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Waddle   Listen
verb
Waddle  v. t.  To trample or tread down, as high grass, by walking through it. (R.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Waddle" Quotes from Famous Books



... rough-tongued, though their hearts were frank and kind). And one said; "These fellows are but raw sailors; they look as if they had been sea-sick all the day." And another: "Their legs have grown crooked with much rowing, till they waddle in their ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various

... of tomfool rubbish! I'm illiterate, I know. I've been a Wild Duck in my time, and I waddle. But for all that, I'm the only person in the play with a grain of common-sense. And I'm sure—whatever Mr. IBSEN or GREGERS choose to say—that a screaming burlesque like this ought not to end like a tragedy—even in this queer Norway of ours! And it shan't, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 30, 1891 • Various

... So I will, Cap, so I will! Besides whatever their names are, it's nothing to me. 'A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,' you know. And if she is 'Mrs. Tagfoot Waddle' I shall still think so good a woman exalted as a Montmorencie. Mind there, Wool; ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... disappointment; and it had all been done for love. With her broad face, and her double chin, and her heavy jowl, and the beard that was growing round her lips, she did not look like a romantic woman; but, in spite of appearances, romance and a duck-like waddle may go together. The memory of those forty years had been strong upon her, and her heart was heavy because she could not see that old man once again. Men will love to the last, but they love what is fresh and new. A woman's love can live on the recollection of the ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... swarming over the pavements. I am the only one in the street whose soul is awake. There's a pretty girl looking at me. She suspects the condition of my soul. Her fingers are dirty. Why doesn't she buy different shoes? She thinks I am lost. In five years she will be fat. In ten years she will waddle with a shawl over ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... was resumed. For a time Whitey would carry Bull. When he tired, Injun would carry Bull awhile. When Injun tired, Bull would waddle a way. It was a strange way for a ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart

... let me whistle. But I think I do mean it. It's very sound philosophy. Even if the lame duckling can't fly, is there any reason why it shouldn't waddle for the fun of it?" And now the smile was just as it should ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller

... trudge, tread, stride, stalk, strut, tramp, march, pace, toddle, waddle, shuffle, mince, stroll, saunter, ramble, meander, promenade, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... spring is all birth-young things coming out of bud and shell, and human beings watching over the process with faint excitement feeding and tending what has been born. So still the young man sat, that a mother-goose, with stately cross-footed waddle, brought her six yellow-necked grey-backed goslings to strop their little beaks against the grass blades at his feet. Now and again Mrs. Narracombe or the girl Megan would come and ask if he wanted anything, and he would smile ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... thought?' Ay, if words never needed enswathe aught But ignorance, impudence, envy And malice—what word-swathe would then vie With yours for a clearness crystalline? But had you to put in one small line Some thought big and bouncing—as noddle Of goose, born to cackle and waddle And bite at man's heel as goose-wont is, Never felt plague its puny os frontis— You'd know, as you hissed, spat and sputtered, Clear 'quack-quack' is ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... nesting; at least, when I was at Burhou on the 14th of June, 1876, I found quite fresh eggs, eggs just ready to hatch, young birds in the down, and young birds just beginning to get a few feathers and almost able to take to the water; it was fun to see one of these when he had been unearthed waddle off to the nearest hole as fast as his legs could carry him—generally, however, coming down every second or third step. The reason for the irregularity in hatching was probably owing to the first brood having been ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith

... You know sir, I see what young ducklings should be; Your taste I commend, My civil young friend; They're beauties you see and obedient to me. In ponds they can paddle, On land they can waddle, They dive and they flutter, Quack, quack, they can utter: I'm glad they can learn, and ...
— The Nursery, August 1877, Vol. XXII, No. 2 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various

