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Disarray   /dˌɪsərˈeɪ/   Listen
Disarray

noun
1.
A mental state characterized by a lack of clear and orderly thought and behavior.  Synonyms: confusedness, confusion, mental confusion, muddiness.
2.
Untidiness (especially of clothing and appearance).  Synonym: disorderliness.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Disarray" Quotes from Famous Books



... Order, &c] Disorder — N. disorder; derangement &c 61; irregularity; anomaly &c (unconformity) 83; anarchy, anarchism; want of method; untidiness &c adj.; disunion; discord &c 24. confusion; confusedness &c adj.; mishmash, mix; disarray, jumble, huddle, litter, lumber; cahotage^; farrago; mess, mash, muddle, muss [U.S.], hash, hodgepodge; hotch-potch^, hotch-pot^; imbroglio, chaos, omnium gatherum [Lat.], medley; mere mixture &c 41; fortuitous concourse of atoms, disjecta membra [Lat.], rudis indigestaque moles [Lat.] ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... his glance shall go Ranging the varied landscape o'er, Far as the looming Dome—no more. One look he gives, then turns aside, Solace he summons from his pride: "So be it! They await me now Who wrought this stinging overthrow; They wait me; not as on the day Of Pope's impelled retreat in disarray— By me impelled—when toward yon Dome The clouds of war came rolling home" The burst, the bitterness was spent, The heart-burst bitterly turbulent, ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville

... in the valley, weeping mist Beset my homeward way. No gleam of rose or amethyst Hallowed the parting day; A shroud, a shroud of awful grey Wrapped every woodland brow, And drooped in crumbling disarray Around ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... day, whilst her foot-gear consisted of a pair of Japanese slippers; and yet the whole effect was charming, possibly because she was entirely unaffected and obviously happy. The flat reflected the character of its mistress. It was full of good things, all in wonderful disarray. Even the drawing-room had an air of having undergone a strenuous straightening up a month previously, since which event it ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt

... years Johnnie had never before seen her face as it was now. It was set and drawn, and a raging white, so that the blue veins stood out in a clear pattern on her temples. Her hat hung down grotesquely at one side of her head. Her hair was in wild disarray. And her eyes! They were ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates

... shaken, they yield to thy shocks, And, crashing, they tumble in wild disarray; The rocks fly before thee—thou seizest the rocks And whirlst ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow

... All is strange, yet nothing new; Endless labour all along, Endless labour to be wrong; Phrase that time has flung away; Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell

... wagon died away. She was alone—at home. Her eyes filled as she roved restlessly from kitchen to living-room and on into the bedroom at the end. Bill had unpacked. The rugs were down, the books stowed in familiar disarray upon their shelves, the bedding spread in semi-disorder where he had last slept and gone away without troubling to smooth it out ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... they made; she with her body eagerly flung forward and her beautiful face all on fire with warm animal emotion; he, big and amber-bearded, his great mouth crushed against hers as if he wanted to absorb her life, and his arms about her pliant body, at once yielding and resisting in its reckless disarray. But I was not a painter—only a longshore mooncalf—and my eyes swam and my tongue swelled till I thought it would stick between my teeth as those of poor rogues do on the gallows, and I was chickenish enough to wish to blubber. And while I stood there, stockish and stupid, the pair became ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... the city, on what this greatest thing in the world might be. And he hoped with gentle skepticism that the enthusiasm was warranted. A young man opened the car door as they stopped. His face was flushed, Eddinger noted, hair pushed back in disarray, his shirt ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... shy of him. One, it is true, charged him with spines erect—he had a nest to guard and would have charged a pike—but even he, for all his burnished panoply of emerald and vermilion, shrank back and bristled defiance from a safe distance. As for the shoal, they scattered in flashing rainbow-tinted disarray at his approach. ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English

... pledge had passed between them—a spiritual troth which nothing in this world could either touch or tarnish. Neither Peter's marriage nor the rash promise Nan had given to Roger could impinge on it. It would carry them through the complex disarray of this world to the edge of the ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... alone a brave stand was made. But Augereau, burning to wipe out the disgrace of Vallette,[10] forced the position, though at a severe loss. Such was the battle of Lonato. Thenceforth nothing could surpass the discomfiture and disarray of the Austrians. They fled in all directions upon the Mincio, where Wurmser himself, meanwhile, had ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... in his ability to convey the feeling by just the right word, or a word misplaced, like a lady's dress in disarray, or a hat askew. This daring quality marks everything he wrote. The recognition that language is fluid, and at best only an expedient, flavors all his work. He makes no fetish of a grammar—if grammar gets in the way, so much the worse for the grammar. All is packed with color, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard

