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Fester   /fˈɛstər/   Listen
Fester

verb
(past & past part. festered; pres. part. festering)
1.
Ripen and generate pus.  Synonyms: maturate, suppurate.



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"Fester" Quotes from Famous Books



... to fester in the wounds. No, we mustn't do it; they want cutting out with a proper knife. Look here, Ned; jump on your pony and go and find father. He'd like to dress the ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn

... understand what he later found to be the truth: that what the Aleut really does with his slate harpoon-head is not to kill the whale with the wound, but to poison it. If the stone harpoon-head passes through the blubber and into the red meat the wound is sure to fester, and in the course of a few days to kill the whale, which then floats ashore somewhere and is discovered by ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough

... Trafalgar Road. He walked because the last tram-car was already housed in its shed at the other end of the world, and he walked quickly because his conscience drove him onwards. And yet he dreaded to arrive, lest a wound in the child's leg should have maliciously decided to fester in order to put him in the wrong. He was now as apprehensive concerning that wound as Nellie herself had been ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... nails? Do you draw your breath part of the time through one nostril and part of the time through the other? Do you ever have nightmare? Did your nose bleed easily when you were growing up? Does your skin fester when scratched? Are your eyes gummy in the mornings? Then," he says, "if you have any or all of these symptoms, your blood is bad, and your liver is ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis

... longer progress take: Oh, what a pair Of dear esteemed friends to me they were! 'Tis not my verse, nor prose, may reach thieir praise; Neither of these can naked virtue raise Above her own true place: with them I have Reach'd many heights; one yoke of learning gave Laws to our steps, to them my fester'd wound I oft have show'd; no time or place I found To part from them; and hope, and wish we may Be undivided till my breath decay: With them I used (too early) to adorn My head with th' honour'd branches, only worn ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... fastened, in fear's rhythmic sympathy, To two contending opposite. There strains The might o' the hero 'gainst his more than match, —Death, dreadful not in thew and bone, but like The envenomed substance that exudes some dew, Whereby the merely honest flesh and blood Will fester up and run to ruin straight, Ere they can close with, clasp and overcome, The poisonous impalpability That simulates a form beneath the flow Of those grey garments; I pronounce that piece Worthy to set up in ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys

... make a fire, we were forced to enter the chaparal for wood, and in doing so we ran many prickles into our legs, which caused us great annoyance afterwards, as they fester, if ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle

... much of this waste is thrown into the dust-bin, there to fester and breed disease. Then there are old newspapers, ragged books, old bottles, tins, canisters, etc. We all know what a number of articles there are which are not quite bad enough to be thrown into the dust heap, and yet are no good to us. We put them on one side, hoping that ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... Noir had not been destined soon to die; his wound, an inward canker from a copper bullet, that the surgeon had at length succeeded in extracting, took the form of a chronic fester disease. Since the night upon which he had been so extremely ill to be supposed dying, and yet had rallied, the doctors felt no apprehensions of his speedy death, though they gave no hopes of his ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth

... surrounded with troops, and the dogs were driven into the Rue Royale and the Place Royale, where they were mowed down by musketry. On that one day the dead carcasses of more than three thousand dogs lay about in the streets of Paris, and there they continued to fester for three days longer, because a dispute had arisen among the city officials as to whose duty it was to remove them. At length the Convention undertook that task, and intrusted the work to representative Gasparin, who was shrewd enough to convert the removal ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach

... plans—and sometimes plots—are laid; when resolutions are formed or changed; when heaven, and sometimes heaven's enemies, are invoked; when anger and evil thoughts are recalled, and sometimes hate made to inflame and fester; when problems are solved, riddles guessed, and things made apparent in the dark, which day refused to reveal. Our nights are the keys to our days. They explain them. They are also the day's correctors. Night's leisure untangles the mistakes of day's haste. ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... Helga frowned regretfully. "I cannot blame him if he will not speak to me," she said to Sigurd Haraldsson. "The nature of a high-born man is such that a blow is like poison in his blood. It must rankle and fester and break out before he can be healed. I do not think he could have been more lordlike in his father's castle than he was yesterday. Hereafter I shall treat him as honorably as I treat you, ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... and during the recreations raise discussions on details of good manners. Ask your friends candidly to point out your defects. It is far easier to be admonished by one friend whose correction is swathed in soft charity than await till a dozen sneerers send their poisoned arrows to fester in your heart. In correcting yourselves and asking your friends to admonish you, it will assist you to pocket your pride, to remember that three such weighty issues as the efficiency of your ministry, the honour of the priesthood, and the comfort of your future home will in a large measure ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan

... stubborne, you must do as the trees list. They will not bend but breake, nor bee wound without danger. A small branch will become a bough, and a bough an arme in bignesse. Then if you cut him, his wound will fester, and hardly, without good skill, recouer: therefore, Obsta principys. Of such wounds, and lesser, of any bough cut off a handfull or more from the body, comes hollownesse, and vntimely death. And ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson

... bondmen—pouring in steady streams from their kennels behind the palaces and from the unhealthy purlieus of such quarters as had been spared from the architectural encroachments of the wealthy, and allowed to fester in their own neglected corruption. Gathered together in close fraternity, the Briton, the Goth, the African, and the Jew—each bearing his badge of life-long servitude, some even wearing marks of recent chastisement, but almost all awaiting the approaching spectacle with pleased and animated countenances, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... The fester of noise widened and widened, and at last burst into twenty minute pieces. And now a large voice commanded the silence of the night, and cried upon London: "What I said is what I say now: that fan-tan is fan-tan. And ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... bog, laystall^, sink, privy, jakes; toilet, john, head; cess^, cesspool; sump, sough, cloaca, latrines, drain, sewer, common sewer; Cloacina; dust hole. sty, pigsty, lair, den, Augean stable^, sink of corruption; slum, rookery. V. be unclean, become unclean &c adj.; rot, putrefy, ferment, fester, rankle, reek; stink &c 401; mold, molder; go bad &c adj.. render unclean &c adj.; dirt, dirty; daub, blot, blur, smudge, smutch^, soil, smoke, tarnish, slaver, spot, smear; smirch; begrease^; dabble, drabble^, draggle, daggle^; spatter, slubber; besmear ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... made up of contiguous Bladesovers and for the gentlefolk, the surplus of population, all who were not good tenants nor good labourers, Church of England, submissive and respectful, were necessarily thrust together, jostled out of sight, to fester as they might in this place that had the colours and even the smells of a well-packed dustbin. They should be grateful even for that; that, one felt, was the ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... would be valuable certainly, but if he goes on as he is he will soon be in a high fever; his wounds will grow angry and fester. While yesterday he seemed in a fair way to recovery, I should be sorry to give any favourable opinion as to what may happen if this goes on. Is there no one who could take care of him if ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty

... piercing the vitals of other people. A forest, pierced with shafts or cut down with the axe, grows again. The man, however, that is pierced with words unwisely spoken, becomes the victim of wounds that fester and lead to death.[462] Barbed arrows and Nalikas and broadheaded shafts are capable of being extracted from the body. Wordy shafts, however, are incapable of being extracted, for they lie embedded in the very heart. One should not taunt a person ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... yet the imprisoning night has half released her, More desires the sun's full face of cheer, than we, Well as yet we love the strength of the iron-tongued north-easter, Yearn for wind to meet us as we front the sea. All thy ways are good, O wind, and all the world should fester, Were thy fourfold godhead quenched, or stilled thy strife: Yet the waves and we desire too long the deep south-wester, Whence the waters quicken shoreward, clothed with life. Yet the field not made for ploughing save of keels ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... satisfaction that pervaded Fitt's comment, however understandable, was lamentable because it helped insure that certain inequities in the military community would linger. The failure of Negroes to win skilled job assignments and promotions, for example, would remain to fester and contribute significantly to the bitterness visited upon a surprised Department of Defense in later years. In brief, because the services had become a model of racial equality when judged by contemporary standards, the impulse of almost all concerned was to play down the reforms still ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... upreared Haughty and high Against the blackening lowering sky. With a hoof it swayed the waves; They opened here and there, Till I spied deep ocean graves Full of skeletons That were men and women once Foul or fair; Full of things that creep And fester in the deep And never breathe the clean ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti

... he said to Rosemary as they walked slowly down the road, extending their walk to enjoy the beauty of the summer evening. "His finger was throbbing and beginning to fester and must have given him ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence

... pustule, boil, abscess, canker, fester, blain, gathering; (venereal sore) chancre, chancroid. Associated Words: antiseptic, slough, proud flesh, poultice, salve, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... Ireland and the Irish people." From peculiar circumstances, the present writer has had more than ordinary opportunities of verifying the truth of this statement. The wound caused by a sarcastic expression may often fester far longer than the wound caused by a hasty blow. The evil caused by such language is by no means confined entirely to Protestants. There are, indeed, but few English Catholics who speak contemptuously of Ireland, of its people, or of its history; but, if I am to credit statements ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... waning bodies from out filthy alleys, as if to gasp some breath of air, then drag themselves back, as if to die in a desolate hiding-place. Engines of pestilence and death the corporation might see and remove, if it would, are left here to fester—to serve a church-yard as gluttonous as its own belly. The corporation keeps its eyes in its belly, its little sense in its big boots, and its dull action in the whiskey-jug. Like Mrs. Swiggs, it cannot ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... There's plenty i' the Seaton to help. We're gauin' to tak' the markis's cutter. She's a heap easier to lainch, an' she'll sail a heap fester." ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... minutes he could have explained his Upper accent and his unlikely education. When you'd copped one you had plenty of opportunity in hospital beds to read, to study, to contemplate—and to fester away in your own schemes of rebellion against fate. And Joe had copped many in ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... is in reality tremendous, downright crushing, terrible... And not at all terrible are the loud phrases about the traffic in women's flesh, about the white slaves, about prostitution being a corroding fester of large cities, and so on, and so on... an old hurdy-gurdy of which all have tired! No, horrible are the everyday, accustomed trifles; these business-like, daily, commercial reckonings; this thousand-year-old science of ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... mankind would revolt at the blunt, naked truth; and the taciturn emperor knows this, as he knows most things. This imperial hypocrisy, like every other hypocrisy, is a homage which vice pays to virtue. There cannot be a doubt that when the political crimes of kings and governments, the sores that fester in the heart of society, and all "the burden of the unintelligible world," weigh heaviest on the mind, we have to thank Christianity for it. That pure light makes visible the darkness. The Sermon on the Mount makes the morality of the nations ghastly. The Divine love makes human ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... region; how the Great Lakes were bereft of their feathered life, and the swamps of the Kankakee were invaded; how the White Pelicans, Western Grebes, Caspian Terns, and California Gulls of the West were butchered and their skinned {146} bodies left in pyramids to fester in the sun. One might recount stories of Bluebirds and Robins shot on the very lawns of peaceful, bird-loving citizens of our Eastern States in order that the feathers might be spirited away to feed the insatiable appetite of the wholesale ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson

... HEART. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it!) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other, when the fraternal spirit shall give way to cold indifference, or collision of interests shall fester into hatred, the bonds of political association will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will it be for the people of the disunited States to part in friendship ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... rather distrust a man who never swears, or savagely kicks the foot-stool, or pokes the fire with unnecessary violence. Without some outlet, the anger caused by the ever-occurring troubles of life is apt to rankle and fester within. The petty annoyance, instead of being thrown from us, sits down beside us and becomes a sorrow, and the little offense is brooded over till, in the hot-bed of rumination, it grows into a great injury, under whose poisonous shadow springs up ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... "seed" of Death's "rude plowshare" Yielded bounteous "human harvests." Each forgot the sacred lesson, Thou art still thy brother's keeper; Each essayed in vain to smother In the ground the cries of bloodshed. Family feuds are wounds that fester, Home dissensions breed sore anguish, Yet the love that binds the members, Spreads the mantle of forgiveness; And from every wound that severs Parent stems and sturdy branches, Springs a shoot of vital growing, Flows a blessed balm of healing. ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... such a noise, Dickon, returned Marmaduke, it is impossible that I can hear what Dr. Todd is saying. I think thou observedst, it is probable the wound will fester, so as to occasion danger to the limb in this ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... the highway to the interior, and Calabar would cease to be so important a port. Great stretches of rich oil-palm country would be opened up and exploited. She urged the need for more men and women to work amongst the rank heathenism that would soon collect and fester in the new industrial and commercial centres. Up there also was the menace of Mohammedanism. "Shall the Cross or the Crescent be first?" she cried. "We need men and women, oh, ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone

... lies in the lack of moral courage to deal drastically with the wound. If poison remains, it is bound to fester. ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi



Words linked to "Fester" :   release, expel, discharge, exhaust, suppurate, sore, eject, mature



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