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Oily   /ˈɔɪli/   Listen
Oily

adjective
(compar. oilier; superl. oiliest)
1.
Containing an unusual amount of grease or oil.  Synonyms: greasy, oleaginous, sebaceous.  "Oily fried potatoes" , "Oleaginous seeds"
2.
Unpleasantly and excessively suave or ingratiating in manner or speech.  Synonyms: buttery, fulsome, oleaginous, smarmy, soapy, unctuous.  "Gave him a fulsome introduction" , "An oily sycophantic press agent" , "Oleaginous hypocrisy" , "Smarmy self-importance" , "The unctuous Uriah Heep" , "Soapy compliments"
3.
Coated or covered with oil.
4.
Smeared or soiled with grease or oil.  Synonym: greasy.  "Get rid of rubbish and oily rags"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Oily" Quotes from Famous Books



... any of the artists deem the praise a little too oily, they can easily add such a tag as the following:—"In our humble judgment, a little more delicacy of handling would not be altogether out of place;" or, "Beautiful as the work under notice decidedly is, we recollect to have received perhaps ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... said the bartender affably. A little yellow man in rags and the youth grasped their schooners and went with speed toward a lunch counter, where a man with oily but imposing whiskers ladled genially from a kettle until he had furnished his two mendicants with a soup that was steaming hot, and in which there were little floating suggestions of chicken. The young man, sipping his broth, felt the cordiality ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane

... He was no judge, he said, except of what pleased himself; he had picked them up, dirt-cheap, and people had considered them rather fine. One man, who at any rate ought to know something of the subject, had declared that 'Sage, Reading' (a specially oily old gentleman in a blanket, with a swan's-down tippet for a beard, and a web of cracks all over him like rich pie-crust), to be a fine Guercino. As for Sebastian del Piombo there, you would judge for yourself; if it were not his later manner, the question was, Who was ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... he had his own little streak of superstition in spite of the fact that he fulminated against it. When he had committed some fault, after confession, he used to hang bags of relics in his room, and watch them for a sign of forgiveness. When one of these would turn oily, or begin to affect the surrounding atmosphere peculiarly, he would consider it a sign of the forgiveness of heaven. It seems to us to-day as if he might have looked to his own relic ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... hoping thus to please him; but it was no use, for he now said he must have two deoles, or he would never allow me to leave his palace. Every day matters got worse and worse. Mfumbi, the small chief of Sorombo, came over, in an Oily-Gammon kind of manner, to say Makaka had sent him over to present his compliments to me, and express his sorrow on hearing that I had fallen sick here. He further informed me that the road was closed between this and Usui, for he had just been fighting there, and had killed the ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke

... colorless oily fluid, which possesses at first not an unagreeable odor, but at last is very disgusting, producing oppression at the chest and exciting cough. It has a sharp hot taste, and burns with a white blue ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse

... her paddles slowly turned, For they kept steam up, waiting for a gale. It seemed as if the slim boat chafed and yearned To go hell-tearing under steam and sail. The oily water churned And made a slap-slap to the paddles' stroke; And a high painted canvas screen cut off The blue haze of ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen

... tied up in a black kerchief, and a brilliant Order conferred by the Queen of Holland adorns his breast. Madame, in magenta shawl and purple gown, travesties European costume. Diamonds blaze incongruously on arms and neck, a scarlet flower in oily black braids completing her startling attire. The girl, in yellow sarong and pink cotton jacket glorified with rubies and pearls, shows her high breeding in slender wrists, delicate hands, and bare feet of exquisite modelling, a red stain of henna drawing attention ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... from his pocket, removed its cap, squeezed a drop of black, oily substance out on a fingertip. "Mind rolling up your sleeve a moment?" he ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz

... But there wasn't the oily-mouthed, bald-headed divorced man alive, with little rat eyes and ugly lips, who could have took me or your mamma out auto-riding before or after dark. We was working-girls, too, but there wasn't a man didn't take off ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst

... why as much is not absorbed in this case also. It is known that one part of aerial acid mixed with 10 parts of ordinary air extinguishes fire; and there are here in addition, expanded by the heat of the flame and surrounding the latter, the watery vapours produced by the destruction of these oily substances. It is these two elastic fluids, separating themselves from such a flame, which present no small hindrance to the fire which would otherwise certainly burn much longer, especially since there is here no ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele

... spots, cross-hatchings, big sabre-like strokes a la John Sargent, indulges in smooth sinuous silhouettes, or huge splotches, refulgent patches, explosions, vibrating surfaces; surfaces that are smooth and oily surfaces, as in his waters, that are exquisitely translucent. You can't pin him down to a particular formula. His technique in other hands would be coarse, crashing, brassy, bald, and too fortissimo. It sometimes is all these discouraging things. It is too often deficient in the finer modulations. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... an oily, significant smile. "I am new to the country, my friend," he said. "I don't know anything about the usual custom employed to force a man to give up his land. Could you ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer

... may be long, long thoughts, but not longer than the thoughts of this old sailor man smoking his pipe under the stars. Thoughts as long as the world is round. Blazing bar rooms in Callao—harbours over whose oily surfaces the sampans slipped like water-beetles—the lights of Macao—the docks of London. Scarcely ever a sea picture, pure and simple, for why should an old seaman care to think about the sea, where life is all into the fo'cs'le and out again, where one voyage blends and jumbles ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... citadel of Troy lies the lizard like a thing of green bronze. The owl has built her nest in the palace of Priam. Over the empty plain wander shepherd and goatherd with their flocks, and where, on the wine-surfaced, oily sea, [Greek text], as Homer calls it, copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the great galleys of the Danaoi came in their gleaming crescent, the lonely tunny-fisher sits in his little boat and watches the bobbing ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde

... waters occur, and at times cold winds and thunderings that ascend out of it into the busy ways of the great ant-hill above. It is only when the water is in motion that it gives out light; in its rare seasons of calm it is black. Commonly, when one sees it, its waters rise and fall in an oily swell, and flakes and big rafts of shining, bubbly foam drift with the sluggish, faintly glowing current. The Selenites navigate its cavernous straits and lagoons in little shallow boats of a canoe-like ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... and let her bark her knuckle on the bracket. But the glow, born in the brass, grew clearer and clearer, till suddenly, stooping to it, she looked into a mirror and saw all the garage behind her and the long rows of cars bent in a yellow curve, and little men and oily women walking incredibly upon the rounded ball of the world. They hung with their feet on curving walls running and walking without difficulty, blinking, moving, talking in a yellow lake ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold

... alleys, wherein political mischief was very generally manufactured by youths who dressed in flashy colored garments, were lean of figure, and very noisy. Their features were sharp, but undefined, and about them there was air of recklessness made more striking by their long, oily locks, (which were turned under in the neck,) and the strong profanity of their conversation, which invariably turned either upon some pugilistic rencounter, or a question of municipal or national policy. Being a popular politician, it was ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"

... swirls about us. The view was not extensive from the launch. Sometimes a deepening of the near shadows would tell of a moored barge, or lights high above our heads mark the deck of a large vessel. In the floods of moonlight gaunt shapes towered above; in the ensuing darkness only the oily glitter of the tide occupied the foreground ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... the eels made into a pie by our shepherd, who assured me that if I entrusted them to my cook she would send me up such an oily dish that I should never be able to endure an eel again. He declared that the Maoris, who seem to have rather a horror of grease, had taught him how to cook both eels and wekas in such a way as to eliminate ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker

