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Hiatus   Listen
noun
Hiatus  n.  (pl. L. hiatus, E. hiatuses)  
1.
An opening; an aperture; a gap; a chasm; esp., a defect in a manuscript, where some part is lost or effaced; a space where something is wanting; a break.
2.
(Gram.) The concurrence of two vowels in two successive words or syllables.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hiatus" Quotes from Famous Books



... T. Wilson stand foremost in the rank of this mode of teaching, and the series fills a hiatus in this department of literature. They embody a vast amount of information in every branch of science, and are well worthy the attention of Schoolmasters, Pupil ...
— Brotherly Love - Shewing That As Merely Human It May Not Always Be Depended Upon • Mrs. Sherwood

... was impossible—men strong in gifts and eager for power—the jealous Republic had provided a system of efficient checks, based upon an astute understanding of the fears and claims of self-interest. Venice knew no hiatus in rule; all were leaders to point the way of that inviolable constitution when the supreme voice was temporarily silent, for it was the voice of an impersonal prince, and not of the man—who had absolutely put off individuality ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... "Encyclopedia." Although apparently allowed to choose from the book-shelves, there were frequent evidences of a parent's careful supervision. "I remember," he once wrote to a friend, "many leaves were torn out of a copy of Dryden's Poems, with the comment 'Hiatus haud diflendus,' but I had like all children a kind of Indian sagacity in the discovery of contraband reading, such as a boy carries to a corner for perusal. Sermons I had enough from the pulpit. I don't know that I ever read one sermon of my own accord during my childhood. ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey

... large and hopeless blank in Kelly, the watchman. Mr. Kelly's films ran smoothly up to a certain point, after which they were not even a blur. The Stygian darkness of his hiatus refused to lift by questioning. He had neither seen nor heard anything suspicious or out of the ordinary. About one o'clock in the morning he had laid down his pipe to rest his long-suffering tongue. Immediately afterward, so far as his recollection went, he found himself tied up, ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm

... they would find the angle of the la pucelle bastion demolished to their hands—he, he!"—"But I believe it would surpass your understanding," resumed the chairman, "to fill up the fosse."—"That, I own, is impracticable," replied the bard, "there I should meet with a hiatus ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... most enchanting slippers imaginable; her figure must be a model for the statuary, and at all seasons, and in every situation, arrayed in muslins or silks, which, wondrous to relate, resist the injuries of time, weather, and wear in a manner perfectly astounding. What heroine had ever an hiatus in her stocking, or a fracture in her gown of finest woof? Ye gods! what an insult to suppose her repairing such! The lady's mental accomplishments and qualifications are as follow:—She sings divinely, plays on the harp (and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various

... cold and flat in colour, with a coldness and insipidity, indeed, that take us by surprise, appearing in a country where the taste for luminous and brilliant tints was so strongly rooted. The student of Venetian painting, who wishes to fill up the hiatus which lies between the Golden Age and the revival of the eighteenth century, cannot do better than compare Fumiani's vault in San Pantaleone with Lazzarini's sober and earnest fresco, "The Charity of San Lorenzo Giustiniani," in San Pietro in Castello, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps

... tree of the Batteks. Native chronicles record the descent of Sumatran princes from Alexander the Great, but though the pages of Javanese history are comparatively legible, those of Sumatra, designated in early days as "the older Java," resemble a dim palimpsest, marred by erasure or hiatus, and barely decipherable beneath the lettering on the surface of the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... ten to the taut oars-men, and then a black hiatus of still water showed in the phosphorescent foam. O'Reilly explored it briefly; then he turned back toward the ship. When he had gone as far as he dared, he lit a lantern and, shielding its rays from the shore with, his coat, flashed it seaward. After a ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... You have more than matched the rival pastors That tute a credulous Fatherland; And we admit that you are proved our masters When there is dirty work in hand; But in your lore I notice one hiatus: Your Kaiser's scutcheon with its hideous blot— You've no corrosive in your apparatus ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... Paean vastos telluris hiatus Divinam spirare fidem, ventosque loquaces Exhalare solum, sacris se condidit antris, Incubuitque adyto: ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant

... to dip my pen in this controversy—much undoubtedly may be wrote on both sides of the question—all that concerns me as an historian, is to represent the matter of fact, and render it credible to the reader, that the hiatus in Phutatorius's breeches was sufficiently wide to receive the chesnut;—and that the chesnut, somehow or other, did fall perpendicularly, and piping hot into it, without Phutatorius's perceiving it, or any one else at ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne

... wonderful thing than the Cathedral of St. Martin, which, after all, was no better than dozens of other cathedrals. There was only one Cloth Hall of the rank of this one. It is not easy to say whether or not the Cloth Hall still exists. Its celebrated three-story facade exists, with a huge hiatus in it to the left of the middle, and, of course, minus all glass. The entire facade seemed to me to be leaning slightly forward; I could not decide whether this was an optical delusion or a fact. The enormous central tower is knocked to pieces, and ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett

... reckoning St. John vii. 53 to viii. 11. Now, in order to estimate fairly how many letters the two lost leaves actually contained, I have inquired for the sums of the letters on the leaf immediately preceding, and also on the leaf immediately succeeding the hiatus; and I find them to be respectively 4,337 and 4,303: together, 8,640 letters. But this, it will be seen, is insufficient by 165 letters, or eight lines, for the assumed contents of these two missing leaves. Are we then to suppose that one leaf exhibited somewhere a blank space equivalent to eight ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... came the first hiatus in his regular contributions to the Record. But he resumed work in May, his return being heralded by a paragraph beginning, "This is a beautiful world, and life herein is very sweet," a note theretofore seldom heard in his ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... his qualities in swift review before his mental eye. Brains? Dash? Spaciousness? Initiative? All present and correct. He wondered where Sally imagined the hiatus to exist. ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse

... sight of the dashes that caused the hiatus in her sentence, and made her heart give one great rushing bound. The ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf

... here forgotten some connecting link which should have joined without abruptness the declaration of his own love, and his social view as to the general expediency of matrimony. But Dorothy did not discover the hiatus. ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... and then galloped off. Captain Veragua—for that, Jim afterwards learned, was the soldier's name—glanced through the paper, and then began to call the roll of the prisoners. Most of them were present; but a hiatus now and again occurred, which was filled in by a voice responding, ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood

... nations, such as some of the American Indians, work when they work no other; and, lastly, it is a metal of which, in its unalloyed state, no relics have been found in England. Stone and bone first; then bronze or copper and tin combined; but no copper alone. I cannot get over this hiatus—cannot imagine a metallurgic industry beginning with the use of alloys. Such a phenomenon is a plant without the seed; and, as such, indicates ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... vintage of the Champagne zone, No stalled chargers neighing for the Park, No 9.5 cigars (I have my own); I do not ask, who am the flower of thrift, For Orient-rugs or "Persian apparatus"; Nothing is lacking save a bath and lift To fill my soul's hiatus. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various

... functional weakness. What is natural asceticism but a lack of vigor? Does it not tend to close the avenues between the soul and the universe? "Is it not so much death?" The accounts of Emerson show him to have been a man in whom there was almost a hiatus between the senses and the most inward spirit of life. The lower register of sensations and emotions which domesticate a man into fellowship with common life was weak. Genial familiarity was to him impossible; ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman

... dressmaker arrives. She tries on a gown, she exerts all her strength, but cannot make the hooks and eyes meet. The waiting maid is called. After a two horse-power pull, a regular thirteenth labor of Hercules, a hiatus of two inches manifests itself. The inexorable dressmaker cannot conceal from Caroline the fact that her form is altered. Caroline, the aerial Caroline, threatens to become like Madame Deschars. ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac

... his whole power of dramatic movement was scrupulously confined; conventional rules of every conceivable denomination hurried out to restrain his genius, with the alacrity of Lilliputians pegging down a Gulliver; wherever he turned he was met by a hiatus or a pitfall, a blind-alley or a mot bas. But his triumph was not simply the conquest of these refractory creatures; it was something much more astonishing. It was the creation, in spite of them, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... completely annihilated. I have myself experimented under such conditions, and attempted to realise the duration of time by counting steadily, one, two, three, four, &c., and had no knowledge whatever that between, say, "four" and "five" there was a complete hiatus of several minutes when, for me, time had vanished; I was still counting steadily when the anaesthetic had passed away, and it was quite impossible to realise that such time had elapsed, as I had not reached more than the twelfth count, whereas, according ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein

... cell of his top-stage hadn't bothered him. The concept of landing on a planet that couldn't come closer to home than some twenty-seven million miles was mere peanuts. Isolation for a year was no more than a hiatus, a period of adventure that would be rewarded many-fold. Sally? So she might not wait but there were others; he'd envisioned himself fighting them off with a club after his successful return. Hell, they'd swarmed him before his take-off, starting with the moment ...
— Instinct • George Oliver Smith

... are mentioned only as indications of the scheme, as explaining some exclusions. There are other exclusions, which have been made, not because the individuals were not men of note, but because it seemed that the story of their lives would fill no hiatus among the volumes of the ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... give two striking examples of this. The royal lists of the time of the Ramessides suppress, at the end of the XVIIIth dynasty, Amenothes IV. and several of his successors, and give the following sequence—Amenothes III., Harmhabit, Ramses I., without any apparent hiatus; Manetho, on the contrary, replaces the kings who were omitted, and keeps approximately to the real order between Horos (Amenothes III.) and Armais (Harmhabit). Again, the official tradition of the XXth dynasty gives, between Ramses II. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... sovereign," she said. "Our bill wherever we stop—" The hiatus was more eloquent ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells

... with this instrument great things were achieved by his successors. He methodised and regulated versification, insisting on rich and exact rhymes, condemning all licence and infirmity of structure, condemning harshness of sound, inversion, hiatus, negligence in accommodating the cesura to the sense, the free gliding of couplet into couplet. It may be said that he rendered verse mechanical; but within the arrangement which he prescribed, admirable effects were attainable by the mastery of genius. He pondered every word, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... success, he must develop himself in quiet, and aloof from the distracting influences of other methods and men. It is easy to perceive, with the complete record of his life before us, that this experience of labor and thought upon the Deerfield farm, although at first sight forming an hiatus in his career, was really its most pregnant period, and that without it the Fuller who is now so much admired might have been lost to us, and the spirit that appears in his later works never have been awakened. It is, indeed, a spirit that can find no congenial dwelling-place ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... "Palmerston!" he would cry. "The man who involved us in the crime of the Crimean War!" And then he would break off with an angry toss of his leonine head; but the accents of immeasurable scorn filled the hiatus in his speech. ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.

... tells you that the details of his life are not tellable, that they would be like those of Tilly or Casanova, and so indecent, and compromise so many people, that we must be content to look at his life through an impenetrable veil. Then in the letters and diary the perpetual hiatus, and asterisks, and initials are exceedingly tantalising; but altogether it is very amusing. As to Byron, I have never had but one opinion about his poetry, which I think of first-rate excellence; an enormous heresy, of course, more ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... save those," I assented. The realization broke unbelievable across a momentary hiatus; brought me down from the false heights, ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... observations on callipedy, and he refuses to state the results of his Meditations on this subject, because it would be difficult to formulate them in terms of prudery, and they would be but little understood, and misinterpreted. Such reserve produces an hiatus in this part of the book; but the author has the pleasant satisfaction of leaving a fourth work to be accomplished by the next century, to which he bequeaths the legacy of all that he has not accomplished, a negative munificence which may well be followed by all those who may be troubled ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... hiatus in my diary here which I must try and bridge over by a footnote especially as my story seems to run off the rails when I say that "nothing further" had come in from Suvla. At 10.50 a.m. a further cable ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton

... honor, unless they contribute something toward it. For this reason we have left the first four weeks uninsured. I am not certain on this point, but if another solution seems better, I believe that the law should cover also this hiatus. There is no ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... Ethel had once described it, but with far more force and beauty; there was Decius's impassioned address to the beauteous land he was about to leave, and the remembrances of his Roman hearth, his farm, his children, whom he quitted for the pale shadows of an uncertain Elysium. There was a great hiatus in the middle, and Norman had many more authorities to consult, but the summing-up was nearly complete, and Ethel thought the last lines grand, as they spoke of the noble consul's name living for evermore, added to the examples that nerve ardent souls to devote ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... is a supposed hiatus in the Mishna text to the following effect: "In Jerusalem they sounded through the whole city during the session of the Sanhedrin (i.e., till noon); but in Jamnia they did not sound in the city, but only before the tribunal of justice. And ...
— Hebrew Literature

... heap of wreckage which had been the observation car, peering anxiously into its depths ("Looking for I. O. W. probably," surmised the agent), and two commercial gentlemen from the smoker whiling away a commercially unproductive hiatus by playing pinochle on a suitcase held across their knees. Glancing at the vast, swollen, blue-black billows rolling up the sky, Banneker guessed that their ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... curious indentations in it which prove that. The marks of two teeth, with a hiatus between, which you will see if you look closely," said the stranger, handing the small bit of tobacco to Sir Walter, "make that point evident beyond peradventure. The Captain lost an eye-tooth in one of his later raids; it was knocked ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs

... was a hiatus. Washington watched every move on the board, and he was in a good position to do this, for he was clerk of this committee, and also one other. He received no salary as private secretary, but these two clerkships, procured by his benefactor, ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... [23] This hiatus we are in some measure able to supply from a note in the Appendix to Mrs. Thomson's Life of Ralegh, (Note B. Notices concerning Tobacco by Dr. Thomson,) p. 458. "In the Mexican or Aztuk tongue, it is called yetle; in Algonkin, sema; ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... of getting into orbit took them around the planet several times, and it was a more impressive spectacle at each circuit. Of course, Marduk had a population of almost two billion, and had been civilized, with no hiatus of Neobarbarism, since it had first been colonized in the Fourth Century. Even so, the Space Vikings were amazed—and stubbornly refusing to show it—at what they saw ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper

... eighth syllable; every line ending in a trisyllabic word, rhyming (not always) with a word preceding the caesura. A dissyllable or trisyllable precedes the caesura. Rhythm of Tennyson's Locksley Hall, proceeding by stress only, independent of vowel-quantity or hiatus. In line seven, 'Keranus' must be pronounced in four syllables, Kiaranus. Refers to the ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous

... also carried down with them, as slaves or allies, a portion of this old Sclavonic population (to which Dr. Latham will perhaps agree); and that this fact caused a hiatus, which was gradually filled by tribes who after all were little better than nomad hunters, and would occupy (quite nominally) a very large ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... he resolved to combat the heresy with its own weapons. He composed a vast number of hymns. Only four have come down to us, and they are as perfect in form as in matter. You will scarcely find anywhere a false quantity or a hiatus. The Ambrosian hymns remained the type of all the hymnic poetry of succeeding centuries. Even Prudentius, great poet as he was, was manifestly influenced in the choice of metre and the composition of the strophe by the Deus ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore

... valuable luggage, in a nameless ship, never to return; if Uncle Contarine and the mother at Ballymahon believed his stories, they must have been a very simple pair; as it was a very simple rogue indeed who cheated them." Indeed, if any one is anxious to fill up this hiatus in Goldsmith's life, the best thing he can do is to discard Goldsmith's suspicious record of his adventures, and put in its place the faithful record of the adventures of Mr. Barry Lyndon, when that modest youth left his mother's ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black

... inquirer, on account of its analysis of the Tertiary flora into its separate types, Cretaceous, Austral, Tropical, and Boreal, each of which has its separate and different history—and for the announcement that "the hiatus, which, in the idea of most geologists, intervened between the close of the Cretaceous and the beginning of the Tertiary, appears to have had no existence, so far as concerns the vegetation; that in general it was not by means of a total overthrow, followed by a complete ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... Mervale suggested, after an interval, "it is I that you are crushing." He sighed,—though not very deeply,—and continued, with a hiatus: "They would have wedded me to Lucius Rossmore, and I ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell

... responsibility during the transitional period for external and internal security and for public order of settlements and Israeli citizens. Direct negotiations to determine the permanent status of Gaza and West Bank had begun in September 1999 after a three-year hiatus, but have been derailed by a second intifadah that broke out in September 2000. The resulting widespread violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel's military response, and instability within the Palestinian Authority continue to undermine progress ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... twice a week in the Capital grounds, and Senators, Cyprians, Ethiops, and children rallied to enjoy; a theatre or two played time-honored dramas with Thespian companies; a couple of scholars lectured in the sombre Smithsonian Institution; an intrigue and a duel filled some most doleful hiatus; and a clerk absconded with half a million, or an Indian agent robbed the red men and fell back to the protection of his "party." A very dismal, a very dirty, and a very Democratic settlement was the American Capital, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... are reckoned among the most valuable ornaments in Mardi. So open wide thy strong box, Hohora, and show thy treasures. What a gallant array! standing shoulder to shoulder, without a hiatus between. A complete set of jewelry, indeed, thought Peepi. But, it seems, not destined for him; Media leaving it to the present proprietor, whether his dentals should change owners ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... Nemeaeus hiatus, Exoriturque Canis, latratque Canicula flammas Et rabit igne suo geminatque incendia solis, Qua subdente facem terris radiosque ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... that you had the luck to meet and study one of the rarest female crooks our mysterious Creator ever turned out. A face like an angel and a heart like a devil. Let time pass and presently you'll see that this is merely a hiatus in a career that is only begun. Much good and valuable work lies before you; and to abandon a profession for which you are specially suited is to fly in the face of ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts

... pure expression of his individuality. He made short cuts to the heart of his theme, perhaps more unconscious than uncaring that his line of approach could not be followed by his general readers, as a mathematician leaves a large hiatus in his demonstration, seeing the result the less experienced must work out ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman

... a long hiatus here in the published " Diary," and upon its resumption we find Fanny at Bath with the Thrales, in April, 1780; but from her letters to Mr. Crisp we learn that she returned, at Christmas, 1779, to her father's house in St. Martin's -street, and spent there the intervening period, frequently ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay

... event of a hiatus in the Government from any source whatsoever, it shall be his duty immediately to call an election, and in the meantime act as Executive until the regularly elected authorities can again assume charge of ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House



Words linked to "Hiatus" :   interruption, subsidence, reprieve, piece, remission, hiatus hernia, remittal, defervescence, foramen magnum, respite, foramen, opening, gap, suspension, break, Monro's foramen



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