... usefully, virtuously, with hopes, doubtless, of a husband and children.—Mrs. H—— is a particularly plump, soft-fleshed, fair-complexioned, comely woman enough, with rather a simple countenance, not nearly so piquant as Nancy's. Her walk has something of the roll or waddle of a fat woman, though it were too much to call her fat. She seems to be a sociable body, probably laughter-loving. Captain H—— himself has commanded a steamboat, and has a certain knowledge ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... adduction of the limb favour the occurrence of dislocation. A child who has recovered with dislocation on to the dorsum ilii is usually able to walk and run about, but with a limp or waddle which becomes more pronounced as he grows up. The condition closely resembles a congenital dislocation, but the history, and the presence of gross alterations in the upper end of the femur as seen with the X-rays, should usually suffice ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... horrible boys!" said their hostess, laughing. "And my lovely fat Michael!—he's getting so corpulent he can hardly waddle. He and the puppy are really very like each other; both of them find it easier to roll than to run." She cast an inquiring eye round the room: ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce

... and a glass of wine in a few minutes becomes a tincture of insects. Butterflies are especially numerous and are of groat beauty. They are so lazy or sleepy that one can nearly always pick them up with one's fingers. Ducks are not agile creatures on land but here they waddle slowly up to the butterflies and as often as not catch them in ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman

... is, but yellow and changing—opal-coloured like sunshine and rainbows. And at the very moment when the wild, whirling, blinding, deafening, tumbling upside-downness of the carpet-moving stopped, the children had the happiness of seeing three large live turtles waddle down to the edge of the sea and disappear in the water. And it was hotter than you can possibly imagine, unless you think of ovens on ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit

... would scarcely be at the trouble of stepping over the threshold to serve them, they are such a set of cross, good-for-nothing gentry. I declare, it was but as we came home to dinner now, that we saw Master Sam throwing sticks and stones at Dame Frugal's ducks, for the sake of seeing them waddle; and then, when they got to the pond, he sent his dog in after them to bark and frighten them out of their wits. And as I came by, nothing would serve him but throwing a great dab of mud all over the sleeve of my coat. So I said, ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner

... until the last; then in a moment the Heat-Ray was brought to bear, and the town became a heap of fiery ruins. Then the Thing shut off the Heat-Ray, and turning its back upon the artilleryman, began to waddle away towards the smouldering pine woods that sheltered the second cylinder. As it did so a second glittering Titan built itself ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... over the road in front of us in as great a hurry as ever hen was," went on Wrotham. "Going back to its family of eggs per express waddle! Whiz! Pst—and all its eggs and waddles were over! By Jove, how ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... hours a day in summer. Thor proved a friendly ally. He behaved handsomely about his molars, and never objected to being pulled off into remote places in his cart. When Thea dragged him over the hill and made a camp under the shade of a bush or a bank, he would waddle about and play with his blocks, or bury his monkey in the sand and dig him up again. Sometimes he got into the cactus and set up a howl, but usually he let his sister read peacefully, while he coated his hands and face, first with an all-day sucker and then ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather

... very wild and tangled with gorse, and in summer very picturesque. Some elms bordered the road, and there was a large clear-looking pond, and flocks of geese would waddle over the common, hissing and thrusting out their yellow bills ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... nothing at all! Lord! how you twaddle and waddle and squall Like common-bred geese and ganders! What sad little bad little figures you make To the rich Miss K., whose plainest seed-cake Was ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... said he was a good boy, and put him into the corn-bin, and there the greedy little Lambikin stayed for seven days, and ate, and ate, and ate, until he could scarcely waddle, and his Granny said he was fat enough for anything, and must go home. But cunning little Lambikin said that would never do, for some animal would be sure to eat him on the way back, he ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant

... The roar of eight hundred houses—or how many more can there be in Aquila?—all reeling and quaking, the yells of ten thousand voices in sudden agony, had wholly subsided ere I allowed the poor woman calmly and majestically to waddle up to her good man in the garden. That, I suppose, was my notion of an orderly retreat. Rosalbina had flown from a window into the lawn, like a bird. Thank God, we found ourselves all in the open air under the broad canopy of heaven. We began to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... Red-breast sat upon a rail, Niddle, naddle, went his head, wiggle, waddle, went his tail; Little Robin Red-breast sat upon a bridle, With a pair of speckle legs, and ...
— Aunt Kitty's Stories • Various