... flattered, sir. And in what capacity are you thinking of me?" There was something too sleek and oily in Binet's ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... stomach used to roast meat and Yorkshire pudding rebels against Eastern cookery, and a Christian may sooner become a Buddhist than a beef-eater a guzzler of olla podrida. The Spaniards without weariness eat the same dinner day after day, year in, year out: it is always the same white, thin, oily soup; a dish of haricot beans and maize swimming in a revolting sauce; a nameless entree fried in oil—Andalusians have a passion for other animals' insides; a thin steak, tough as leather and grilled to utter dryness; raisins and oranges. You rise ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... an hombre at the portal knocks Who hath an oily tongue, which wagged desire To speack with thee, but I all unawere Of thy design, did ward him gently off. Quezox: 'Twere well, thus ever do when skins are white. But did this hombre show a mighty girth? Muchacho: In sooth he did, Senor; his leg like to A python gorged ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)

... light. It was not an appetizing luncheon that that individual banged down upon the lap-board that was propped across the receding arms of the morris-chair to serve as a table. There were some microscopic scraps of the cold lamb, a cup of cocoa on which the surface had long since grown thick and oily, a rather limp looking lettuce leaf with a stuffed tomato palpably left from some former meal. Felicia sipped the cocoa, she dipped bits of the dry bread in it and fed Babiche. She herself ate the lamb and struggled through the salad. She was really very, very ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... the darkness was no longer quite so opaque as it had been, nay, I was sure of it, for by putting my face right up against the circular opening I was enabled to catch an occasional transient gleam of faint, shifting light that I knew was the glancing of the coming dawn upon the back of the oily swell that came creeping up to the ship; while, by directing my glances higher, I found that I was able to make out indistinctly something of the outline of the great black cloud- masses ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood

... rubbish heap was a mixture. There were jam pots and paper bags, and mountains of chopped grass from the mowing machine (which always tasted oily), and some rotten vegetable marrows and an old boot or two. One day—oh joy!—there were a quantity of overgrown lettuces, which had ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter

... Europe;" and Mark Lemon declared that it was simply used as a sort of trade-mark whereby he might be known again, just as Mr. Harry Furniss invented Mr. Gladstone's collars, Lord Randolph Churchill's diminutiveness, and exaggerated those complacent smiles and oily rippling chins of Sir William Harcourt, continuing them long after the time when Sir William could boast the local portliness no more. However, it is certain that the sprig of straw, which really referred only to his pure devotion to the Turf, from 1815 onwards, was first ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... round. At the end opposite that where the faraway light leaks through, a mob is gathered in front of a tent-cloth which reaches from the ceiling to the ground, and thus forms an apartment, whose illumination shines through the oily yellow material. In this retreat, anti-tetanus injections are going on by the light of an acetylene lamp. When the cloth is lifted to allow some one to enter or leave, the glare brutally besplashes the disordered rags of the wounded stationed ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... compliments to Trirodov and his instructresses. But when he looked at the instructresses the Commissary smiled as detestably as the sergeant. His small, narrow eyes, which resembled those of a Kalmyk, became oily with pleasure. His cheeks became ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... the agent of a patent washing-machine, wishing to advertise his goods, stationed himself outside one of the mill gates, and offered to wash the girls' greasy, oily aprons as they came out from work ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 54, November 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... minutes for the benefit of the fishery craft that crowded the waterways. From the bridge the fo'c'sle was invisible; from the hand-wheel at the stern the captain's cabin. The fog held possession of everything—the pearly white fog. Once or twice when it tried to lift, we saw a glimpse of the oily sea, the flitting vision of a junk's sail spread in the vain hope of catching the breeze, or the buoys of a line of nets. Somewhere close to us lay the land, but it might have been the Kurile Islands for aught we knew. Very early in the morning there passed us, not a cable's-length away, but ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling

... kitchin farre better than a dining chamber, and yet it makes a kitchin also oftentimes in the inward parts of men, soyling and infecting them with an vnctuous and oily kind of soote, as hath been found in some great tobacco takers, that after their ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... seen on a soap bubble, as in the illustration, may also be seen in very fine sections of crystals, in glass blown into extremely fine bulbs, on the wings of dragon-flies and the surface of oily water. The different colours correspond to different thicknesses of the surface. Part of the light which strikes these thin coatings is reflected from the upper surface, but another part of the light ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... of the reasons why very little propagation is done with beeches is that no outstanding variety has ever been discovered. Although the nut shell is thin and the meat sweet and oily, the kernel is so small that one must crack dozens of them to get a satisfying sample of their flavor. This, of course, prevents their having any commercial value as a nut. There is also the fact that the beechnut ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke

... colour, deep black, with a white border to the ears, a few brown hairs on the head and anterior surface of fore-legs. Some of the Malayan specimens are slightly sprinkled with brown, and have the head, face, and throat grizzled. It has a large sub-caudal gland, secreting an oily fluid. ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... calm, peaceful nights in which God seems to draw nearer than usual to the souls of His creatures. The only sounds that broke the profound stillness were the pattering of reef-points on the sails as the vessel rose and sank gently on the oily swell; the measured tread of the officer of the watch, and the humming of the man at the wheel, as he stood idly at his post, for ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne

... way, as if glad to burn for the sake of burning. Burning like a clear oil, it has none of the heaviness and fatness of the pine and the balsam. Woodsmen are at a loss to account for its intense and yet chaste flame, since the bark has no oily appearance. The heat from it is fierce, and the light dazzling. It flares up eagerly like young love, and then dies away; the wood does not keep up the promise of the bark. The woodsmen, it is proper ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... they are often spoilt by over-cooking, and it should be remembered that when lightly done they are easiest to digest. White fish, tender steak, or juicy joint and cutlet are superior to the oily fish, and kidney, liver, and heart. These internal organs should be avoided, as they contain even more than the rest of the animal certain extracts liable to produce URIC ACID (see). Milk, cheese, eggs, and butter are not open to these objections. Cheese is a food very rich ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... cleaned and oiled daily, preferably just before retreat or parade. It is advisable for each man to have a canvas cover to keep off the dust and dampness. In a shelter-tent camp tie the rifle, muzzle up, to the pole of the tent, placing a chip of wood under the butt plate and an oily rag over (never inside) ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department

... cast anchor, and threw overboard his lines. Suddenly his boat moved uneasily, and close to its side the oily surface of the pale sea broke into a tumbling mass of foam. In the heart of the troubled waters, the fisherman beheld, to his great astonishment, a man clad in a strange garment of gleaming black scales, struggling with an enormous scarlet fish. ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston

... with such oily effusiveness that I longed to kick him over the side; "but there ain't no need for your men to be scared. My crew on'y want to hev' a bit of a gam{*} with ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke

... considered, bit his lip, glanced at the open cheque-book—always a potent argument—and bowed in his grand fashion. Lepardo changed his spectacles for a larger pair, reached for a pen, peering, and overturned a massive inkstand. The ink poured in an oily black stream across the leathern top ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... lad did not surrender, but looked sharply about to try and fully grasp his position and his chances of escape. Ahead the water certainly appeared deeper, for it glided on towards him, looking black, oily, and marked with sinuous lines. There was no ripple to indicate a shallow, and he could feel, from the pressure against him, that it would be impossible to stem it in swimming; while most ominous of all, right in the centre, a little way ahead, there was a ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn

... say that it is very easy to remind yourself of the Continent," said Mr. Lind, smiling—"that you have only to go to a place where they give you oily food ...
— Sunrise • William Black

