Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

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




Lilliputian   Listen
noun
Lilliputian  n.  
1.
One belonging to a very diminutive race described in Swift's "Voyage to Lilliput" or "Gulliver's Travels".
2.
Hence: A person or thing of very small size.






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





"Lilliputian" Quotes from Famous Books



... rush of sound burst joyously on the silence—the slumbering trees awoke, their leaves moved, their dark branches quivered, and the grasses lifted up their green lilliputian sword-blades. Bells!—and SUCH bells!—tongues of melody that stormed the air with sweetest eloquence—round, rainbow bubbles of music that burst upon the wind, and ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli

... of his headset followed, after which Mac oozed into the Lilliputian air lock at the bottom, now rear, wall of the cabin. He nodded to Ruiz, who secured the air lock, then adjusted his suit control to force a little pressure into his suit. Gradually the suit became livable. Then he cracked the other air-lock valve and allowed ...
— Tight Squeeze • Dean Charles Ing

... garden-pots. There's no time to be lost, I can tell you, if you mean to save their precious lives. Miss Ada is upon her last legs, and master Diomede in a galloping consumption—two of our prime geraniums, ma'am!" quoth Dick, with a condescending nod to Miss Wolfe, as that Lilliputian lady looked up at him with a stare of unspeakable mystification; "queerish names, a'tot they? Well, there are the patterns of the sizes, and there's the order; so if your little gentleman will but look the pots out, I have left the cart in Jem Tyler's yard, (I've a message to Jem ...
— Miss Philly Firkin, The China-Woman • Mary Russell Mitford

... as it was at the period in question. Our battles were obstinate and frequent; but as the quarrels of the two families and their relations on each side, were as bitter and pugnacious in fairs and markets as ours were in school, we hit upon the plan of holding our Lilliputian engagements upon the same days on which our fathers and brothers contested. According to this plan, it very often happened that the corresponding parties were successful, and as frequently, that whilst the Caseys were well ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton

... talk; you quite confuse me with being so silly,' said Mrs. Gibson, fluttered and annoyed as she usually was with the Lilliputian darts' Cynthia flung at her. She had recourse to her accustomed feckless piece of retaliation—bestowing some favour on Molly; and this did not ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... who are technically called flat-catchers, and who picked up a very pretty living by a quick hand, a rattling tongue, a deal board, three thimbles, and a pepper-corn. The game they played with these three curious articles is a sort of Lilliputian game at cups and balls; and the beauty of it lies in dexterously seeming to place the pepper-corn under one particular thimble, getting a green to bet that it was there, and then winning his money by showing that it ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... day was dissipated. This being the 24th of May and the Queen's birthday; to commemorate the event and keep our loyalty in good trim, we fired, even under the ramparts of Cronenborg Castle, which is not always liked, a royal salute; and, when we had accomplished about one-half of our Lilliputian cannonade, a large French war-steamer passed within thirty yards of us, and, not heeding the approximation of such a terrible and sensitive neighbour, we continued our firing, and sent a broadside right into the Frenchman's ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross

... matter of the hair. When next the street-boy sorrowfully exclaims on your passing that 'it's no wonder the barbers all 'list for soldiers,' or some puny idiot at your club—a lilliputian model of popular 'manhood'—sniggers to his friend behind his coffee as you come in: call to mind pictures of certain brave 'tailed men' of old, at the winking of whose eyelid your tiny club 'man' would have expired on the instant. Threaten ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne

... of diving, feeding, coquetting, quarreling swimmers, relieving the colorless ice with groups of jetty velvet and scoter ducks, gray and white-winged coots, crested mergansers in their gorgeous spring plumage, and fat, lazy black ducks, with Lilliputian blue and green winged teal, filling the air with the whirr of swift pinions, and the ceaseless murmur of the mating myriads, rested from their long northward journey, a host such as mortal eye hath seldom beheld, and which it hath fallen to ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall

... big Pennsylvania Railroad stone bridge is still burning, and the efforts of the firemen to quench or stay the progress of the flames are as futile as were those of Gulliver's Lilliputian firemen. The mass, which unquestionably forms a funeral pyre for thousands of victims who lie buried beneath it, is likely to burn for weeks to come. The flames are not active, but burn away in a sullen, ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... pleased remembrance builds delight on woe. At every danger pants thy consort's breast, And gaping infants squall to hear the rest. How did I tremble, when, by thousands bound, I saw thee stretch'd on Lilliputian ground! When scaling armies climb'd up every part, Each step they trod I felt upon my heart. 70 But when thy torrent quench'd the dreadful blaze, King, queen, and nation staring with amaze, Full in my view how all my husband ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... noticed a pack of sparrows round some crumbs perchance that you have thrown out from your window? Suddenly the rest of the flock will set upon one. There is a tremendous Lilliputian hubbub, a tossing of tiny wings and heads, a babel of shrill chirps. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... Over soon), I took an Excursion ('twas in the third year of my Residence here) into North Holland, to visit the famous village of Brock. Here the streets are divided by little Rivulets, for all the world like Lilliputian Canals; the Houses and Summer-houses all of Wood, painted Green and White, very handsome, albeit whimsical in their shape, and scrupulously neat. The Inhabitants have a peculiar association among themselves, and scarcely ever admit a Stranger within their Doors. During ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... King alone. For three days this selfsame crowd has followed him, and stared at him, and cheered him, but their ardour remains undiminished. All the school-children of the city, down to little mites of things who can scarcely toddle, have been brought out to see him. Boy-soldiers, with Lilliputian muskets, salute him as he passes. A mob of men, heedless of the gendarmes or of the horses' hoofs, run before the cavalcade, in the burning heat, and cheer hoarsely. Every window is lined with ladies in the gayest ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey

... were anxious moments coming for the man who kept on the open veldt the twentieth anniversary of his joining Her Majesty's army with gladness in his heart. After he had found the column and had got into the Lilliputian forest with its stunted, bushy trees and its sandy soil, he was brought face to face with the greatest enemy that can harass, fret, and wear down nerves of steel—absence of water. A commander whose mind is racked by the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of finding ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie

... feet, and the circumference of the body fourteen and a half feet; while its thigh-bone was twenty times the size of that of the modern iguana. Vast as was the inhabitant of the ancient world, it was herbivorous, like that of the comparatively Lilliputian ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... perfect and beautiful, but cast in a Lilliputian mould. It stood barely a foot high, the most delicate thing he had ever looked upon. Mature in every detail of its proportion, the dainty hoofs, the fragile legs, smooth-coated body, and small, wide-antlered head—a miniature eight-pointer—made such a vision as might ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... with its lake and pheasant-preserve; along the River Lys, with its miles of flax, soaked in this peculiarly potent water, now drying in countless little cones, like the tents of some vast Lilliputian army, and so at ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... me, he wandered. Literature is not less a conventional art than painting or sculpture; and it is the least striking, as it is the most comprehensive of the three. To hear a strain of music, to see a beautiful woman, a river, a great city, or a starry night, is to make a man despair of his Lilliputian arts in language. Now, to gain that emphasis which seems denied to us by the very nature of the medium, the proper method of literature is by selection, which is a kind of negative exaggeration. It is the right of the literary artist, as Thoreau was on the point of seeing, to leave out ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... me this literary attempt is quite indifferent—a Lilliputian affair. In comparing my work with other work of the same kind, I find a sort of relative satisfaction; but I see the intrinsic futility of it, and the insignificance of its success or failure. I do not ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... that the adjectival epithet which is prefixt to all the virtues is invariably the epithet which geographically describes the country that I am in. For instance, not to take any real name, if I am in the kingdom of Lilliput, I hear of the Lilliputian virtues. I hear courage, I hear common sense, and I hear political wisdom called by that name. If I cross to the neighboring Republic Blefusca—for since Swift's time it has become a Republic—I hear all these virtues ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser

... the daring flights of the previous century, writers contented themselves with marking time. Chenedolle, whose verse Madame de Stael said to be as lofty as Lebanon, and whose fame is lilliputian to-day, was, with Ducis, the representative of their advance-guard. In painting, with Fragonard, Greuze and Gros, there was a greater stir of genius, yet without anything corresponding in ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton



Words linked to "Lilliputian" :   petite, colloquialism, flyspeck, piddling, piffling, character, little, trivial, fictional character, fictitious character, Lilliput



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com