... police order you to move on, said the Thames magistrate, it is better to go in the long run. Others declare that it is quite sufficient to melt from view at a businesslike waddle. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various

... Mrs. Amber, coming out with her funny walk, which was at once a waddle, because of her weight, and a trip, from the energy of her disposition, "have you had a ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton

... what I would think and what I would write to you concerning the conditions under which I met her. We were simply forced to lunch with them. We could only nibble at the too rich, too highly seasoned food set before us. And I noticed that Eileen nibbled also. She is not going to grow fat and waddle and redden her nose, but, my dear, back deep in her eyes and in the curve of her lips and in the tone of her voice there were such disappointment and discontent as I never have seen in any woman. She could not suppress them; she could not conceal them. There ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter

... He began to waddle round the circle, an extraordinary sight, covered as he was with grey grime, varied with streaks of black skin where the perspiration ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard

... Gill is very ill, Nothing can improve her, But to see the Tuillerie, And waddle through ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... Master Duckbill, they watch him waddle along in his funny, awkward way and bark at him, but they will not touch him. When cats first see this queer creature, they scamper ...
— Dew Drops - Volume 37, No. 18, May 3, 1914 • Various

... something going on," said Johnny Chuck to himself, and began to waddle faster. He looked so very queer when he tried to hurry that jolly round, red Mr. Sun ...
— Mother West Wind's Children • Thornton W. Burgess

... a height of utilitarian ugliness which, when one reflects that it is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into one. These dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in port, and with an added touch of the ridiculous. Their rolling waddle when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a sea-way, so unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have in them something caricatural, a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... off, grumbling. He walked with the peculiar waddle affected by young Dutchmen of a certain class, and was soon out of sight round the corner of the street. French opened the door with a masterkey and secured it carefully, leaving one of his men to guard it. He searched the rooms on the ground floor and finally ascended to Quest's study. ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... perpendicularly as they sing: woodlarks hang poised in the air; and titlarks rise and fall in large cubes, singing in their descent. The white-throat uses odd jerks and gesticulations over the tops of hedges and bushes. All the duck- kind waddle; divers and auks walk as if fettered, and stand erect on their tails: these are the compedes of Linnaeus. Geese and cranes, and most wild-fowls, move in figured flights, often changing their position. The secondary rerniges of tringae, wild-ducks, and some others, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White

... land camps composed of tents and board shanties, with rows of seines and tarred pound-nets stretched in the sun to dry; tow-headed children abound, almost as nude as the pigs and dogs and chickens amongst which they waddle and roll; women-folk busy themselves with the multifarious cares of home-keeping, while their lords are in shady nooks mending nets, or listlessly examining trout lines which appear to yield but empty hooks; they tell us that when the river is falling, fish bite not, ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... astonished, and well he might, for he had supposed Jack to be dead fully fifteen years. Time and hard service had greatly altered him, but the general resemblance in figure, stature, and waddle, certainly remained. Notwithstanding, the Jack Tier that Spike remembered was quite a different person from this Jack Tier. That Jack had worn his intensely black hair clubbed and curled, whereas this Jack had cut his locks into ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper

... from his hole. He had left his old burrow in the huckleberry hillside, and dug a new hole under one of my young peach-trees. I had made no objection to his huckleberry hole. He used to come down the hillside and waddle into the orchard in broad day, free to do and go as he pleased; but not since he began ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp

... soliloquized, tumbling over a carcass, puffy, bloated, and rotund—"this has been, no doubt, in every sense of the word, an unhappy—an unfortunate man. It has been his terrible lot not to walk but to waddle—to pass through life not like a human being, but like an elephant—not like a man, but ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... sort of seal, some twenty-five feet in length and quite five high. If big, it was certainly also most unwieldy, for it appeared to waddle up from the shore with the greatest difficulty. Its body was covered with a short brown fur, with lighter hair of a dun colour under the throat; and, what gave it the singular appearance whence its name of "sea-elephant" was probably more derived than from its size, ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson

... without effect. La Salle "lined" four as they flapped their huge wings hurriedly, striving to flee from the hidden danger, killing three and breaking the wing of a fourth, who fluttered down to the ice, and began to run, or, rather, to waddle rapidly away. ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall

... Church of England, is it not painful to hear her putting forward Jones's asthma, when we all know the true fact is that Ponto's tastes are so aristocratic that he can't take exercise with an under servant, and the housekeeper is too fat to waddle. By the bye, how ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... all my good-byes—to Angelo and the gondola; to the greedy pigeons of San Marco, so heavy in the crop that they can scarcely waddle on their little red feet; to the bees and birds and flowers and trees of the beautiful garden behind the casa; to the Little Genius and her eagle's nest on the house-top; to "the city that is always just putting ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... Certain character parts, a few vaudeville acts, a singing turn, or a burlesquing of her own abnormality (if she has the personality to carry it off with), and there her availability for stage purposes ends. But you cannot dance and waddle at the same time. "It isn't done." If you aspire to be the kind of stage dancer that the public demands and that we produce in our courses, you will have to submit to diet and exercise, the only coin of the realm that will buy physical beauty and perfect development. There is no other way. ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn

... on the streets on a wet and windy day than there is under a fair sky. Thin folk hold on at corners. Fat folk waddle before the wind, their racing elbows wing and wing. Hats are whisked off and sail down the gutters on excited purposes of their own. It was only this morning that I saw an artistocratic silk hat bobbing along the pavement in familiar company with a stranger bonnet—surely a misalliance, for the ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks

... at the north city diningrooms in Marlborough street from Miss Kate Collins, proprietress... They purchase four and twenty ripe plums from a girl at the foot of Nelson's pillar to take off the thirst of the brawn. They give two threepenny bits to the gentleman at the turnstile and begin to waddle slowly up the winding staircase, grunting, encouraging each other, afraid of the dark, panting, one asking the other have you the brawn, praising God and the Blessed Virgin, threatening to come down, peeping at the airslits. Glory ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... inaudible to Tom; but the heavy, deliberate waddle of the banker was not. He opened the house-door, and then the parlour-door, without knocking; but when he saw the visitor, he stopped on the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... reapers, Father John, So many reapers and no little son, To meet you when the day is done, With little stiff legs to waddle and run? Pray you beg, borrow, or steal one son. Hurrah for the ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris

... till Elihu observed that she probably had her cubs inside the cave, and that she was guarding them. Our appearance, however, instead of daunting her increased her rage, and with a savage roar she began to waddle towards Short. He retreated slowly. We sang out to him to give him confidence. He had before not thought it prudent to fire, lest, as was very likely, his shots should not kill the bear; but when he heard our voices, he lifted his ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston

... our bedding, in one corner of the barn, swept the concrete floor, rolled the blankets, explained to the gossipy farm servant that I did not "compree" her gibberish, and (p. 037) watched her waddle across the midden towards the house, my duties were ended. I was at liberty until the return of the battalion. It was all very quiet, little was to be heard save the gnawing of the rats in the corner of the barn ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill

... Queen of Egypt. A brazen-faced thing, with a very muddy complexion, I'm told, and practically no reputation, of course, after the way she carried on with Caesar. And that reminds me, I hear your little Caius suffers from the croup. Now my remedy'—and so they waddle on, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al

... Nick spat contemptuously, and a puff of gray smoke spread rapidly over walls, ceiling and floor. "That will hold you," he jeered, and opened the door. Aping the Minister's important waddle, he walked ...
— Satan and the Comrades • Ralph Bennitt

... with a grievance in life, He was rude to his neighbours and short with his wife. For, up in the apple-tree over his nest, There dwelt a fat spider who gave him no rest: A spider so fat, so abnormally stout That he seemed hardly fitted to waddle about. But his eyes were so sharp, and his legs were so spry, That he could not be caught; ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis



Words linked to "Waddle" :   totter, waddler, walk, coggle



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