... known rules of shipbuilding and rigging had not convulsed him with laughter at the first glance. Swarthy boys and dark-eyed Madonnas, staring at you from one corner of the studio, suggested Murillo; oily brown shadows of faces with a lurid streak in the wrong place, meant Rembrandt; buxom ladies and dropiscal infants, Rubens; and Turner appeared in tempests of blue thunder, orange lightning, brown rain, and purple clouds, with a ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... lurk in the smooth, oily face of the Atlantic. Far ahead stretched the grey barricade that seemed to mark the spot where the voyage was to end. There was no going beyond that clear-cut line. When the ship came up to it, there would ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... exceptional. No sooner had the outlines of Madeira melted and blended into the soft darkness of a summer night than we appeared to sail straight into tropic heat and a sluggish vapor, brooding on the water like steam from a giant geyser. This simmering, oily, exhausting temperature carried us close to the line. "What is before us," we asked each other languidly, "if it be hotter than this? How can mortal man, woman, still less child, endure existence?" Vain alarms! Yet another shift of the light wind, another degree ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... the manufacture of the liqueur peculiar to the Abbey of Grace-Dieu. From this account it appears that the liqueur was formerly called the Liqueur of the Grace-Dieu, but is now known as Trappistine. It is limpid and oily; possesses a fine aroma, a peculiar softness, a mild but brisk flavour, and so on. It was invented by an ecclesiastic who was once the Brother Marie-Joseph, and prior of the convent, but is now M. Stremler, having been released by the Pope ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne

... Miss Shepherd twelve Brazil nuts for a present, I wonder? They are not expressive of affection, they are difficult to pack into a parcel of any regular shape, they are hard to crack, even in room doors, and they are oily when cracked; yet I feel that they are appropriate to Miss Shepherd. Soft, seedy biscuits, also, I bestow upon Miss Shepherd; and oranges innumerable. Once, I kiss Miss Shepherd in the cloak-room. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... wid de pack-hoss, Massa de Croix," was the oily answer. "I done s'posed you would n't need 'em till ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish

... Harrington's life—a coarse woman would, perhaps, have contented herself with its material comforts, and, without loving, ceased to desire the capacities of love; the world is full of such. A wicked woman would have skulked out of her fate through the oily-hinged portals of the law—a feeble woman would have pined herself to death; but Mabel was none of these, else my pen would not love to dwell upon her character, as it does now. She had gone through her life honestly, cultivating ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens

... accustomed as we had been to the noisy importunities of their more sophisticated brethren, we could scarcely believe them to be Esquimaux. There was, besides, a degree of lankness in the faces of the two men, the very reverse of the plump, round, oily cheeks of those we had before seen. Their countenances at the time impressed me with the idea of Indian rather than of Esquimaux features; but this variety of physiognomy we afterward found not to be uncommon among ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... to speak irreverently—in itself ten times more trouble than ten thousand Grimalsons could have raised; a tearing gale of wind which, all of a sudden, converted the oily summits of the swell into bursting white waves. I don't suppose the height from trough to summit actually increased as it did to view, but in twenty minutes, and with night shutting down the lid on us, each successive wave astern seemed to grow taller by feet. The rain appeared ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... period of nearly five months. On July 1 we were overhauled by the only ship we ever saw, so far as I can remember, during all that time, the Inverclyde, a barque out from Glasgow to Buenos Ayres. It was an oily, calm day with a sea like glass, and she looked, as Wilson quoted, "like a painted ship upon a painted ocean," as she lay with all ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... Armed with my consent, Chamilly dispatched to the unhappy girl that , whose skill in such delicate commissions had never been known to fail. Not that in the present instance any great bribes were requisite, but it was necessary to employ some agent whose specious reasoning and oily tongue should have power to vanquish the virtuous reluctance of the victim herself, as well as to obtain a promise of strict silence from her family. They were soon induced to listen to their artful temptress; and the daughter, ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon

... the second middy, thoughtfully; "I forgot about him. Bother the monkey! Phew! I am hot. I say, they may well call this Oily Bight. The sea looks just as if it had been greased. Oh, don't I wish I were in a good wet fog in the Channel. This ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn

... through March wind and sleet, and through the mists of the low meadows; her feet were loaded with earth from the ploughed fields; her nostrils filled with the cold, rich smell of the wet earth; the rank, sharp smell of swedes, the dry, pungent smell of straw and hay; the thick, oily, woolly smell of the folds, the warm, half-sweet, half sour smell of the cattle sheds, of champed fodder, of milky cow's breath; the smell of hot litter ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair

... hand there was a portly personage of Jewish type, dark to swarthiness, and somewhat oily, whose every word suggested bullion. He and Mr. Smithson were evidently acquaintances of long standing, and Mr. Smithson presented him to Lesbia, whereupon he joined in their ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... you congratulated yourself on your escape? We always do. I was violently in love with a little hotel clerk, with oily hair, a snub-nose, and a waxed black moustache, in the Adirondacks ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page

... allowed to find his excuse; 2ndly, because an Englishman, attempting to play the adulatory character, finds an obstacle to his success in the standard of his own national manners from which it requires a perpetual effort to wean himself: whereas the oily and fluent obsequiousness found amongst Italians and Frenchmen makes the transition to a perfect Phrygian servility not only more easy to the artist, and less extravagantly palpable, but more agreeable in the result to his employer. This cannot be denied, and therefore needs no comment. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... a submarine! A warm, peculiar, oily odor greeted them as they descended, but the air was not at all unpleasant and breathing was easy. Glancing about they saw confused masses of mechanism, tanks, pipes, valves, levers, wheels, clock-faced dial plates and other contrivances, all huddled together, with barely room to pass ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward

... waters, with phosphorescent scraps of rotten fish gleaming and twinkling out of the dark hollows, like devilish grave-lights—over bubbles of poisonous gas, and bloated carcases of dogs, and lumps of offal, floating on the stagnant olive-green hell-broth—over the slow sullen rows of oily ripple which were dying away into the darkness far beyond, sending up, as they stirred, hot breaths of miasma—the only sign that a spark of humanity, after years of foul life, had quenched itself at last in that foul death. I almost fancied that ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... the canoe slid on smoothly under the clear sunlight and the frost towards the film of mist where the oily green now broke up into the mad white tumult that poured down the canon. Then the strokes quickened, the craft lurched beneath them, and the sunlight was blotted out as they plunged into spray-filled dimness. High through the vapour towered smooth walls of stone, and the river that rebounded from ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss

... spirits; Eugene, by one of the quick transitions of his nature, was hardly less elate. Up-hill they toiled and down-hill they raced, getting, as the manner of "cyclists" is, very warm and rather oily. But retribution lagged not. Down a steep hill they came, round a sharp turn they went, and, alas, over into a ditch they fell. This was bad enough, but in the calm seclusion of a garden seat, perched on a knoll just above them, the sinners, as they rose, dirty but unhurt, beheld Miss Bernard! ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope

... free from dust. For this purpose, the entire road surface, is given a frequent sprinkling with petroleum. After each sprinkling, the enormous pressure of an hundred-ton roller, soon converts the layer of moistened dust, into a hard, smooth mass of oily rock. This process is repeated until a thick, heavy, durable surface of water-proof rock, is secured. This makes an ideal road! The hard, well pounded, gravelly soil, below, gives a permanent foundation, because it is so well protected ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... into water and carbonic acid. By means of calculation applied to the products of these experiments, we find that fixed oil is composed of 21 parts, by weight, of hydrogen combined with 79 parts of charcoal. Perhaps the solid substances of an oily nature, such as wax, contain a proportion of oxygen, to which they owe their state of solidity. I am at present engaged in a series of experiments, which I hope will throw great light upon ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier

... her name dots Canada's map like ink-blots on a boy's copybook. Wherever a Ste. Anne's is now found, there has the voyageur of long ago passed and repassed. In places the surface of the river, gliding to meet us, became oily, almost glassy, as if the wave-current ran too fast to ripple out to the banks. Then little eddies began whirling in the corrugated water and our paddlers with labored breath bent hard to their task. By such signs I learned to know when we were stemming ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... Belfast amid the wonderful scenes described in the last chapter, Carson, Londonderry, F.E. Smith, Beresford, and the rest of the distinguished visitors awoke next morning—if the rollers of the Irish Sea permitted sleep—in the oily waters of the Mersey, to find at the landing-stage a crowd that in dimensions and demeanour seemed to be a duplicate of the one they had left outside the dock gates at Belfast. Except that the point round which everything had centred in Belfast, the signing of the Covenant, was of course missing ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... o' oily tongued wheedlers," was the reply, "an' that wee ferrit-eyed yin is the worst o' them a'. Just wait till he begins to speak, an' you'll think he's a showman. He can fairly pit on the butter, an' he'll send ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh

... and passed between the two green islets that guarded the entrance. We experienced some difficulty and no little danger in passing the surf of the breaker, and shipped a good deal of water in the attempt; but, once past the billow, we found ourselves floating placidly on the long oily swell that rose and fell slowly as it rolled over the ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne

... which sputtered on account of the dampness of the atmosphere, and the drop of water from the roof, which cut this irregular sputtering with its monotonous splash, and made the light of the lantern quiver in concentric waves on the oily water of ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... gained first, and it was cheaper to do that at another man's expense than his own. He knew how the right kind of a man could form a partnership with a flockmaster sometimes; he had heard stories of such small beginnings leading to large ownership and oily prosperity. Jasper had examples of its own; he was familiar ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden

... coast, the sea otter, clad in kingly robes, sports shyly in the kelp fields. The fur seals stream by unchased to their misty home in the Pribyloffs. Barking sea-lions clamber around the jutting rocks. Lazy whales roll on the quiet waters of the bay, their track an oily wake. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... called Palolo muli, or after Palolo. Pa means to burst, and lolo, fatty or oily, and hence probably the origin of the name in the fatty or oily appearance of the worms as they break, burst, and are mixed up in the heaps directly after they are taken. They are only found for about half an hour before sunrise, ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner

... sand. A number of particles still clung to his palm, and over the skin there spread an oily, slightly iridescent film. His manner had suddenly grown composed, though his eyes still ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames

... means free from uneasiness and anxiety, from a certain lack of self-respect that was unfamiliar. Mr. Young, the Colonel explained, was a legal light in Galesburg, near Elkington,—the Railroad lawyer there. And when at last Mr. Young appeared he proved to be an oily gentleman of about forty, inclining to stoutness, with one ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... inside of a huge heated caldron. Nobody remained below. The native sailors formed in anxious groups amidships and for'ard, where they talked in low voices and gazed apprehensively at the ominous sky and the equally ominous sea that breathed in long, low, oily undulations. ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London

... and joints. A cataplasm of the juice, with rye meal, is good against luxations and ruptures. The flowers are good against palsy, numbness, convulsions, and cramps, being given in a sulphurous or a saline tincture, or an oily tincture, or an essence of the juice with spirits of wine. The juice of the flowers, or an ointment of the flower or its juice, cleanses the skin from spots, though the worthy old physician only gives a receipt ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various

... chin was disposed a blond goatee. The cheeks were fatty. The continually perspiring forehead exhibited innumerable pinkish pock-marks. In conversing with a companion this being emitted a disgusting smoothness, his very gestures were oily like his skin. He wore a pair of bloated wristless hands, the knuckles lost in fat, with which he smoothed the air from time to time. He was speaking low and effortless French, completely absorbed in the developing ideas ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... with them the blessd void repose Of oily days at sea, when only rose The porpoise's slow wheel to break the sheen Of satin water indolently green, When for'ard the crew, caps tilted over eyes, Lay heaped on deck; slept; mumbled; smoked; threw dice; The sleepy summer days; the summer nights (The coast pricked ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various