... seen it also disfigured in the same way. The huge deal cases stood on bare boards; the splendid staircase was carpetless. Nothing indeed could have been more repellant than the general aspect, the squalid disarray of Threlfall Tower, as seen from the inside, ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... him, before he reached his own nest, nor brought him home in the end to give to his nestlings. Even so shall we, though we burst with mighty force the gates and wall of the Achaians, and the Achaians give ground, even so we shall return in disarray from the ships by the way we came; for many of the Trojans shall we leave behind, whom the Achaians will slay with the sword, in defence of the ships. Even so would a soothsayer interpret that in his heart had clear knowledge of omens, and whom the ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)

... indeed, but comfortable and something more. It bore traces of many petty attentions, even—in its white dimity curtains and valances—of an attempt at daintiness. The sight of it brought quite a pleasant shock after the dirt and disarray of the corridor. Nor was the room assigned to my brother one whit less habitable. But if surprised by all this, I was fairly astounded to find in each room a pair of candles lit—and quite recently lit—beside the looking-glass, and an ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... appeared at the hatch of the doorway above. Her hair hung in disarray over her well-developed shoulders, and recent tears had left their furrows on a painted ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... the warriors of his House and of the Bearings and the lesser Houses of Mid-mark, all duly ordered for wending through the wood. The dawn was coming on apace, but the wood was yet dark. But whereas the Wolfings led, and each man of them knew the wood like his own hand, there was no straying or disarray, and in less than a half-hour's space Thiodolf and the first battle were come to the wood behind the hazel-trees at the back of the hall, and before them was the dawning round about the Roof of the Kindred; the eastern heavens were brightening, ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris

... us the earliest hint of what has been done: "This house was his. . . ." But Ottima, whether from scorn of Sebald's mental disarray, or from genuine callousness, answers this first moan of anguish not at all. She gazes from the open lattice: "How clear the morning is—she can see St. Mark's! Padua, blue Padua, is plain enough, but where lies Vicenza? They shall find it, by ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... rather rough and uncomfortable, but most of the company made the best of it. Mlle. Frahender grew pale and ill, and her hair flew about in the most comic disarray. Cosily ensconced in a corner, Maurice sketched the various attitudes his companions assumed with every antic of the lightly-laden, wave-tossed Soulacroup. Hunched up on the seat, Esperance clung to the ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt

... efforts and sacrifices of martyr and reformer may be in vain, and the hope of the world a delusion. It is only the believer who can never despair, who knows that his work will endure and enrich the world—that there will be no collapse or final disarray, that the world is no blot nor blank, but means intensely and means good. It is that faith which makes endeavour and surrender worth while; that faith—the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen—which alone gives us ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... life, when principle takes the place of innocence. There is a time,—many of you must have arrived at it,—when thought and inquiry awaken; when, out of the mere chaos of boyhood, the elements of the future character of the man begin to appear. Blessed are they for whom the confusion and disarray of their boyish life is quickened into a true life by the moving of the Spirit of God! Blessed are they for whom the beginnings of thought and inquiry are the beginnings also of faith and love; when ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold

... hungry. She came sooner than he had expected, setting the wild disarray of her hair in some hurried order. Her eyes were quick and curious as she looked up at him. She shrugged her shoulders behind his back and extended her hands to ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory

... view before you left. In this pleasant study he lived among the books, which seemed to multiply from case to case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to ceiling. Everything was in exquisite order, and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat as if the sloven disarray of most authors' desks were impossible to him. He had a number of ingenious little contrivances for helping his work, which he liked to show you; for a time a revolving book-case at the corner of his ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... fly, but await your coming. For my part, my counsel is that you halt all your men, and rest them in the fields throughout this day. Before the hindermost can come up, and before your lines of battle are set in order, it will be late; your men will be tired and in disarray; and you will find the enemy cool and fresh. To-morrow morning you will be better able to dispose your men and determine in what quarter it will be expedient to attack the enemy. Sure may you be that they will await you." This counsel was well pleasing to the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... round belly with fat capon lined," the sign and symbol affixed by Shakspeare to the "Justice of Peace," entered the apartment. He gazed with some surprise upon two persons, who, notwithstanding some slight disarray in their apparel from all the events which had lately taken place, still bore the appearance of belonging to the highest ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James

... his eyes to efface the vision which so unexpectedly impeded his official progress. It was the sight of a girl, nestled on a cot, and over the pillow upon which her head rested was strewn in a wild, magnificent disarray, a profusion of tawny curls, such as he never had seen. For a moment the corpulent deputy from Auburn, the terror of all the criminals in the country around, forgot his delegated obligation to the state. Tessibel Skinner's two slender ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... three hundred yards in length. In epochs of a magnificence that is now scarcely conceivable this forest of columns grew high and thick, rising impetuously at the bidding of Amenophis and the great Ramses. And how beautiful it must have been even yesterday, dominating in its superb disarray this surrounding country, vowed for ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... and keep it green; and along the dell, first of one, then of another, of these, the road, for a considerable distance, descends into this fortunate valley. The song of the waters and the familiar disarray of boulders gave us a strong sense of home, which the exotic foliage, the daft-like growth of the pandanus, the buttressed trunk of the banyan, the black pigs galloping in the bush, and the architecture of the native houses dissipated ere it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... have ye mark'd that pillar'd wreath, When sudden struck by northern blast, Amid the low and stunted heath, In broken volumes cast? At sunrise, as by northern blast The pillar'd smoke is roll'd away. Fled all that cloud of Saxon war. In headlong disarray." * * * ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... he bade them get the fire lit, and stalked out upon his crutch, with his hand on my shoulder, leaving them in a disarray, and silenced by ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... settlements that one of them would have attracted any notice from Hester Prynne at such a time; much less would he have excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By the Indian's side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with him, stood a white man, clad in a strange disarray ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... mostly were late, and so there would be a tight race to see who would arrive at table first. A dozen heated horses were turned out unceremoniously, a dozen saddles and bridles dumped down anywhere anyhow, and their occupants, with wet dishevelled hair and clothing in glorious disarray, would appear at table ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin

... railway station was a dingy place of cobwebbed murk. It was also the express office, and in helter-skelter disarray lay a litter of uncalled-for plow-shares and such articles as go from the end of the rails into that hinterland where lies an isolated ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck

... conscious of a slight stoppage in his mother's footsteps and rather a convulsive squeeze of her hand on his arm. Looking at her face, he discovered it occupied with a process whose secret he could not penetrate, a kind of disarray of her features, rapidly and severely checked, and capped with a resolute smile. They had already reached the station exit, where Stanley's car was snorting. Frances Freeland looked at it, then, mounting rather hastily, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... might be inferred from the disarray. One was that Mr. Edwards was generous to his son Jim, and another was that there was no Mrs. Edwards. Further, it might be easily enough guessed that Jim had been lured from the study of Latin, in which pretty Miss Ware, who was his teacher at the "Union" school, ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson

... starboard bow. Even at that distance, and to eyes so inexperienced as those of Wilbur, it needed but a glance to know that something was wrong with her. It was not that she failed to ride the waves with even keel, it was not that her rigging was in disarray, nor that her sails were disordered. Her distance was too great to make out such details. But in precisely the same manner as a trained physician glances at a doomed patient, and from that indefinable look in the face of him and the eyes of him pronounces the verdict "death," so Kitchell ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris

... unformable; much the sort of a face that he might have expected to see, remembering those thin and pouting lips that before had impressed him. Its owner was probably little more than twenty. In his attire there was a suspicion of a fop's preciseness, aside from its accidental disarray; the cut of his waistcoat was the extreme of the then fashion, the white tie (twisted beneath one ear) an exaggerated "butterfly," his collar nearly an inch too tall; and he was shod with pumps suitable only for the dancing-floor,—a whim of the ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... of fine grass; a slender sword, silver mounted, hung from a knot in his sash—the last being an almost invariable adjunct, more for utility than ornament, of a South American gentleman's dress to this hour. Excepting when his occasional nervous contortions brought about disarray, there was a certain precision in his attire curiously at variance with the unsightly disorder around; especially in the belittered Ghetto, forward of the main-mast, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... from Madam Bowker," he explained to Craig, humbly conscious of his own disarray and toiler's unkemptness. "She would be greatly obliged if you will give her a few minutes of your time. She begs you to excuse the informality. She has sent me in her carriage, and it will be a great satisfaction to her if ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... his young legmen, was in altercation across the counter-desk with Varkar Klav, the Deputy Claims Agent on duty at the time. Varkar was trying to be icily dignified; Sphabron Larv's black hair was in disarray and his face was suffused with anger. He was pounding with his ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper

... in itself terrible, and that hopeless young "wrong 'un" of twenty-three (also well connected I believe) had some sort of subdued row in the cleared rooms: wardrobes open, drawers half pulled out and empty, trunks locked and strapped, furniture in idle disarray, and not so much as a single scrap of paper left behind on the tables. The maid, whom the governess and the pupil shared between them, after finishing with Flora, came to the door as usual, but was not admitted. She heard the two voices in dispute before she knocked, and then being sent away ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad

... muscular Mexican with a swarthy, wrinkled face, broad but well-cut. His big, thin-lipped mouth showed an amazing disarray of strong yellow teeth when he smiled. His little black eyes were shrewd and full of fire. Although he was sixty years old, there was little grey in the thick black hair that hung almost to his shoulders. ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson

... see nothing wrong. She seemed as crisp and dainty as ever. If there were any disarray, it was a fetching sort, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... if we fall among the potsherds we shall hobble on but lamely. Since thou art raised unto a high command in the army, and hast a dragoon to hold thy solid and stately piece of horse-flesh, I cannot but take it into my fancy that thou hast some commission of array or disarray to ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... in the throng, gave an order, then vanished, leaving the terrified expression of his face reflected upon a score of others. Jenkins showed himself in that way for a moment, cravat untied, waistcoat open, cuffs soiled and rumpled, in all the disarray of the battle he was waging upstairs against a terrible opponent. He was at once surrounded, pressed with questions. Certainly the monkeys flattening their short noses against the bars of the cage, awed by the ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... and easily be removed from his own opinion Drink a dish of coffee Ill from my late cutting my hair so close to my head Nothing of the memory of a man, an houre after he is dead! She had got and used some puppy-dog water Subject to be put into a disarray upon very small occasions Very angry we were, but quickly friends again Went against me to have my wife and servants look ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Diary of Samuel Pepys • David Widger

