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Rotund   Listen
noun
Rotund  n.  A rotunda. (Obs.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Rotund" Quotes from Famous Books



... he meets is him. I only hope he won't take it into his stupid head to mistake me for him,—not so unlikely a thing, after all." And the youthful Corrie shook his head with much gravity, as he surveyed his rotund little legs complacently. ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne

... truly majestic piece of humor; it gives you the note, as it were, of Chambord. It opens on each landing to a vast guard-room, in four arms, radiations of the winding shaft. My guide made me climb to the great open-work lantern which, springing from the roof at the termination of the rotund staircase (surmounted here by a smaller one), forms the pinnacle of the bristling crown of Cham- bord. This lantern is tipped with a huge fleur-de-lis in stone, - the only one, I believe, that the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... Malaitans, was fat. And of his fatness it would seem had been begotten his good nature with its allied laziness. But as the fly in his ointment of jovial irresponsibility was his wife, Lenerengo—the prize shrew of Somo, who was as lean about the middle and all the rest of her as her husband was rotund; who was as remarkably sharp-spoken as he was soft-spoken; who was as ceaselessly energetic as he was unceasingly idle; and who had been born with a taste for the world as sour in her mouth as ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London

... because she is sheet-anchored and gripped to the Mother Country. We may like it or dislike it. We may dispute and argue round about. The fact remains, without any screaming or flag waving, or postprandial loyalty expansions of rotund oratory and a rotunder waist line—Canada is sheet-anchored to England by an invisible, intangible, almost indescribable tie. That is one reason why she rejected reciprocity. That is why at a colossal ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... perishing ruling class in the world's history. Fat with power and possession, drunken with success, and made soft by surfeit and by cessation of struggle, they are like the drones clustered about the honey vats when the worker-bees spring upon them to end their rotund existence. ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... bull-proof, and no weeds grew in the shelters of the fences. Many of the level fields were in alfalfa. Others, following the rotations, bore crops planted the previous fall, or were in preparation for the spring-planting. Still others, close to the brood barns and pens, were being grazed by rotund Shropshire and French-Merino ewes, or were being hogged off by white Gargantuan brood-sows that brought a flash of pleasure in his eyes as ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... box, and the orchestra had only just begun the overture, when the usher knocked and Blanch, followed by the rest of the family, entered. That young lady greeted Alice with an effusive kiss at once, and the next instant she found herself shaking hands with a rotund and gray-haired lady of dignified bearing, but of very kind and courteous manner. An introduction to Edith followed, and then Frank acknowledged her polite "How do you do, Mr. Nason?" with his very ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn

... up upon crutches, tottering on the brink of the sewers—shores I mean—of eternity; behold his crushed and crownless hat—his hollow eyes—his rheumy visage—look at that petition penned on his breast. Poh! 'tis a surveyor's notice to pull down. But, then, look at that plurality parson with rotund prominence of portico, and red brick cheeks of vast extent, and that high, steeple-crowned hat—look at the smug, mean, insignificant dwarf of a meeting-house, sinking up to its knees in a narrow lane, and looking as blank as a wall, with a trap-door of a mouth, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various

... that it is sterile. The flesh does not change color on exposure to the air. The tubes are plane, adnate, very slightly depressed around the stem or nearly free, yellowish white when young, becoming dark olive green in age from the color of the spores. The tube mouths are small and rotund. The spores caught on white paper are dark olive green. They are elliptical usually, with rounded ends, 12—15 x 4—5 mu. The stem is white when young, with a tinge of yellow ochre, and pale flesh color below. It is marked with somewhat parallel elevated ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson

... produced more famous men than any town same size in 'Merika,—Russell Sage, General New,—comin'" (to those in the bar-room); "say, you fellers, can't you wait?" As he disappeared in the rear we heard his rotund voice, "What'll you take? Was jest tellin' that chap with the threshin'-machine a thing or two about this country. Rye? no, thet's Bourbon—the reel corn juice—ten years ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... time Mrs. Ambrose reigned in undisputed possession of the woman's social rights in Billingsfield. She was an excellent person in every way. She had once been handsome and even now she was fine-looking, of goodly stature, if also of goodly weight; rosy, even rubicund, in complexion, and rotund of feature; looking at you rather severely out of her large grey eyes, but able to smile very cheerfully and to show an uncommonly good set of teeth; twisting her thick grey hair into a small knot at the back of her head and then covering it with a neatly made cap which she considered ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford

... embarrassed by this reception, and started to back out hastily, but was stopped by the rotund figure of ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt

... toward a large faded sign that read, "Killibrew's Grocery." A little later Peter entered a big, rather clean store which smelled of spices, coffee, and a faint dash of decayed potatoes. Mr. Killibrew himself, a big, rotund man, with a round head of prematurely white hair, was visible in a little glass office at the end of his store. Even through the glazed partition Peter could see Mr. Killibrew smiling as he sat comfortably at his desk. Indeed, the grocer's chief assets were a really ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... humor—and Tewfick Pasha liked always to be kept in good humor—he had touches of that boyish charm that had made him the enfant gate of Paris and Vienna as well as Cairo and Constantinople. An enfant no more, in the robustly rotund forties, his cheerful self-indulgence demanded still of his environment that smiling acquiescence that kept ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... bestowed upon them many kine, O perpetuator of Yadu's race, Then the Vrishni dame (Kunti), comforted a little, addressed the daughter of Virata, saying,—O faultless daughter of Virata, thou shouldst not indulge in grief. For the sake of thy husband, O thou of rotund hips, protect the child in thy womb.—Having said these words, O thou of great splendour, Kunti ceased. With her permission I have brought Subhadra here. It was even thus, O giver of honours, that thy daughter's son met with his death. Cast off thy burning ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... and bonfires blazed," is a phrase of the Doctor's which sets all the caverns of the mind ringing, even though its historical setting is long forgotten. But unction is the chief feature of the history: there is a rotund finality about the author's spacious utterances, and a dodging of investigation by means of pious generalisations. The book has all the effect of a benediction. When it is really too tiresome to inquire into all the authorities on some affair of magnitude, it is ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... it were taken upon the sacrament." From the chancel we passed through key-holes to the upper end of a cell which stood apart, full of burning candles at mid-day, where we perceived a priest with his crown shaven, walking about as if he were in expectation of visitors; presently there came a rotund figure of a woman, and a very pretty girl behind her, and they went upon their knees before him to confess their sins. "My spiritual father," said the good woman, "I labour under a burden too heavy to be borne, unless you in your mercy will lighten it; I married a member ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne

... with much difficulty, and joined us. The horse was small but beautiful, a sorrel with long mane and tail; had he been hoodwinked he might perhaps have been mistaken for a Cordovese jaca; he was broad-chested, and rotund in his hind quarters, and possessed much of the plumpness and sleekness which distinguish that breed, but looking in his eyes you would have been undeceived in a moment; a wild savage fire darted from ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... it!" cried the Older Man, looking now far too old for his years. "If I have summoned up in you that spirit I have not done ill! Get you forward in that mood and when you come to my time of life you will be as rotund and hopeful a fellow ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc

... Vinet! She has the frankness of a man and the tenderness of a mother. There is something of her youth still left at forty-six; not her figure—that is rotund simplicity itself—but in the clearness of her brown eyes and the finely cut profile before it reaches her double chin, and the dimples in her hands, well ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith

... the people of all others with whom I would like to worship to-day," I thought; "and I hope that that rotund old lady, whose face beams under the shadow of her deep bonnet like a harvest moon through a fleecy cloud, will feel moved to speak." I plucked a few buds from the sweet-briar bush, fastened them in my button-hole, and promptly followed the old lady into the ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe

... old. He was happy and good-natured, and it was easy for him to smile. While his body was slim in the Asiatic way, his face was rotund. It was round, like the moon, and it irradiated a gentle complacence and a sweet kindliness of spirit that was unusual among his countrymen. Nor did his looks belie him. He never caused trouble, never took part in wrangling. He did not gamble. His soul was not harsh enough for the soul that must ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London

... countess sprang lightly from her couch, and pressed her handkerchief to her lips to smother her laughter; the little Amelie, overwhelmed by merriment, buried her face in her mother's skirts; the maid giggled discreetly; while Jocrisse, clasping his rotund stomach with both hands, bent his head toward his knees, and betrayed his suppressed hilarity by his shaking shoulders. Even the more important of the two physicians pursed his lips into a smile, and proffered his snuff-box to his colleague, who, ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai

... to do. He was a cheerful, rotund little man with round simple eyes and a smile that went all ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole

... jurisdiction, the exact locality where the crime was committed being in doubt." He seemed to be the spokesman. The other, shorter and rotund, kept an amiable silence. "We hope you will see the wisdom of waiving extradition," he went on. "It ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... perfumes, the party entered without delay the inner apartments adorned with many precious gems of pure rays. Entering those apartments, everybody, O Bharata, began to sport, according to his pleasure. The women of the party, all of full rotund hips and deep bosoms and handsome eyes, and gait unsteady with wine began to sport there at the command of Krishna and Partha. Some amongst the women sported as they liked in the woods, some in the waters, and some ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... sergeant speaks a little group of officers issues from the battalion commander's tent. Foremost among them, in loose flapping raiment and broad-brimmed hat and green goggles, the rotund and portly shape of Major Plummer, ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King

... ill-conditioned skin, instead of the glossy fur with which it nestled into rest; and it finds its coat a few sizes too large, until an industrious search for food shall have restored its figure to its original rotund proportions. ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... for instance, fairly shouted his, while Rodd hesitated, seeming to search for an even smaller word. Carpenter's "here," was little more than a whisper, as might come from one who was making an admission which he wished circumstances had ordered otherwise. And the rotund little McWilliams answered in a manner that convinced McGee that Mac was really wishing ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke

... age of three, when my father resigned his Boston pulpit for the professorship of Rhetoric in Andover Seminary. I remember distinctly our arrival at the white mansion with the large, handsome grounds, the distant and mysterious grove, the rotund horse-chestnut trees, venerable and solemn, nearly a century old—to this day a horse-chestnut always seems to me like a theological trustee—and the sweep of playground so vast, so soft, so green, so fragrant, so clean, that the baby cockney ran imperiously ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various

... spherule, globule, vesicle, bulb, bullet, pellet, pelote^, clew, pill, marble, pea, knob, pommel, horn; knot (convolution) 248. curved surface, hypersphere; hyperdimensional surface. V. render spherical &c adj.; form into a sphere, sphere, roll into a ball; give rotundity &c n.; round. Adj. rotund; round &c (circular) 247; cylindric, cylindrical, cylindroid^; columnar, lumbriciform^; conic, conical; spherical, spheroidal; globular, globated^, globous^, globose; egg shaped, bell shaped, pear shaped; ovoid, oviform; gibbous; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... and in a moment a rotund and loquacious landlady appeared. Yes, the drawing-room was to let; would the reverend gentleman come up and see it? Mr Bunker went up, and approved. They readily agreed upon terms, and the landlady, charmed with her new lodger's appearance and manners, ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston

... has been thy warfare for ever. First, thou stealest from the rotund face its joyous dimples; then, dost thou gradually imprint remorseless furrows on the ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... came to a pause. Presently Aunt Mary asked Willy, who sat resigned to his fate, calm and solemn as a Buddha, his hands clasped over his rotund stomach, if he thought that Maggie's state was one to cause immediate anxiety, to which he replied: "My sisters think of nothing but pleasure. The trouble girls are in a house is more than any one would believe. Here I am, I can do nothing; every night ...
— Spring Days • George Moore

... rose again, and swept hurriedly out to sea to meet a small black-and-white speck that was coming in. It was a little, rotund, parrot-beaked puffin, loaded with fish—sprats—four of them set crossways in his wonderful bill. He seemed to know nothing about the skua till that worthy was upon him, and then, as he fled, after a furious chase of about three minutes, he suddenly surrendered ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... the rotund boat swung into the Brooklyn dock. Her gunwales rubbed and squeaked along the straining piles green with sea slime; deck chains clinked, cog-wheels clattered, the stifling smell of dock water gave place to the fresher odour ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... gay, rotund, and good-humored, a sayer of "quodlibets," a maker of anagrams, always busy, represented the capable and bantering bourgeois, with faculty without success, obstinate toil without result; he was also the embodiment ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... down in a chair near a window that had been his favorite. Settled there, he remembered the position of a near-by bell, just under the window-curtain.... Yes, there it was. He rang, and a waiter came—a rotund, pink-faced, John-Bullish waiter, with little white tufts on each cheek. Ayling ordered a whisky-and-soda, and when presently the waiter brought it Ayling asked how long he had been in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... friendship and good company never ceased to have a charm for both poets. Mrs. Browning loved him almost as a brother: her husband told Bayard Taylor, on the day when that good poet and charming man called upon them, and after another visitor had departed—a man with a large rosy face and rotund body, as Taylor describes him—"there goes one of the most splendid men living—a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp

... the Lump worked steadily away at the building of the castle. Pollyooly did the digging; now and again the Lump would pat a wall placidly. They had been at work for rather more than half an hour; and the castle was already beginning to wear the rotund air so dear to the eye of the builder when the progressive prince ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson

... a part of her as her breathing, contended in a vigorous fight against her much too solid flesh. It was a certain aid to wakefulness that her two children, deep in audible slumber, kept her in a state of active concern lest their inert and rotund little masses of slippery flesh should elude her grasp, and wreck the proprieties of the hour by flopping on the floor. There was also a further sleep deterrent in the fact that immediately before her sat Mr. McFettridge, whose usually erect form, yielding to the soporific influences ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor

... green, strangely different from the blue greens and black greens of our northern pines. The lofty or normal type with the umbrella-formed top is almost peculiar to Central and Southern Italy. In other parts of the south of Europe, though often attaining large dimensions, it remains more dwarf and rotund in shape. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... spherical form, it lurks in dark places, which it soon makes insanitary. In the open it crouches among dead leaves which have gathered in the fork of a tree, and will construct a web which spans the coconut avenue with its stays. From one aspect its rotund body invites a good-humoured smile, for the marking exactly simulates the features of a tabby cat, well fed, sleepy, and in placid mood. Venom of virulence to kill a bat almost instantly would be severe enough to a human being. This dirty, obese spider deserves little ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... About twelve o'clock, when the market was in full swing, there appeared at the front door a tall, middle-aged peasant, with a hooked nose and a cap on the back of his head; it was Robelin, the farmer of Geffosses. Shortly afterwards came Liebard, the farmer of Toucques, short, rotund and ruddy, wearing a grey ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert

... Impossible to take a flying leap into the train! He missed the train. And then he reflectively stroked his short grey beard (he had no moustache, and his upper lip was very long), and then he smoothed down his new overcoat over his rotund form. ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... the moment from that of the king of beasts which led to the tragedy under the walls of Babylon, where the blood of the lovers dyed the mulberry red! It is the evidence of a bloodless thing, a rotund and turreted medusa, the leader of a disorderly procession, soundless and feeble as becomes beings almost as impalpable as the sea itself. Shadows of fish exquisitely framed flit and dance. I see naught but shadows, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... not far off. Colonel Long's is a typical Southern establishment: a white house, or rather three houses, all of one story, built on to each other as beehives are set in a row, all porches and galleries. No one at home but the cook, a rotund, broad-faced woman, with a merry eye, whose very appearance suggested good cooking and hospitality; the Missis and the children had gone up to the river fishing; the Colonel was somewhere about the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... Robbie was there too, rotund and rubicund, but not just the Robbie who had danced the tango with McRae before the clubhouse on the occasion of the ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick

... contour of his body, not an angle was apparent. His garments were quite filled by his body, arms and legs—so that there was not a wrinkle to be seen anywhere. It was a form usually styled "dapper." His face was also of the rotund shape—the features all tolerably regular, with the exception of the nose—that, like the nasal organ of his comrade, was nez retrousse—the turn-up being infinitely more pronounced. The expression was equally indicative ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... seems moribund! O teach them, 'tis not she displays The panic of a purse rotund, Eternal dread of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... man as to legs and arms, but fearfully rotund as to paunch, and he had a yellow leather face and black eyes which, though gleaming like beads, seemed to have a muddy cast. Bobby rose to greet him with a cordiality in no degree abashed ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester

... tribute, having momentarily withdrawn himself from mamma, whose loyal escort he was once more. Willie was a shade balder than last year, when he had played his great part in Cally's life and then sunk below her horizon; a shade more rotund; a shade rosier in the face. But he was as genial as ever, being well lined now with a menu to his own taste and ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... being at Berlin, one day took a fancy to make an excursion on foot to the quarter where our soldiers in the public houses indulged in the pleasures of the dance. He saw a quartermaster of the cavalry of his guard walking with a coarse, rotund German woman, and amused himself listening to the gallant remarks made by this quartermaster to his beautiful companion. "Let us enjoy ourselves, my dear," said he; "it is the 'tondu' who pays the musicians with the 'kriches' of your sovereign. Let us take our own gait; long live joy! and forward"—"Not ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant

... that if they once got them off their Legs they should have them at Advantage; Besides, they had been inform'd, though falsely, that the British Ladies had not good Legs, and then at all Events this Scheme would expose them. With these pernicious Views they set themselves to work, and form'd a Rotund of near 7 Yards about, and sent the Pattern over by the Sussex Smugglers with an Intent that it should be seiz'd and expos'd to Publick View; which happen'd accordingly, and made its first Appearance at a Great Man's House on that Coast, whose Lady claim'd it as her peculiar Property. In it she ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... the rotund little real estate agent, who came forward to greet us, a look of surprise on his round face, I looked through the window at the woman from whose sight ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison

... sake of the merits of your fathers, God hath caused you to find a treasure, for the money ye paid for the corn came into my hand." Then he brought Simon out to them. Their brother looked like a leather bottle, so fat and rotund had he grown during his sojourn in Egypt.[240] He told his brethren what kind treatment had been accorded unto him. The very moment they left the city he had been released from prison, and thereafter he had ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... its body is at these seasons astonishing, the spine of its back becomes pointed, the flesh of its sides adhere to each other, and apparently form one united subsance, when it will, in a few hours, at pleasure, resume its rotund state; and this appears to me to be a most extraordinary circumstance in the construction of this animal, which invites the minutest research ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry

... middle of the street and looked straight at me. The heavy face, greasily moist on the cheeks and nose, was serious. His rotund fist went up to the dark yellow mustache, so carefully pointed, and smoothed it tenderly. Then he continued to lay bare his heart to me "I want her; but, you know, I shall marry her all right, I shall. She's called Eudoxie Dumail. At ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... place seemed to have a good society, and the beauty of the young girls sitting at the doors or walking in the evening showed something of the florid North Europe skins, Batavian eyes, and rotund ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... Gentle and rotund little Mr Blurt were seated on two camp-stools near the stern, conversing occasionally and gazing in a dreamy frame of mind at the milky-way over which they appeared ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne

... Cristo del Grao—would appear the smoking paella, a vast, circular dish of rice upon whose surface of white, swollen grains were lying bits of various fowls. The cook loved to surprise his following by distributing rotund, raw onions, with the whiteness of marble and an acrid surprise that brought tears to the eyes. They were a princely gift maintained in secret. One had only to break them with one blow and their sticky juices would gush ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... Maritimes boat, I made the acquaintance of an M. Bayol, a native of Marseilles, who had been for twenty-five years in business at Pondicherry, the French colony some 150 miles south of Madras. M. Bayol was a typical "Marius," or Marseillais: short, bald, bearded and rotund of stomach. It is unnecessary to add that he talked twenty to the dozen, with an immense amount of gesticulation, and that he could work himself into a frantic state of excitement over anything in two minutes. I heard on board that he had the reputation of being the ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... rails. Fillmore, however, strangely adaptive, had taken on a marked grace of manner, his fine stature and mien carrying a dignified courtliness which is said to have won him a handsome compliment from Queen Victoria—a gentleman rotund, well-groomed, conspicuously elegant. Shoulder to shoulder with him rose the queer, raw-boned, ramshackle frame of the Illinoisan, draped in the artless handiwork of a prairie tailor, surmounted by the rugged, homely ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer

... dashed through the magueys, I leaped the zequia, and galloped through the affrighted herd; I beheld the spotted mustang stretched lifeless upon the plain, its rider bending and weeping over it. That face of rare beauty, that form of exquisite proportion, that eye rotund and noble, that tongue so free, and heart so bold—all were again encountered in dreamland. A dark face was in the vision, and at intervals crossed the picture like a cloud. It was the ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... heard from my learned friend, inasmuch as it did not lie within my learned friend's province to tell you, what are the facts and circumstances of the case." This rich bit of circumlocution is simple nonsense, in rotund phrase, and meant to suggest the imposing majesty of legal process. The Jury knew perfectly beforehand what they were going to try: but were to be impressed by the magnifying agency of legal processes, and would be awe stricken accordingly. The passage, "inasmuch as it did not ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald

... Cupids or stately cavaliers. The "decorative impulse" is here at its topmost. In his second period we get the Decameron series, the episodes from Faust, the Don Quixote—recall, if you can, that glorious tableau with its Spanish group and the long, grave don and merry, rotund squire entering on the scene, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... remained as it was born; doubtless by the agency of submarine commotion of former days, beyond even the epoch of far-back history's phantom dream. From this encampment I can only liken Mount Olga to several enormous rotund or rather elliptical shapes of rouge mange, which had been placed beside one another by some extraordinary freak or convulsion of Nature. I found two other running brooks, one on the west and one on the north side. My first encampment was on the south. The position of this extraordinary ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... sketches, plans, and working drawings until my eyes swam. Four more months passed which I utilized to the full. I then went to Kiel and saw a remarkable framework of steel slowly take shape upon the stocks across the way at Gaarden. Rotund, snug, and harmless the thing lay there. Inside it were hidden all the countless, complicated, and powerful features of those sketches and working drawings. I cannot boast that the reality as executed in steel and brass was any easier to grasp than the endless network ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... clean tin box. It was clear that the day's work was almost at an end for all present. At that moment Fischelowitz entered with jaunty step and smiling face, jingling a quantity of loose silver in his hand. He is a little man, rotund and cheerful, quiet of speech and sunny in manner, with a brown beard and waving dark hair, arranged in the manner dear to barbers' apprentices. He has very soft brown eyes, a healthy complexion and a nose ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford

... counsel old." Next would have appeared the successive governors, Winthrop, Dudley, Bellingham, and Endicott, who sat in the chair while it was a chair of state. Then its ample seat would have been pressed by the comfortable, rotund corporation of the honest mint-master. Then the half-frenzied shape of Mary Dyer, the persecuted Quaker woman, clad in sackcloth and ashes would have rested in it for a moment. Then the holy, apostolic form of Eliot would have sanctified ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... fulfilled his long-cherished purpose of visiting Scotland and the Hebrides, the story of which trip he told afterwards in his usual rotund and massive style, and which was recounted with far more liveliness and verisimilitude by Boswell. In 1774 he lost Goldsmith, who had long been his friend, whom he had counselled, rebuked, assisted, loved, and laughed at, and at whose death he was deeply grieved. In 1775, the publication ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett

... northern point of entrance. After tea we called on the pilot. Patriarchally installed before a roaring stove, in the company of a buxom bustling daughter-in-law and some rosy grandchildren, we found a rotund and rubicund person, who greeted us with a hoarse roar of welcome in German, which instantly changed, when he saw us, to the funniest broken English, spoken with intense relish and pride. We explained ourselves and our mission as well as we could through ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... looked the gentleman and something more. For there was that in his air and physiognomy, which proclaimed him no common man. Captivity may hold and make more fierce, but cannot degrade, the lion. And just as a lion in its cage seemed this man in a cell of the Acordada. His face was of the rotund type, bold in its expression, yet with something of gentle humanity, seen when searched for, in the profound depths of a dark penetrating eye. His complexion was a clear olive, such as is common to Mexicans of ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid

... Mrs. Fitch's pale countenance, with its crown of gray hair, which appeared in the doorway; it was a rotund and ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson

... years ago, as clearly as figures—made up, like the restaurateur's pain, at discretion—can prove any thing, that the larger the foreign trade he carried on, the greater were his losses, in various instances cited of hundreds per cent; from whence, seeing how rotund and robust grows the worthy alderman, deplorable balance-sheets notwithstanding, which would prostrate the Bank of England like the Bank of Manchester, it should result that he, like another Themistocles, might exclaim to his family, clad in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... except through a window, was cut off. The crowd, however, quickly procured and raised a long ladder. By means of this I was descending rapidly, and in apparent safety, when a huge hog, about whose rotund stomach, and indeed about whose whole air and physiognomy, there was something which reminded me of the Angel of the Odd,—when this hog, I say, which hitherto had been quietly slumbering in the mud, took it suddenly into his head that his left shoulder needed ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... could for one moment have descended from the nebulous regions, and touched the earth, he would have found an impatient ardor in the depth of Marianne's glance, and something feverish and restless in her movements. But this huge, ruddy, rotund man, speaking above his rounded stomach, cared only for the morality of art, aesthetic dignity, and the necessity of raising the standard of art, of creating a mission for it, an end, an idea—art the educator, art the moralizer,—and ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... Hahn, erstwhile usher, call boy, press agent, advance man, had a genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, Sid Hahn, with the eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a comic ol'-clo'es man. His generosity was proverbial, and ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber

... the junior of the heir of Maxfield, a rotund, matter-of-fact, jovial-looking lad, sturdy in body, easy in temper, and perhaps by no means brilliant in intellect. The turmoil of debarkation failed to ruffle him, and the information given him in sundry quarters that he was ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed

... the table reserved for them. Waiters stood aloof, effacing themselves, prepared to pounce upon their smallest need and annihilate it. Dupontel breathed a number as he sat down, and the rotund and reverend wine-waiter, wearing a chain of office, tried to express in his face respectful esteem for a man who could ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... large round table, on which a small army of wax figures in green and blue uniforms had been placed in neatly-arranged rows. At the head of this army stood a somewhat larger figure of the most revolting appearance. It was a little fellow with hunched shoulders, a rotund stomach and an unnaturally large head. The face was of a black-and-green color, and had eyes of a ferocious expression, and a tremendous mouth without lips, showing rows of ugly yellow teeth. This figure was dressed ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach

... killed many foolish legends, but none more foolish than the legend of the typical Frenchman, conceived as a short, rotund, explosive person, with a square, brown beard of curly baby-hair and a shiny silk hat with a flat brim. There have been too many young athletes of clean build on view whose nationality, language and the uniforms of powder-blue and khaki could alone decide. The more curious might, perhaps, ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason

... the acquaintance of another one of the crew,—Louis he is called, a rotund and jovial-faced Nova Scotia Irishman, and a very sociable fellow, prone to talk as long as he can find a listener. In the afternoon, while the cook was below asleep and I was peeling the everlasting ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London

... few minutes, that it really would be a case for a chirurgeon, with cupping and leeching and smelling salts. Our rotund friend was in a bad way. His heart, plainly, was broken. From his right-hand trouser emerged a green roll. With delicate speed and tact the conductor hastened this tragic part of the performance. His silver punch flashed in his hand as he made ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... the judge, and saw that he was listening to a rotund, gray little man with beady, bird-like eyes who, as he talked, bowed and gesticulated. Behind him stood a younger man, a more modern edition of the other. He also bowed and, ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis

... Kings Spent the most on wedding rings. But to search through old Archives For tales of Henry and his wives And all their little tiffs to trace We cannot spare the time or space. Yet there are some who fain would sing The praises of this rotund King; But as a husband we're afraid His category's lowest grade. He wielded harsh the despot's power, And packed his wives off to the Tower; Consigned them to a fate most dreaded; ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison

... contrast otherwise, however, the two presented. The man next the aisle was well past sixty, rotund of abdomen, rubicund of countenance, beetle-browed. He was elaborately well-groomed, almost foppish in attire, and wore the obvious stamp of worldly success, the air of one accustomed to giving orders and seeing ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... tent appeared a young man, rotund of form and with a chubby face. He was partly dressed, his night-robe being stuffed hastily into his trousers, and he held the camp axe ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor

... met Matthew on the street, and been gratified with his deferential bow. His bulk, to which, as a rotund lady, she had taken an antipathy, seemed to dwindle down as it was looked at. Matthew, whose ideal was a delicate woman with observable shoulder blades, had also, by repeated sights of Mrs. Frump, become reconciled to ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... second month Mr. Strout resigned his position as organist and the gentleman who led the orchestra that played during the evening at the hotel was chosen in his stead. At the end of the third month a red flag was seen hanging at the door of Mr. Strout's store and Mr. Beers the auctioneer whose once rotund voice had now become thin and quavering, sold off the remaining stock and the fixtures. Then the curtains were pulled down and the door locked. The next day Mr. and Mrs. Strout and family ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin

... one, if the most striking, of a long row of villas that overlook the river, each with its comfortable-looking and rotund trees and trim plat in front, with sometimes a summer-house snuggling down to the ripples. These riverside colonies, thrown out so rapidly by the metropolis, have no colonial look. We cannot associate the idea of a new settlement with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... gaze switched back to Tom, and in that instant Chow jumped the intruder. With surprising agility for his rotund bulk, the cook bore down on him and let fly a gnarled fist at the stranger's jaw. Tom followed up like lightning, grabbing the man's wrist and yanking his hand out of ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton

... left the room; his rotund shadow rested on the wall of the passage. He held a travelling-bag in ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

... early work of the interesting case of the Marquis of Cortona, a subchieftain under the Duke of Alva, and a fine fat old butcher he must have been, too, by all tellings. Finding himself grown so rotund that no longer could he enter with zest into the massacre bees and torture outings which the Spaniards were carrying on in the harried Netherlands, the marquis had recourse to vinegar; and so efficacious ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb

... himself, who never missed an opportunity to praise the food and the comforts to be enjoyed at the county "poorhouse" when he paid his semi-annual visit to the venerable dependents; Mr. Charlie Webster, the rotund manager of the grain elevator, who spent every Saturday night and Sunday in the city and showed up for duty on Monday with pinkish eyes and a rather tremulous whistle that was supposed to be reminiscent ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon

... absolutely sick, with terror. Besides this, the figure held me spellbound—I could neither move nor utter a sound. It had a white, absolutely white face, a tall, thin, perpendicular frame, and a small, glittering, rotund head. For some seconds it remained stationary, and then, with a gliding motion, left the path and vanished ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell

... mind's eye, then let him by all means yield to the inspiration, and try to mould the theme into a drama. The real labour of creation will still lie before him; but he may face it with the hope of producing a live play, not a long-drawn rhetorical anachronism, whether of the rotund or of the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... entertainment. As he entered the gay ball-room, his lofty plumage swayed grandly and a glittering tomahawk shone from his girdle. The scene that met his eyes was resplendent with life and beauty. Masked figures were flitting by, clad in every imaginable garb. Here was a sleek-faced friar, rotund and merry; there, a gypsy maid, or mild-eyed shepherdess with her stave. Lonely hermits and whimsical jesters, cackling witches, and members of a pilgrim band—all thronged together with laugh or grimace, ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood

... the Diligente and Hercule now went cruising, and it was not long before the two harpies swooped down upon their prey in the shape of two Dutch East Indiamen, armed with twenty-five guns each, and manned by rotund-bodied Dutchmen. There was rich treasure aboard, and, with eagerness and zeal, the Frenchmen slapped on ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston

... seen by astronomers. Of course it may be that the phenomena that we shall now consider are not angels at all. We are simply feeling around, trying to find out what we can accept. Some of our data indicate hosts of rotund and complacent tourists in inter-planetary space—but then data of long, lean, hungry ones. I think that there are, out in inter-planetary space, Super Tamerlanes at the head of hosts of celestial ravagers—which have come here and pounced upon civilizations ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... happy, but Romley promised to be the bright exception in a long list of failures. (It was he who discovered and introduced Johnny Whitelamb to the household.) He was sociable; had pleasant manners, a rotund figure not yet inclining to coarseness, a pink and white complexion, and a mellifluous tenor voice. To his voice, alas! he owed most ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... the rotund giant swayed with something in his arms, something which he crushed in his fists and brutally shook, something which he held off at arm's length and ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie

... magazine lay open, exhibiting one of those melancholy modern "illustrations" which present the English art of our day in its laziest and lowest state of degradation. A vacuous young giant, in flowing trousers, stood in a garden, and stared at a plump young giantess with enormous eyes and rotund hips, vacantly boring holes in the grass with the point of her parasol. Perfectly incapable of explaining itself, this imbecile production put its trust in the printer, whose charitable types helped it, at the bottom of the page, with the title of "Love at First ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins

... reply, said good-night again and left the room. Dona Casiana continued to grumble, then ensconced her rotund person in the rocker and dozed off into a dream about an establishment of the same type as that across the way; but a model establishment, with luxuriously appointed salons, whither trooped in a long procession all the scrofulous ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja

... one of those called gallant, was famous for her precocious embonpoint which had earned her the nickname of "Boule de Suif" (ball of tallow). Short and rotund all over, fat enough to supply lard, with puffed fingers constricted at the joints and looking like strings of small sausages, a shiny and tight skin, an enormous bust which protruded from under her gown, she was yet attractive and much coveted, her ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant

... Calcutta bazaars at night, and in underground streets of Pekin, have I seen stranger beings than I unearthed in my Atta nest. Now and then there rolled out of a shovelful of earth, an unbelievably big and rotund Cicada larva—which in the course of time, whether in one or in seventeen years, would emerge as the great marbled winged Cicada gigas, spreading five inches from tip to tip. Small tarantulas, with beautiful wine-colored cephalothorax, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... The rotund woman with a short waist, sketched in No. 54, may improve her figure, as shown in No. 55, by choosing belts and collars the exact shade of her shirt-waists in summer, and by not cutting off her height by any sort of ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley

... left alone after successive deaths and with scant resources, sought economic salvation in Europe, the promised land of American thrift—she was present as this almost ancient and this oddly unassertive little rotund figure whom one seemed no more obliged to address than if she had been a black satin ottoman "treated" with buttons and gimp; a class of object as to which the policy of blindness was imperative. He felt the need of some explanatory ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James

... necessary to keep him away from those cages. His father got down to business and gave him a beating—much against that good man's heart. (Skag's father was a Northern European who kept a fruit-store down on Waspen street—a mildly-flavoured man and rotund. His mother was a Mediterranean woman, ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost

... with the sentimentalists," answered the severe critic, "but that of exceeding feebleness. They have no bone and muscle in their genius—all is flaccid and rotund in its feminine symmetry. They seem to think that vigour consists in florid phrases and little aphorisms, and delineate all the mighty tempests of the human heart with the polished prettiness of a miniature-painter ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the past was the rear of a large supermarket, more specifically between two packing cases which had once contained breakfast foods. The excursion through time had evidently been a smooth one for the smile had not once left Mrs. Mimms' rotund countenance during the ...
— The Amazing Mrs. Mimms • David C. Knight

... profound calm, the silence of terrified suspense, fell over the city. Many a rotund bourgeois, emasculated by a purely commercial life, awaited the arrival of the victors with anxiety, trembling lest their meat-skewers and kitchen carving-knives should come ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... that mark the zenith hour, How great thy reach, how marvellous thy power, So lavishly outpouring all thy rotund gifts On mortal ways, in superhuman shifts That overtax the mind, and vex the soul of man, As would the details of some awful plan, Jocund, mysterious, complex, and yet withal Enmeshed with Joy and Sorrow, as a pall Envelops all the ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs

... horse, ox, and ass, the three abreast, drag piles of country produce, jingling their fantastic harness, and primitive carts laden with red-soaked wine-casks rattle recklessly along; where bare-footed, girdled, and tonsured monks plod on their no-business, and every third man one passes is a rotund ecclesiastic, who never in his life walked at more than a mile an hour; where, at evening, carriages returning from the Villa Nazionale cram the thoroughfare from side to side, and make one aware, if one did not previously know it, that parts of the street have no ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing

... smooth- faced Simmons, who in the old days was content to take his chances of filling a vacancy at Wallack's or the Winter Garden, when some one of the regular orchestra was under the weather; but a sleek, prosperous, rotund Waller, with a bit of red in his button- hole, a wide expanse of shirt-front, and a waxed mustache; and a thoughtful, slightly bald, and well- dressed Simmons, with gold eyeglasses, and his hair worn long in his neck as befitted the leader of an orchestra whose ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... came a wild scream and a shout from the major,—"Arrah, my darling, where are you after going to?" though, before the words were well out of the speaker's mouth, down came flop on the top of the leg of mutton the rotund form of Mrs Major Molony, fortunately head uppermost, in a semi-sitting posture,—the joint of meat serving as a cushion to that part of her body which is usually thus accommodated, while one of her feet stuck into a dish of potatoes and the other into one of curry and rice, the gravy flying ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston

... there to guard the site and protect the gang of woodchoppers set to work at once, then turned their faces homeward. They had spent four days and nights at the Gap, and the more the youngster saw of the rotund quartermaster the less he cared to cultivate him. A portly, heavily built man was he, some forty years of age, a widower, whose children were at their mother's old home in the far East, a business man with a keen ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King

... referring to Liubov Ivanovna, the lady who shared the lodge with him. Every day I saw this lady, very plump, rotund, and dignified, not unlike a fat goose, walking about the garden, in the Russian national dress and beads, always carrying a parasol; and the servant was continually calling her in to dinner or to tea. Three years ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... rapidly than they do here. The lines of many of these natural temples or fortresses are still more lengthened and attenuated than those of the Temple of Isis, appearing like mere skeletons of their former selves. The forms that weather out the formation above this, the Permian, appear to be more rotund, and tend more to ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... queer little pumpkin, a jolly fat fellow, Stood close to his mother so rotund and yellow. "What a stupid old place! how I long to aspire," Cried he, "I was destined for something ...
— Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper and Other Stories • Anonymous

... and trying to assume an easy stride in spite of the uncomfortable addition to his already rotund figure, he slipped into the hotel, where avoiding the lighted elevator, he laboured ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo

... Thomas's, the pinnacled tower of the College, and, more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale. Behind the city swept the rotund upland of St Catherine's Hill; further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... his robberies and rapes. Something must be abated for boastfulness. But after all deduction there remains a tale of crime that is unsurpassed. His most admirably artistic quality is his complete consistence. He was a ruffian finished and rotund; he made no concession, he betrayed no weakness. Though he never preached a sermon against the human race, he practised a brutality which might have proceeded from a gospel of hate. He spared neither friends nor relatives, and he ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... not, it's most delightfully absurd and amusing," said she, watching the group nearest her. This consisted of a very short and rotund man with hair a la Paderewski and a frilled evening shirt, a thin man of incredible stature and lank black locks, and a pretty young girl in a tunic, a tam o' shanter, enormous green hairpins, and tiny patent-leather shoes decorated with three inch heels. To her the lank man, who wore ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... a delightful burlesque. I saw the chuckling Angel sayer with his face veiled, and the corporeal presence of Swindells upheld amidst the laughter of the spheres. "Here's a thing, and a very pretty thing, and what's to be done with this very pretty thing?" I saw a soul being drawn from a rotund, substantial-looking body like a whelk from its shell. ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... paced the floor earnestly, a small, active, already rotund young man, his hands thrust ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... conglobating sunk. And as the bond grew firmer, ampler forth Pressed they the fluid essences that reared Sun, moon, and stars, and main, and heaven's high wall. For those of atoms lighter far consist, Subtiler, and more rotund than those of earth. Whence, from the pores terrene, with foremost haste Rushed the bright ether, towering high, and swift Streams of fire attracting as ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... has elsewhere stated that the Roman Catholic clergy in this part of the world are easily divided into two classes, the rotund, rosy and jolly, and the thin, ascetic and reserved; the cure of St. Ignace belonged to the latter, and possessed a strongly marked characteristic face, the droop of his bitter mouth and the curve of his chiselled nose being almost Dantesque in effect. He had conserved ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison

... respectable-looking individual was never seen," writes his erstwhile pupil; "he really looked what he was, a gentleman of the law—there was nothing of the pettifogger about him: somewhat under middle size, and somewhat rotund in person, he was always dressed in a full suit of black, never worn long enough to become threadbare. His face was rubicund, and not without keenness; but the most remarkable thing about him was his head, which was bald, and shone like polished ivory, nothing ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt

... first stranger handed his neighbor the family mug—a huge vessel of brown ware, having its upper edge worn away like a threshold by the rub of whole generations of thirsty lips that had gone the way of all flesh, and bearing the following inscription burnt upon its rotund ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various

... very tender where the feathers do not grow. The bare parts are admirably formed for expansion about the throat and stomach, and they fit into the different cavities of the body at the wings, shoulders, rump and thighs with wonderful exactness; so that, in stuffing the bird, if you make an even, rotund surface of the skin where these cavities existed, in lieu of re-forming them, all symmetry, order and proportion are ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... officer grunted inarticulately, and waved me in the direction of his clerk, glaring at me meanwhile with an expression which combined singularly the dissimilar effects of a gimlet and a plane. The rotund junior contented himself with glancing suspiciously at the order and sternly at me. As if reassured, however, by my plausible countenance, he flipped over the pages of a ledger, told me the number of my stateroom, and hunted up a packet of letters, ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee

... A small rotund, red-gilled man, in bearing and aspect not unlike a turkey-cock, was mounting the steps of the portico. Behind this personage sailed an ample lady of middle age, with a bevy of younger damsels—his spouse ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... What with the coming and the going, it was never still. The rafters of the great living-room shook with the roar of wassail and of song. At table sat men from all the world and chiefs from distant tribes—Englishmen and Colonials, lean Yankee traders and rotund officials of the great companies, cowboys from the Western ranges, sailors from the sea, hunters and dog-mushers of a ...
— Lost Face • Jack London

... mosses, afforded us a comfortable resting-place. Elder Staples, in his faded black coat and white neck-cloth, leaned his quiet, contemplative head on his silver-mounted cane: right opposite him sat the Doctor, with his sturdy, rotund figure, and broad, seamed face, surmounted by a coarse stubble of iron-gray hair, the sharp and almost severe expression of his keen gray eyes, flashing under their dark penthouse, happily relieved by the softer lines of his mouth, indicative of his really genial and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... climb trees!" And Chunky Brown went off into a paroxysm of silent mirth, his rotund ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin

... noticed, but there was the faintest shadow of a queer smile upon his own lips as he turned back to the big notebook open on his knees—a vaguely unpleasant smile that was not in keeping with the rotund ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans

... striking episode. CHAPLIN delivered oration on Home-Rule Bill hour and half long. Had sat up night and day with it, polishing its rotund periods, till, as PRINCE ARTHUR whispers, "CHAPLIN, gazing upon their surface, saw not himself, but DEMOSTHENES." Fortune favoured him in opportunity. Member for Sunderland had secured privilege of resuming Debate after Questions. Resolved to make long STOREY ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various

... who had joined him, a whole roasted pigeon in his hands. "How can you make such an underestimate! Our rotund Monsieur would be far more graceful and far more healthy if he dropped forty pounds! And it behooves us, his trainers and physicians, to see that he drops 'em. Then he will go back to Albany and to his good friend, Mynheer Hendrik ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... Mr. Sponge. 'Cards,' repeated he thoughtfully, stroking his hairy chin. 'Cards,' added he, for the third time, as he conned Facey's rotund visage, and wondered if he was a sharper. If the cards were fair, Sponge didn't care trying his luck. It all depended upon that. 'Well,' said he, in a tone of indifference, as he picked up his Mogg, thinking ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... the rotund little object of two-feet-ten standing before the fire with its legs apart and its arms crossed, putting such a question, ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne

... met wandering, naked and grave, along the road with a cigar in his baby mouth, and perhaps his mother's rosary, purloined for purposes of ornamentation, hanging in a loop of beads low down on his rotund little stomach. The spiritual and temporal pastors of the mine flock were very good friends. With Dr. Monygham, the medical pastor, who had accepted the charge from Mrs. Gould, and lived in the hospital building, they were on not so ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... look to me as well filled out and as blooming as ever," answered Jack, surveying the rotund figure and rosy cheeks of his new messmate; "you and I afford proof that hard work seldom does people harm. Idleness is the greatest foe to health of the two. And who is to ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston

... instant there came a loud rap upon the door, which immediately opened to disclose the rotund form of Stodger, and behind him two slight figures in furs and veils, bearing into this desolate and gloomy old mansion a delicious flavor of young, ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk

... glance followed her, and a look of sudden inspiration illumined his shiny face. Wild Cat Bill, with his rotund form, resembled a domesticated house cat far more than the agile creature which had given him his frontier title. The incongruity struck Danvers, and he smiled at Winifred Blair as she drifted to another part of the room—a smile ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman

... of a man between thirty-eight and forty years of age, big-bodied, rapidly acquiring that rotund shape which is thought becoming to bishops, about six feet high though stooping a little, prodigiously active, walking with incredible rapidity, having large limbs, large feet, large though well-shaped and very white hands; in short, a huge fellow physically, as big of heart as of body, ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent

... words there came into the dining room a rotund, middle-aged Jewish gentleman, coated with dust and ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson

... wand he brandished was in his eyes as honorable a distinction as the marshal's baton which Conde threw, or did not throw, into the enemy's line of battle at Fribourg. His person had undergone a change, analogous to the change in his dress; his figure had grown rotund and, as it were, canonical. The striking points of his face were effaced; he had still a nose, but his cheeks, fattened out, each took a portion of it unto themselves; his chin had joined his throat; his eyes were swelled up with the puffiness of his cheeks; his hair, cut ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... brown-bearded Armenian priest from the Venice monastery that had sheltered Byron, a man who ate everything except soup with his knife, yet with a daintiness that made one marvel, and with hands so graceful they might almost have replaced the knife without off offence. Beyond the priest sat the rotund Canadian drummer. He kept silence, watched the dishes carefully lest anything should escape him, and—ate. Lower down on the opposite side, one or two nondescripts between, sat the big, blond, bearded stranger with his son. Diagonally across from himself ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood

... Interest centred on the preparation of a rabbit and creamed oysters, and pleasant badinage flew from tongue to tongue. Selma found herself between the magazine editor and a large, powerfully built man with a broad, rotund, strong face, who was introduced to her as Dr. Page, and who was called George by every one else. He had arrived late, just as they were going in to supper, and his appearance had been greeted with a murmur of satisfaction. He had placed himself between Pauline ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... building occupied by Tom Buffum's family, he met the head of the family coming out; and as, hitherto, that personage has escaped description, it will be well for the reader to make his acquaintance. The first suggestion conveyed by his rotund figure was, that however scantily he furnished his boarders, he never stinted himself in the matter of food. He had the sluggish, clumsy look of a heavy eater. His face was large, his almost colorless eyes were small, and, if one might judge by the general expression of his features, ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland

... the rector, "for an intelligent man you are slow at taking hints." The good-natured rotund preacher went on, amazing his helpless friend, "I wonder if the Squire would like ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... don't. I mean to have some of those rotund berries of yours. Don't you, Edna? I'll wager she hasn't thrown them in with this common ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham

... abruptly struck him, flashing the symbol into his imagination—that Maria lived so close to the universe that her life and movements were akin to those of the heavenly bodies. He saw her as an epitome of the earth. Fat, peaceful, little, calm, rotund Maria—a miniature earth! She had no call to hurry nor rush after things. Like the earth she contained all things within herself. It made him smile; he smiled as he looked down into her face; she smiled as she rolled her blue ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood

... and rotund men, rode up in the elevator with him and went into Marston & Waller's office ahead of him, for he had modestly stepped to one side to ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... his hands crossed upon his rotund stomach and his bowed legs as near crossed as they could ever be without an operation. He was pretty well satisfied that the man upstairs, who that pretty little nurse had said would be down in a few minutes, had not killed Sam Brent. He had a few pertinent reasons for ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... warmth and luxury, as a poor, draggled moth might do, to bask in the revivifying light of an astral lamp, attracted beyond my power to resist, to pause before the resplendent window, rich in green and purple and amber rotund vases, whose transparent contents were set forth and revealed by fiery jets of gas, toward which I feebly ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield

... and he seated himself in a capacious chair, substantially fitted to receive and sustain its burden of divinity, and began to read. My letters were from men high in authority, purple-robed and rotund supporters of our good Alma Mater, and met with all due respect. Clearing his sonorous throat of the obstructing phlegm, with which there seemed to be danger that he should sometime or other be suffocated, he welcomed me to London, rejoiced ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... half-alarmed but wholly delighted Beechleaf. Tired of this, at last, Bark, with no particular intent, drew forth from the pouch in his skin cloak a string of sinew, and drawing the ends of the strong twig somewhat nearly together, attached the cord to each, thus producing accidentally a petty bow of most rotund proportions. He found that the string twanged joyously, and, to the delight of Beechleaf, kept twanging it for such time as his boyish temperament would allow a single occupation. Then he picked from the ground a long, slender pencil of white wood, a sliver, perhaps, from the ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo

... the correctness of his opinion of the cause of the grand effect of the rotund questioned, i. 150. his fine lines on honorable ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke

... patron saint of the children—oh, no! Maria Metz would have considered it foolish, even sinful, to lie to a child about any mythical Santa Claus coming down the chimney Christmas Eve! Nevertheless, the smiling, rotund face of the red-habited Santa in the store window seemed so real and so emanative of cheer that Phoebe delighted in him each year and felt sure there must be a Santa Claus somewhere in the world, even though Aunt Maria knew ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers

... soon as it arrived. The telegraph-boy who conveyed it, got sixpence for himself as a reward for the extra speed he had put on in running all the way from the village to the house, thereby outstripping the postman, who being rotund in figure was somewhat heavily labouring up in the same direction with the last delivery of letters for the day. Miss Vancourt's correspondents were generally very numerous,—but on this occasion there was only one letter for her,—one, neatly addressed, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... commercial basis?" demanded Flint, while Waldron, now a trifle less scornful, seemed to listen with more interest as his eyes rested on the rotund ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... restlessness. She seemed never still for an instant; her legs had a fidgety, nervous movement in them, and in moments of excitement, which were not infrequent, she was given to executing a sort of war-dance. Old she was not; but her peculiar graces of person, her rotund form, her badly-made front of flaxen curls, which was rarely in its place, made her appear so. A bold, scheming, unscrupulous, vulgar-minded woman, who had never considered other people's feelings in her life, whether equals or inferiors. In her day she must have been rather ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood

... a rotund man, bald, with red hair that had a faded, washed-out appearance. His eyes were large, pale blue in color, with a singularly ingratiating expression which was made almost yearning ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer



Words linked to "Rotund" :   fat, orotund, rotundity, rounded, round



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