a snake. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... speech in support of an unpopular measure or an unpopular man. But here the hisser is not so safe, nor the hissee—to coin a convenient word—so defenceless. The orator is not hampered by the studied words of a written part: he has the right of free speech, and he may retort upon his sibilant surrounders. Macready records that on one occasion, when Sheil was hissed, he "extorted the applause of his assailants by observing to them, 'You may hiss, but you cannot sting.'" Even finer was the retort of Coleridge under similar circumstances: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... Close the emergency—" Then a gluey mass cut across my mouth, and, as though carried on huge soft springs, I was hurried away, with the sibilant, whispering sounds louder and closer than ever. With me, as nearly as I could judge, went every man who had not been on ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... sacrament, sacrilege, salient, salubrious, sardonic, satellite, saturnine, schism, scurrilous, sectarian, secular, sedative, sedentary, seditious, sedulous, segregate, seismograph, senescent, sententious, septuagenarian, sequester, sibilant, similitude, sinecure, sinuous, solicitous, solstice, somnolent, sophisticated, sophistry, sorcery, spasmodic, specious, spirituelle, splenetic, spontaneity, sporadic, spurious, stipend, stipulate, stoical, stricture, stringency, stultify, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Facing Gavrilo at another table sat a drunken man in the dress of a sailor, with a red beard, all over coal-dust and tar. Hiccupping every minute, he was droning a song all made up of broken and incoherent words, strangely sibilant and guttural sounds. He ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... front shop, bearing trays of cakes and steaming cups of coffee. There was a rumble and clatter of German. Every one seemed to know every one else. A game of chess was in progress at one table, and between moves each contestant would refresh himself with a long-drawn, sibilant mouthful of coffee. There was nothing about the place or its occupants to remind one of America. This dim, smoky, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... would not open except by the application of brute force, and many of the windows rattled, so that carpenters were in possession of the premises a total of one hundred and twenty-eight hours in the course of nine calendar months, and I was compelled to listen in hang-dog silence to Josephine's sibilant commentary, that this was the natural result of buying a ready-made house. Still, I must admit that on the whole she behaved extraordinarily well under these trying circumstances, and said nothing more tart than that, if she ever were ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... never accused of not being noisy enough, while we have one bird who, though he is classed with the oscines, passes his life in almost unbroken silence. Of course I refer to the waxwing, or cedar-bird, whose faint, sibilant whisper can scarcely be thought to contradict the foregoing description. By what strange freak he has lapsed into this ghostly habit, nobody knows. I make no account of the insinuation that he gave up music because it hindered his success in cherry-stealing. ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... the speaker was Girasole. He had heard the sibilant sounds of the whispering, and, knowing that Minnie could not speak Italian, it had struck him as being a very singular thing that she should be whispering. Had her sister joined her? He thought he would go up and see. So he went up softly, and the whispering still went on. He therefore concluded ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... tia should be sounded zia: and in Greek transliterations of the sixth century we find such forms as δωναζιόνεμ for donationem, and ἄκτζιο for actio. Pompeius says that whensoever a vowel follows ti or di, the ti or di becomes sibilant. So again on Christian epitaphs we find Constantso for Constantio, etc. But in the classical period of the language, there is no reason for thinking that this assibilation existed, for the Greek transliterations of that period invariably denote ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... fairest landscape. No plant on earth rustles in such a horribly metallic fashion when the wind blows through those everlastingly withered branches; the noise chills one to the marrow; it is like the sibilant chattering of ghosts. Its oil is called "medicinal" only because it happens to smell rather nasty; it is worthless as timber, objectionable in form and hue—objectionable, above all things, in its perverse, anti-human habits. What other tree would have the effrontery ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... an enemy," came in a sibilant whisper too low to be heard by the watchful overseer. "Monakatocka never forgets a friend. Some day ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... had vigor to sing, the song of the mill knew no resting; morning and evening, day and night it crooned its rhythmic tune; only during the daylight Sundays did its murmur die to a sibilant hiss. All the week its doors were filled with the coming and going of men and women and children: many men, more women, and greater and greater throngs of children. It seemed to devour children, sitting with its myriad eyes gleaming and its black maw open, drawing in the pale white mites, ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... must come from some other Italic dialect. The symbol G was a new coinage in the 3rd century B.C. The pronunciation of C throughout the period of classical Latin was that of an unvoiced guttural stop (k). In other dialects, however, it had been palatalized to a sibilant before i-sounds some time before the Christian era; e.g. in the Umbrian facia Latin facial. In Latin there is no evidence for the interchange of c with a sibilant earlier than the 6th century A.D. in south Italy and the 7th century A.D. in Gaul (Lindsay, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... showed his teeth in a wolfish snarl. "She is my wife," he said, in his slow, sibilant way. "I shall not set her free. And—wherever I go, ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... But, as I said, all this time we were at work; our emissaries gave us enough to do: we knew what spoil the robbers in the March had made, the decree issued in Vienna, the order of the day in Paris, the last word exchanged between the Cardinals, what whispers were sibilant in the Vatican; we mined deeper every day, and longed for the electric