... the cellar Nadezhda handed the keys to her companion, and with a slow step which set her ample bosom swaying, and increased the disarray of the bodice on her round, but broad, shoulders, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky

... whole of the appalling operation, which was conducted with incredible speed, not a sound nor a respiration was heard from more than five hundred persons who were present; but all, with blanched faces and palpitating hearts, stood in deathlike silence around the victim, who in his strange disarray—a rare spectacle of the melancholy and the ridiculous— underwent a moment of agony which could only be equalled by feelings engendered on the scaffold. Thousands there are who in his situation would have been stretched senseless on the ground by the first shock; but his firm nerves and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... table by the fire stood a chess-board, the old carved red and white pieces standing on it in jumbled disarray; for Chloe and her husband, both inveterate chess-lovers, had begun a game which they were unable, through lack of time, to finish; and as his eyes fell on the board Anstice had a queer fancy that if he and Major Carstairs were not present two ghostly chess-players would issue softly from the shadows ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes

... that stood before them. Dishevelled and in disarray, with disordered garments, the spittle still hanging about His face, and the marks of the awful storm and mental anguish stamped on every feature, the innate dignity and glory of Jesus shone out in His every movement, and notably in His majestic ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer

... Is blown out like a candle, And all the heavens are wandering in disarray, Yet when pleiads of people are Deployed around me, and I see The street's long outstretched ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence

... picture stood a man with a horn in his uplifted hand, which he had just taken from his mouth. He was minus a coat; and the rough-and-tumble disarray of his attire showed that he had been lounging by his camp-fire, or perhaps overseeing the preparation of supper. Dol had a vague impression that the individual was not a forest-guide like Uncle Eb, nor a rough lumberman such as he had heard of. He would have taken him for a pioneer ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook

... In the obscure disarray of that thing, happening like a cataclysm, it was in her feminine head that some gleam of reason survived. He was lost to the world in their embraced stillness. But she said, whispering into ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... galleys, with no lack of skill, Hemmed them and battered in their sides, and soon The hulls rolled over, and the sea was hid, Crowded with wrecks and butchery of men. No beach nor reef but was with corpses strewn, And every keel of our barbarian host Hurried to flee, in utter disarray. Thereon the foe closed in upon the wrecks And hacked and hewed, with oars and splintered planks, As fishermen hack tunnies or a cast Of netted dolphins, and the briny sea Rang with the screams and shrieks of dying men, Until the night's dark aspect hid the scene. Had I a ten days' ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus

... stood open. On the table burned a lamp. Beside the table in the crushed plush rocker sat Mrs. Brackett. Her spectacles were pushed high up on her forehead. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was slightly open. From the corners of her eyes red marks ran down her cheeks. Her thin gray hair was in disarray. In her lap, open, lay her huge family Bible; a spray of pressed maidenhair ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris

... his men were keeping guard at that time; for all were assigned by turns to guard-duty. So when he saw the enemy advancing in disorder, he went out against them before they were yet drawn up in line of battle and while they were advancing in great disarray, and routing those who were opposite him without any trouble he slew many. And a great outcry and commotion arose throughout the city, as was to be expected, and the Romans gathered as quickly as possible to all parts of the fortifications; whereupon the barbarians ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius

... arrive in the rags and tatters of a white silk calling gown," mentioned Arlee cheerfully, surveying her disreputable and most delightful disarray. "I must have trunks and a respectable air—and a ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley

... image of shabby gentility and the dinginess of "reduced circumstances." He would have been, I suppose, some fifty years of age; but his pale haggard unwholesome visage, his plaintive drooping carriage and the irremediable disarray of his apparel seemed to add to the burden of his days and tribulations. His eyes were weak and bloodshot, his bold nose was sadly compromised, and his reddish beard, largely streaked with grey, bristled ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James

... hair in disarray from the frantic combing of his fingers, Kenny went down to find Joan. He read the will aloud to her, controlling his voice ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... fire. Against the heaping coils of white the priest was outlined, drawn, as Jerry sensed, against the protest of every fiber of his being. Yet, one stiff step at a time, he went faltering on. The hair above his white face was torn in disarray. And the face itself, so exultantly fierce in its hour of triumph, now a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... aloft the cross. The Moorish troops, who had been jeering at the king and the cross-bearing prelate, drew back before this impetuous assault, which was given force by the troops who crowded in to the rescue of the king. The Moors soon yielded to the desperate onset, and were driven back in wild disarray. ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris

... in order to go off with the heathen! You men are so monopolizing! He wants to be let love the inky-eyed Jewess, but I must not say a kind word to you! Oh, what am I to do now?" and in pretending to repair the disarray of her hair, down came a luxuriant tress. "What does it matter which way I turn? All roads lead to the river or the railroad—a step into the cold water or repose on the track of the iron horse, and no one will then ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas

... soon came to one of those boudoirs which sweetly recall the deep-buried inner seclusion and dim sanctity of the Eastern home: a door encrusted with mother-of-pearl, sculptured ceiling, candles clustered in tulips and roses of opal, a brazen brasero, and, all in disarray, the silken chemise, the long winter-cafetan doubled with furs, costly cabinets, sachets of aromas, babooshes, stuffs of silk. When, after two hours, I went from the house, I was bathed, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... doubt about that! It supplied the only lack of which the disclosure of sly old Skipper John had informed her. And she tossed her dark head in a proper saucy fashion, and she touched a strand of hair to deliberate disarray, and smoothed her apron; and then she tripped into the kitchen to exercise the wiles of the little ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan

... upward. There, overhead, was Miss Lorne coming down the stairs from the upper floor in a state of nervous excitement, with a bedroom candle in her shaking hand, a loose gown flung on over her nightdress, and her hair streaming over her shoulders in glorious disarray. ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew

... must be clad and conduct myself thus and so, with utmost particularity: must be combed and brushed, and carry my head bravely, and square my shoulders, and turn out my toes, and cap my crown so that my unspeakably wilful hair, which was never clipped short, as I would have it, would appear in disarray. Never once did I pass the anxious inspection without needing a whisk behind, or, it may be, here and there, a touch of my uncle's thick finger, which seemed, somehow, infinitely ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan

... man sprawled in Captain Dabney's easy chair at the farther end of the cabin table. The table was littered with the debris of a meal, which Charley Bo Yip was phlegmatically and deftly clearing away, and Martin stared across the board's disarray at Wild Bob Carew's disdainful face. The erstwhile commander of the schooner Dawn, his comrades' unscrupulous enemy, his own rival, was the same aloof, superior rogue he remembered from ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer

... necessary to destroy the last vestiges of the Yuan Shih-kai regime. Furthermore a new article, conferring on the President the right to dismiss the Premier summarily by Presidential Mandate without the counter-signature of the other Cabinet Ministers, completed the disarray of the conservatives who saw in this provision the dashing of their last hopes. [Footnote: The final text of the Permanent Constitution as it stood on the 28th May, 1917, will be found in the appendix. Its accuracy has been guaranteed ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... in the morning when George Dupont closed the door and came down the steps to the street. The first faint streaks of dawn were in the sky, and he noticed this with annoyance, because he knew that his hair was in disarray and his whole aspect disorderly; yet he dared not take a cab, because he feared to attract attention at home. When he reached the sidewalk, he glanced about him to make sure that no one had seen him ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair

... that the Western States have offered their help.' In the following number, a detailed article, written by Kropotkin, recounted the denouement of the crisis, the recovery of Pittsburgh, where two thousand wagons loaded with merchandise had been burned, the repression and the disarray of the strikers following the treachery of the miserable false brothers, and the final miscarriage of the movement. But if there had been, in this attempt of popular insurrection, weak sides that had brought about the failure, Kropotkin rightly praised the qualities of which the American working ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... blow. Then the males were at it again, their blue plumage mixing with the green grass and ruffled by the ruddy soil. What a soft, feathery, ineffectual battle it seemed in both cases!—no sound, no blood, no flying feathers, just a sudden mixing up and general disarray of blue wings and tails and ruddy breasts, there on the ground; assault but no visible wounds; thrust of beak and grip of claw, but no feather loosened and but little ruffling; long holding of one down by the other, ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... all scarred by red scratches, without collar or neck-tie, having hastily resumed his clothes. He appeared furious as he surprised her in his disarray. She let him lead her as though she were a child. He drew her to his room and closed ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux

... open and we hate the haunts o' men, But we had to come to town to get the mail. And we're ridin' home at daybreak—'cause the air is cooler then— All 'cept one of us that stopped behind in jail. Shorty's nose won't bear paradin', Bill's off eye is darkly fadin', All our toilets show a touch of disarray; For we found that City life is a constant round of strife, And we ain't the breed for shyin' ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn

... occupant; no disarray of jewels, flowers, or dresses, no little slippers; no single trace of Beatrice's ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme

... youth of Alexander and the maturer actions of Hannibal and Caesar; an imaginative language which found for his ideas words that came as from a distance, like those of Shakespeare or Racine; and within his own heart a mystic faith, deep-anchored, immutable, tranquil, when all around was trouble and disarray—the calm of a spirit habituated to the Infinite, and familiar with the deep places of man's thought from his youth upwards. Yes, Mirabeau was long dead, and Danton, Marat, and Saint-Just, and but three years ago the heroic Lazare Hoche, richly gifted in politics as in war, had been struck down in ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... by a new problem, she stopped short. About her she peered in vain for something to protect her disarray. There was nothing. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... retreat from this imaginary body of horse, they came of necessity, and without design, full upon their pursuers, whom unhappily the intoxication of victory had by this time brought into the most careless disarray. These, almost to a man, the rebels annihilated: universal consternation followed amongst the royalists; Father Murphy led them to Ferns, and thence to the attack ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... The emptiness and disarray of the little room, flooded by the sunbeams, were producing in Trent a sense of gruesomeness. His fancy called up a picture of a haggard man dressing himself in careful silence by the first light of dawn, glancing constantly at the inner door behind which ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley

... this lest someone in that great silence should have heard what he had said. Thus does the presence of the dead accuse living men, as if by our mere retention of life we did them injury. Wheresoever we encounter them, whether in the hired pride of the vulgar city hearse, or in the pitiful disarray of bleached bones and tattered raiment strewn on a mountainside, they make even those of us who are remotest from blame ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson

... honour of her friend, but that the Archbishop might not despise the house, when he blessed the marriage bed, according to the rite. When all was ready the mother carried the bride to that chamber where she should lie, to disarray her for the night. Looking upon the bed she marked the silken coverlet, for she had never seen so rich a cloth, save only that in which she wrapped her child. When she remembered of this thing, her heart turned to ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France

... the light of her latest discovery, though she could never meet Clara in disagreement without a qualm. But she made the plunge that evening, before Clara left for the Bullers', while she was at her dressing-table in the half-disarray which brings out all the softness and the disarming physical charm of women. From her low chair Flora spoke laughingly of Ella's perturbation. Clara paused, with the powder puff in her hand, while ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain

... probably unaware that he was giving utterance to his thoughts. "That was a sharp rock! Durn if thar's a inch o' skin left on my knee. Whut is it Scott ses? 'An' broken arms and disarray marked the fell havoc of the day.' Gee! if Mariar cud only see me now, maybe ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish

... the apparent purpose of occupying the town: and the soldiers of Rufus, becoming aware of their approach, and thinking the force was marching straight against them, set out without being ordered to oppose their progress. They fell upon the advancing troop while the men were off their guard and in disarray, and so cut down great numbers of them. Vindex seeing this was afflicted with so great grief that he slew himself. For he felt, besides, at odds with Heaven itself, in that he had not been able to attain his goal in an undertaking of so great magnitude, involving ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio

... bath," said Marcia. She and Galen were alone with Pertinax, who looked splendid in his official toga. She was herself in disarray. Her woman had tried to dress her hair on the way in the litter; one long coil of it was tumbling on her shoulder. She looked ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy

... Then bent upon her purpose dire, Kaikeyi with her soul on fire, Upon the floor lay, languid, down, Her brows contracted in a frown. The bright-hued wreath that bound her hair, Chains, necklets, jewels rich and rare, Stripped off by her own fingers lay Spread on the ground in disarray, And to the floor a lustre lent As stars light up the firmament. Thus prostrate in the mourner's cell, In garb of woe the lady fell, Her long hair in a single braid, Like some fair nymph ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... of the village. John Girder also stood upon his threshold, now looking at his honoured right hand, which had been so lately shaken by a marquis and a lord, and now giving a glance into the interior of his mansion, which manifested all the disarray of the late revel, as if balancing the distinction which he had attained with the expenses ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... midnight. She had taken off her straw-bonnet, and her head, covered with a little embroidered cap, dropped upon her uncle's shoulder. When they reached Bouron at dawn, Savinien awoke. He then saw Ursula in the slight disarray naturally caused by the jolting of the vehicle; her cap was rumpled and half off; the hair, unbound, had fallen each side of her face, which glowed from the heat of the night; in this situation, dreadful for women to whom ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac

... Marcellin, what are you going to make of him?" "A sailor," replied my father, "Captain Sibille has agreed to take him with him to Toulon." Then the good Mme. Barairon, towards whom I have always felt the warmest gratitude, observed to my father that the French navy was in complete disarray, that the poor state of the country's finances would not allow its rapid refurbishment, and, furthermore, its inferiority vis—vis the English navy was such that it would spend most of its time ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... given themselves up for hours to their artistic chatter ... when a couple of Guardias civiles, who had doubtless those days been looking for marauders, approached them. They heard something of apses, squinches, ogives, and other terms as suspicious or as dangerous ... and observing the disarray of those who thus discoursed, their long beards, their excited mien, the lateness of the hour, the solitude of the place, and obeying especially that axiomatic certainty of the Spanish police to blunder, they angrily swooped down upon those night birds, and, in spite of protests and ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... bend wildly from the balustrade, a sight for a painter. Across the way Flora, holding back her grandmother, silently leans out, another picture. In the ranks near Charlie a disarray continues even after Kincaid has got the battered Mandeville again into the saddle, and while Mandeville is rejecting sympathy with a begrimed yet ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... slew, Down with the bridle-hand drew The foe from the saddle and threw Underfoot there in the fray— Ranged like a storm or stood like a rock In the wave of a stormy day; Till suddenly shock upon shock Staggered the mass from without, Drove it in wild disarray, For our men gallopt up with a cheer and a shout, And the foemen surged, and wavered and reeled Up the hill, up the hill, up the hill, out of the field, And over the ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various

