Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Bacchanal   Listen
noun
Bacchanal  n.  
1.
A devotee of Bacchus; one who indulges in drunken revels; one who is noisy and riotous when intoxicated; a carouser. "Tipsy bacchanals."
2.
pl. The festival of Bacchus; the bacchanalia.
3.
Drunken revelry; an orgy.
4.
A song or a dance in honor of Bacchus.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Bacchanal" Quotes from Famous Books



... terrible depth it is. The roar, meanwhile, is horrible. You are stunned by it as by the roar of a great waterfall. You see a wave of unusual magnitude rolling in from far beyond the wild revelry of waters on 'The Rips.' It leaps into the arena as if fresh and eager for the fray, clutches another Bacchanal like itself, and the two towering floods rush swiftly toward the shore. Instinctively you run backward to escape what seems an impending destruction. Very likely a sheet of foam is dashed all around you, shoe-deep, but you are safe—only the ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley

... to empty the glass under the table or out of a window, if this can be done without observation,—and most young men are not very observing at such times. Under the window, outside, sat a party of the cuirassiers drinking, about a dozen of whom made a sudden irruption into that bacchanal chamber, and, with little explanation, proceeded to clear it of its tenants and guests, knocking down, beating, and pitching them headlong down-stairs, until the work was done. There were sundry flesh-bruises inflicted, some small blood-vessels lying near the surface tapped, one collar-bone ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... but he staggered a trifle as he followed the men along the edge of the dancing space to the stairway. The music crashed furiously. Fred's associates were giving all their attention to treading the uncertain steps of their tawdry bacchanal, so they ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... strike other chords; Fill high the cup with Samian wine! Leave battles to the Turkish hordes, And shed the blood of Scio's vine! Hark! rising to the ignoble call— How answers each bold Bacchanal! ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... plains of waving grain. The hedges have put on their best draperies of leaves and flowers, and, girdled in at their waist by double osier bands, stagger luxuriantly along the road like a drunken Bacchanal procession, crowned with festive ivy, and holding aloft their snowy clusters of elder-blossoms like thyrsi. Among their green robes may be seen thousands of beautiful wild-flowers,—the sweet-scented laurustinus, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various

... news pleased Sylvia; who trembling with fear every moment, had expected Brilliard's coming, and found no other benefit by his negotiation, but she must bear what she cannot avoid; but it was rather with the fury of a bacchanal, than a woman of common sense and prudence; all about her pleaded some days in vain, and she hated Brilliard for not doing impossibilities; and it was some time before he could bring her to permit him to speak ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn

... with the enriched Gothic of modern courts, and the finished Corinthian capitals of society, illustrating, as we proceed, with choice specimens of the rustic and the grotesque; now laughing over our wine with the Tuscan bacchanal, or singing a soft tale of love in the ear of some chaste daughter of the composite order; 285trifling perhaps a little harmless badinage with a simple Ionic, or cracking a college joke with a learned Doric; ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... 'Altar of Bacchus' that the poem in question deals. But coming to modern times, many of the Rhine drinking songs are also concerned to some extent with patriotism—an element which seems to go hand in hand with the bacchanal the world over!—and a typical item in this category is the Rheinweinlied of Georg Hervegh, a poet of the first half of the nineteenth century. A better patriotic song of Rhine-land, however, is one by a slightly earlier poet, Wolfgang Mueller, a native of Koenigswinter, ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... more honoured among the slain—peasants mourning over their trampled crops and plundered habitations—and widows and orphans searching for the bodies of husbands and parents, amid the promiscuous carnage of two combats. Thus wo mingled her wildest notes with those of jubilee and bacchanal triumph, and the plain of the Garde Doloureuse formed a singular parallel to the varied maze of human life, where joy and grief are so strangely mixed, and where the confines of mirth and pleasure often border on those ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... The last bacchanal painted by Renovales was in a fashionable bar in New York. His pageant of the Abruzzi was in one of the noblest castles in Russia. Another picture, representing a dance of countesses disguised as shepherdesses ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... o'clock before the Bacchanal laugh began to ring out at intervals—so easily distinguished from the sober laugh, in that it carries in its closing tones the queer ring of ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore

... refrain from a temperance lecture; also from sacred and classical reminiscences. The world is not composed of monks who thought to escape temptation—and vainly too—in stony cells. To some the purple cluster suggests Bacchanal revelry; to others, sitting under one's own vine and fig-tree—in brief, a home. The vine is like woman, the inspiration of the best ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe

... to a wet and fashionable wedding on Monday afternoon, and in the evening had occurred the denouement: Gloria, going beyond her accustomed limit of four precisely timed cocktails, led them on as gay and joyous a bacchanal as they had ever known, disclosing an astonishing knowledge of ballet steps, and singing songs which she confessed had been taught her by her cook when she was innocent and seventeen. She repeated these by request at intervals throughout the evening with such frank conviviality that Anthony, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... oysters are exhausted, brandied fruits are rarely seen, and even port-wine is beginning to look scarce. Old callers occasionally drop in, looking dreadfully sheepish and subdued, and so sorry, and people are evidently arousing themselves from the bacchanal madness into which they were so ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe

... of the Greeks, just before the final catastrophe, the chorus is supposed to advance to the centre of the theatre and sing a bacchanal of frensied exultation. ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed



Words linked to "Bacchanal" :   devotee, drunken reveller, bacchanalian, drunk, imbiber, orgy, drunken reveler, toper, intoxicated, drunken revelry, debauchery, inebriated, revel, bacchic, buff, riot, carousing, lover, bacchanalia, fan, juicer, debauch, orgiastic



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com