stroke which should kindle the spark and send princes and principalities shivered widely into atoms. But, friend, this was not to be. We knew one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... light shone from the open door of an isolation room where a nurse was watching by a patient dying of gangrene. Two comrades who had been to the movies at the Gaumont Palace near the Place Clichy began to talk in sibilant whispers of the evening's entertainment, and one of them said, "That war film was a corker; did you spot the big cuss throwing the grenades?" "Yuh, damn good," answered the other pulling his shirt over his head. It was a strange ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... polonaise! When you hear it, does there not recur to you some dream of bygone happy hours, the sibilant murmur of fragrant night winds through the crisp foliage, the faint call of Diana's horn from the woodlands, moon-fairies dancing on the spider-webs, the glint of the dew on the roses, the far-off music of the surges tossing impotently on the sands, the forgetfulness of time and place and ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... Helene. Mother Fetu had ceased whining on his entrance, but kept up a sibilant wheeze, like that of a child in pain. She had understood at once that the doctor and her benefactress were known to one another; and her eyes never left them, but travelled from one to the other, while her wrinkled face showed that her mind was covertly working. The doctor put some questions ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... turned courteously and went back to the door, half closing it and making her request in a low tone. Then her stepmother's excited sibilant whisper: ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... cook gave us a warning glance. He then laid hold of the rope that was made fast to a shears overhead, swung out, and slid down to the very keelson. Silently, one at a time, we followed. The only sound was our sibilant breathing and the very faint shuffle of feet. Now we could see, almost midway between the hatches, the dim light of a candle and a man at work. While we watched, the man cautiously struck several ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... not lasted more than three minutes. The frightened household clustered at the top of the stairway. From below, as from out an abyss of blackness, came up a gurgling sound, as of air bubbling through water. Sometimes this gurgle became sibilant, almost a whistle. But this, too, quickly died down and ceased. Then naught came up out of the blackness save a heavy panting of some creature ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... shadows of a fern-brake far in the woods on the right, and they heard the muffled trickling of water, falling on mossy stones hard by, from a spring so slight as to be only a silver thread. The trees far below waved in the wind, and a faint dryadic sibilant singing sounded a measure or so, and grew fainter in the lulling of the ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... talked, and not once did her listener interrupt. Her words were spoken in that sibilant whisper that is louder than ordinary speech, and not one of them was lost. When she had finished, she rose and demanded, laying her hand ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... through the blue fog of incense! KO-NGAI!—What a thunder tone was that! All the lacquered goblins on the palace cornices wriggle their fire-colored tongues! And after each huge shock, how wondrous the multiple echo and the great golden moan and, at last, the sudden sibilant sobbing in the ears when the immense tone faints away in broken whispers of silver,—as though a woman should whisper, "Hiai!" Even so the great bell hath sounded every day for well-nigh five hundred years,—Ko-Ngai: ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... from the twilight of the south door and looked distractedly about him in the full light before he saw his vacant place. The galleries at the lower end were occupied too, down there, where she had failed to obtain a seat. Yet from all the crowded interior there was no sound but a sibilant whispering; from the passages behind she could hear again the quick bell-note repeat itself as the lobbies were cleared; and from Parliament Square outside once more came the heavy murmur of the crowd that had been inaudible for the last twenty minutes. ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... another—sibilant, clearer, uncannily human. Nicholas had heard, too, for he threw down the tattered deerskin, and went to the other side of the fire. Voices in the tunnel. Nicholas held back the flap and gravely waited there, ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... not gifted with the trolling-line. Sometime I shall write an article on the humors of using it—on the soft and sibilant hiss with which it goes out over the stern; on the rasping with which it grates on the edge of the boat as it holds on, stanch and true, to water-weeds and floating branches; on the low moan with which it buries itself under a rock and dies; ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... without a break; nor might he have said it was in motion or of any depth. A sound came from the direction not unlike that of a sibilant wind. Presently out of the perspective, which reduced the many to one and all sizes to a level, the line developed into unequal divisions, with intervals between them; about the same time the noise became recognizable as the voices ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... the others at his heels, the morio slowly made his way up the stairs. Goaded by the taunts of the outlaws, his face was distorted with ferocity; through his lips came a fierce, sibilant breathing; in the dim light his colossal figure and enormous head seemed in no wise human, but rather a murderous phantasm. With head rolling from side to side, stabbing in the air with his knife, he continued ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... out when there was any exchange of sentiments. He had a great admiration for the gifts of Ned Nestor, and wanted every one to understand what his sentiments were. So he started to open his mouth to say something, when Ned lifted a hand and gave a low sibilant hiss. ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... away foraging, but a faint sibilant squeaking within the dome told me that the little ones were there, and hungry as usual. As I watched there was a swift movement in a tunnel among the roots, and the mother-mouse came rushing back. She paused a moment, lifting her forepaws against a root to sniff what danger threatened. Then ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... but his strength failed him, and the sailors of the trader had to catch him as he tottered, take the young woman from his arms, and help him struggle up the ladder on deck, like a man whose every bone and muscle is racked by rheumatism. Attempting to speak, he could produce only an asthmatic, sibilant wheeze. On deck, he groaned, burst into a senseless, cackling laugh, and spread out his purple, frozen hands. His lips, too, were purple, and his sunken eyes glowed feverishly from a face crusted with dirt and brine. He seemed to want nothing so much as to ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... outside the gates of Ludwigsburg; they raised a shout when they saw their Duke. He bowed, and the Landhofmeisterin also bent her head in dignified salutation. Immediately the shouting ceased, and a low ominous groan went up, intermingled with sibilant hissings. Wilhelmine grew pale, and shot a glance of hatred towards the peasants. His Highness spoke rapidly in a low tone to the cadet who rode at his elbow. The youth galloped back along the line of the cortege, and delivered an order to the captain of the 1st Regiment of Wirtemberg Cavalry. ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... the wings of night, was sharp with the fragrance of heather and the sea. One fancied how it would surge through the dim aisles of cathedral-like forests, ruffling the plumage of drowsy birds, stirring the surface of some dark pool, where the trout still slept, and making sibilant music among the ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... traces of the endeavour to distinguish them otherwise and more precisely. Already in very early times two such proposals of change must have been made, each of which found a field for its diffusion. In the one case they employed for the sibilant—for which the Phoenician alphabet furnished two signs, the fourteenth ( —"id://") for —"id:sh" and the eighteenth (—"id:E") for —"id:s" —not the latter, which was in sound the more suitable, but the former; and such was in earlier times the mode of writing ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... knocker put by with Mr. Bowls's plate. She insisted that the Doctor should call twice a day; and deluged her patient with draughts every two hours. When anybody entered the room, she uttered a shshshsh so sibilant and ominous, that it frightened the poor old lady in her bed, from which she could not look without seeing Mrs. Bute's beady eyes eagerly fixed on her, as the latter sate steadfast in the arm-chair ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... listened to the infinitesimal noises of the night, straining their ears in the stillness. The river wound past them with a faint, sibilant sound like a child chuckling in its sleep; an owl hooted somewhere in the far-off sanctuary of the trees. Betty drew her breath with a little sigh that was no louder than the rustle of the bat's wings overhead. ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... interesting to step back sixty years into the lives of Miss Mitford and her "dear young friend Miss Barrett," when the -esses of "authoresses" and "poetesses" and "editresses" and "hermitesses" make the pages sibilant; when 'Books of Beauty,' and 'Keepsakes,' and the extraordinary methods of "Finden's Tableaux" make us wonder that literature survived; when Mr. Kenyon, taking Miss Mitford "to the giraffes and the Diorama," called for "Miss Barrett, a hermitess in Gloucester Place, who ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... tremeti. Shuffle (cards) miksi, enmiksi—igi. Shuffle (prevaricate) cxikani. Shun eviti. Shut fermi. Shutter, window fenestra kovrilo. Shuttle naveto. Shy timeta, hontema. Shyness timeteco, honteco. Si (music) B. Si (flat) Bes. Sibilant sibla, sibla sono. Sick (ill) malsana. Sick vomema. Sicken malsanigxi. Sickle rikoltilo. Sickly malsanema. Side flanko. Sideboard telermeblo. Side face profilo. Siege siegxo. Sieve kribrilo. Sift kribri. Sigh ekgxemi. Sigh after—or for sopiri pri. Sight ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... with the ocean of life, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk'd where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok, Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant, Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways, I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems, Was seiz'd by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot, The rim, the sediment ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... is always elided before a vowel. An illustration of the way in which final M and N were weakened may be found in the nasalised pronunciation of them in modern French (main, faim). The gutturals C and G have by some been supposed to have had from the first a soft sibilant sound before E and I; but from the silence of all the grammarians on the subject, from the transcriptions of C in Greek by kappa, not sigma or tau, and from the inscriptions and MSS. of the best ages not confusing CI with TI, we conclude ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... there emerged a deep, regular pat-pat. It was the tread of some animal—the rhythm of soft but heavy pads placed cautiously upon the ground. It stole slowly round the camp, and then halted near our gateway. There was a low, sibilant rise and fall—the breathing of the creature. Only our feeble hedge separated us from this horror of the night. Each of us had seized his rifle, and Lord John had pulled out a small bush to make ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... eyes and there saw the light of undreamed-of hopes. The white world was tearing itself to pieces. White solidarity was riven and shattered. And—fear of white power and respect for white civilization together dropped away like garments outworn. Through the bazaars of Asia ran the sibilant whisper: 'The East will see the West to bed.'" At last comes the inevitable conclusion pleading for a better understanding between England and Germany and for everything else that would make for racial solidarity. The pitiful thing about this book is that it is so thoroughly ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... columns of blue smoke drifted up here and there between the close-set tents, and the sibilant wearing of stone-mills, as they ground the wheat, was heard in many households. The nutty aroma of parching lentils, and the savor of roasting papyrus root and garlic told the stage of the morning ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
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