... enemy out of the battered villages of France and across the devastated plains of Belgium. They might hurl him across the Rhine in battered disarray. But unless the nation as a whole shoulders part of the burden of victory it won't profit by the triumph, for it is not what a nation gains, but what it gives that makes ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... Lord! a man soon gets tired of whacking something that doesn't fight back but merely goes its own way repeating its offences. You needed to escape into another epoch and get your bearings while waiting for a congenial subject to present itself. That explains your spiritual disarray of the last few months and your immediate recovery as soon as you stumbled ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... water-jugs and jars that might have held the forty thieves. At one booth harness is sold and high Turkish saddles, at another pannier baskets for mules. A flood of colour on the pavement of a covered way—a great disarray of little shrivelled lemons, with stalks in many cases, for they have been gathered hard by. In the centre of the market-place are all the meat and fish shops, and there one may see huge sturgeon and salmon brought from the fisheries of ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... Duchessa—and blessed the elements. To see her seated there, in her wet gown, seated familiarly, at her ease, before his fire, in his kitchen, with that colour in her cheeks, that brightness in her eyes, and her hair in that disarray—it was unspeakable; his heart closed in a kind of delicious spasm. And the fragrance, subtle, secret, evasive, that hovered in the air near her, did not ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... flatters me immensely," murmured Volney, smiling whimsically. "Faith, I never liked my clothes so well as now. You make an admirable setting for them, Captain, but the ruffles are somewhat in disarray. If you will permit me to ring for my valet Watkins he will be at your service. Devil take him, he should have been here ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine

... the open door, she scrambled over the low back fence, the high comb with which her hair was fastened falling out unheeded behind her, and all her dark waves of hair coming about her shoulders in wild disarray. ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... Ridged high against the evening bloom, The Old Town rises, street on street; With lamps bejewelled, straight ahead, Like rampired walls the houses lean, All spired and domed and turreted, Sheer to the valley's darkling green; Ranged in mysterious disarray, The Castle, menacing and austere, Looms through the lingering last of day; And in the silver dusk you hear, Reverberated from crag and scar, Bold ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley

... patroness, but sought in vain. Apollo whisper'd in my ear—"Germain."— I know her not.—"Your reason's somewhat odd; Who knows his patron, now?" replied the god. "Men write, to me, and to the world, unknown; Then steal great names, to shield them from the town. Detected worth, like beauty disarray'd, To covert flies, of praise itself afraid: Should she refuse to patronize your lays, In vengeance write a volume in her praise. Nor think it hard so great a length to run; When such the theme, 'twill easily be done." Ye fair! to draw your excellence at length, Exceeds the narrow bounds of human ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young

... eyes. He had seen such a look in the eyes of creatures physically hurt. He reached out with his hands and brushed back the thick, soft hair from about her face. His fingers buried themselves in the silken disarray, and he looked for a moment straight into her ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood

... enters to write a prescription, followed by Clive's mother-in-law, who had cast Rosa's fine Cashmere shawl over her shoulders, to hide her disarray. "You here still, Mr. Pendennis!" she exclaims. She knew I was there. Had not she changed her dress in order ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... with the witnesses of Lucifer, and I think that the search-light of a drastic criticism has left them in considerable disarray. We approach the limit of the present inquiry, but before summing up and presenting such a general statement or conclusion as may be warranted by the facts, there is one point, left over hereunto, and ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... cap was off, her hair tangled loosely over her forehead. In her disarray she looked prettier than he had ever remembered her. There was something provoking about the large, dreamy eyes, the red lips that parted at the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... facie and in itself a good cannot be doubted. It is a spontaneous activity, and that settles the question. Yet the function of ethics is precisely to revise prima facie judgments of this kind and to fix the ultimate resultant of all given interests, in so far as they can be combined. In the actual disarray of human life and desire, wisdom consists in knowing what goods to sacrifice and what simples to pour into the supreme mixture. The extent to which aesthetic values are allowed to colour the resultant or highest good is a ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... with a burst of humility. In short, he gave me an opportunity of studying John Bull, as I may say, stuffed naked—his greed, his usuriousness, his hypocrisy, his perfidy of the back-stairs, all swelled to the superlative—such as was well worth the little disarray and fluster of our passage in ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson

... soprano laughter and scents of many slain but living flowers. The Minnies and Pearls and jewels and jennies would gather round her like courtiers, bearing wispy frailties of Georgette crepe, delicate chiffon to echo her cheeks in faint pastel, milky lace to rest in pale disarray against her neck—damask was used but to cover priests and divans in these days, and cloth of Samarand was remembered ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... loftily above the structure. This dome was left still erect, but only as a skeleton might stand, with its flesh gone and its bare ribs exposed to the searching air. Its roof, its smaller towers came tumbling down in frightful disarray, and the once proud edifice is to-day a miserable wreck, fire having aided earthquake in its ruin. The new Post Office, a handsome government building, also suffered severely from the shock, its walls being badly cracked and injury done by earthquake and fire that it is estimated will need ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... canopy about the bed, were curtains of cheap, gaudy material, through the partings of which there was to be had a glimpse of a daintily-made-up bed, whose pillows were made conspicuous by the hand-made lace that trimmed their slips, as was the bureau-cover, and upon which, in charming disarray, were various articles generally included in a woman's toilet, not to mention the numberless strings of coloured beads and other bits of feminine adornment. A table standing in the centre of the room was covered with a small, white cloth, while falling in folds from beneath this was a faded, ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco

... time to start up from the ground, his colour deepening with discomfiture as he glanced at the disarray of the room, littered with playthings, displaced cushions, newspapers, with which he had been playing bo-peep, drawing materials, all in as much confusion as the hair, which, in an unguarded moment, he had placed at the mercy ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... trunk in the women's dressing tent sat a young, wistful-faced girl, chin in hand, unheeding the chatter of the women about her or the picturesque disarray of the surrounding objects. Her eyes had been so long accustomed to the glitter and tinsel of circus fineries that she saw nothing unusual in a picture that might have ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo

... hunger. Then he glanced at Grenfell, who lay fast asleep close by, with his blanket falling away from him. The man's face was half buried among the withered needles which were thick in his unkempt hair, and he lay huddled together, grotesque and unsightly in ragged disarray. Weston vacantly noticed the puffiness of his cheeks, and the bagginess beneath his eyes. The stamp of indulgence was very plain upon him, and the younger man, who had led a simple, strenuous life, was sensible of a certain ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... Eloquent limbs In disarray Sleep-suave limbs of a youth with long, smooth thighs Hutched up for warmth; the muddy rims Of trousers fray On the thin bare shins of a man who ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence

... fruitless, as were the glances he sent into Paula's wardrobe room and dressing room. He passed the short, broad stairway that led to her empty window-seat divan in what she called her Juliet Tower, and thrilled at sight of an orderly disarray of filmy, pretty, lacy woman's things that he knew she had spread out for her own sensuous delight of contemplation. He fetched up for a moment at a drawing easel, his reiterant cry checked on his lips, and threw a laugh ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... disarray of her nightgown, sat upright. The alarm clock on the floor by the bed clacked in the stillness. The tap in the kitchen cubicle dripped. Timbers, contracting in the cool of ...
— Stopover Planet • Robert E. Gilbert

... had returned to the table, where she was standing when I entered, and seemed, after a moment, to busy herself in arranging the books scattered in disarray on the green cloth. But she had a secret object—to regain possession of the paper spiral that lay there neglected, its pin sticking up beside the lamp-stand. Her light hand, hovering hither and thither, had by a series of cunning manoeuvres got the offending ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

... country the six hundred had broken file and were in easy disarray all over Gareb. Spears were at rest, standards grounded, many were dismounted, whole companies slouched in their saddles. The Jews, long used to rigid military discipline among the Romans, looked in amazement. Then a light click of a hoof attracted ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller

... him was the body of his sister, her torn clothing in frightful disarray, a look of agony and horror upon her white set face under its dishevelled hair. She was stone dead. He knelt down and touched her. She was stone cold, too. He stared at her, a groan bursting from his lips. The groan brought forth another sound. Was it an echo? Lifting the candle, he looked ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... who out of the complex disarray of his little world effects a new harmony is an artist. He who fashioned the first cup, shaping it according to his ideal,—for no prototype existed,—and in response to his needs; he who, taking this ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes

... economy in disarray because of a quarter century of nearly continuous warfare. An apparently durable peace was established after the death of rebel leader Jonas SAVIMBI on February 22, 2002, but consequences from the conflict continue ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... its fastenings. "Give me ice quickly." She looked haggard and distracted. Dark circles ringed her eyes; her sleeves rolled above the elbows revealed rounded arms from which water dripped; her skirt was splashed; her blouse and hair were in disarray. ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... Najara and Lograno there's waste and disarray:— And now with Christian captives, a very heavy prey, With many men and women, and boys and girls beside, In joy and exultation to their ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various

... This disarray of the Turkish attack diminished the fire their bow-guns could bring to bear on the Christian line, for the leading galleys masked the batteries of those that followed. Along the allied left and centre, lying in even array bows to the attack, the guns roared ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale



Words linked to "Disarray" :   disorientation, distraction, confusedness, throw out of kilter, befuddlement, obfuscation, disarrange, change, disorderliness, modify, daze, mental confusion, puzzlement, messiness, haze, untidiness, fog, confusion, bemusement, jumble, mess up, perturb, scramble, cognitive state, muddiness, perplexity, bafflement, alter, half-cock, mess, throw together, bewilderment, jamais vu, order, state of mind, disorder, mystification, derange



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