... more of it, Rachel had fled from the tent, and sat herself down at a distance to watch the oily sea. ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard

... this vermin sometimes, and sits for hours in the shade before the door of Domingo's posada telling his beads as piously as a devil that had turned monk for the greater undoing of us Christians. These women crowd there to kiss his oily paw. What else they——— Basta! Only I wanted to tell you, Senor, that this evening (I just come from taking a pasear that way) there is much talk in the villages of an evil-intentioned heretic that has introduced himself into this our town; of an Inglez ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... feel that I am in the midst of one of those great calm, oily stretches of ocean that a ship is rocked gently in for a few hours before the storm tosses it first to Heaven and then to hell. He is so psychic, and in a way attuned to me, that he partly understands my purpose in declaring my love for him to put him at a disadvantage in his ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess

... the platform into a tavern consisting of a barn-like eating-room and a few starved little garret rooms over it. She stopped at the door uncertainly, while the passengers crowded about the eating-stands at the far end of the room. A fat, oily landlord came up with a hat driven down ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various

... a while is not to be condemned, as the grease does not have a chance to "soak in." But when crullers or potatoes or fritters are dropped into warm (not hot) lard, and allowed to remain there until they are oily and soggy to the core, we may with accuracy count on at least fifteen minutes of heartburn to each ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... the Cradle of the Deep" the WHOLE way; he was blind and he had a small organ, one of those portable organs, and he expected money; so you can imagine what THAT was like; there came a constant smell of luncheon from below, and puffs of hot oily machinery; the journey took hours and hours and hours; and for miles, literally for miles, dreadful boys ran with us on the shore, in that AWFUL Thames mud, going in UP TO THE WAIST—they had their trousers ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... That great Achilles left the field, and fled; Which was so liuely by the Painter done, That one would sweare the very cloth did runne. Trecherous Vlysses bringing in that horse, Which proued a fatall coffin for Troies corse. False-hearted Synon groueling on the mire, Whose oily words prou'd fewell to Troies fire. Flint-brested Pyrrhus with an iron mace Murdring the remnants of great Priams race. Vertuous AEneas, with the armes of Greece, Venturing for Troy as Iason for his fleece. And vpward if you lookt, you might behold ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale

... master's caprice. We know, too, that when a master was arraigned on a criminal charge, the first thing done to prove his guilt was to torture his slaves. But just as in America the popular figure of the oily, lazy, jocular negro, brimming over with grotesque good-humour and screening himself in the weakness of an indulgent master, merely served to brighten a picture of which the horrible plantation system was the dark background; so at Rome no instances ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley

... plain, flat, level, abraded, levigated, slippery, sleek, glary; unruffled, placid; voluble, fluent; suave, oily, bland, insinuating, flattering, smooth-tongued. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... frightened her into marrying him. I get the impression she was afraid of him." This last sentence was inked out, I but I read it through the scratching; the letters being too big to hide. "He had an inflexible will beneath all that oily kindness which passed for spiritual. He was a real personality, I mean. I'm sure he'd have sent you and me cheerfully to the stake in another century—for our own good. Isn't it odd she never speaks of him, even to me?" This, again, was stroked through, though without the intention to obliterate—merely ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood

... smile, His proffered hand's a snare; He's plannin deepest villany, When seemingly mooast fair; He leads yo' on wi' oily tongue, Swears he's yo're fastest friend. He get's yo' once within his coils, An' crushes yo' ith' end. Old Nick, we're tell'd, gooas prowlin' aat, An' seeks whom to devour; But he's a saint, compared to some, 'At's th' luk to be ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series - To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour - from his Popular Writings • John Hartley

... is just the reverse. Republicanism stands for vested rights, for imperialism, for graft, for the annihilation of every semblance of liberty. Its ideal is the oily, creepy respectability of a McKinley, and the brutal ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... college graduate, though doubtless he was as much of a humbug in recitations and examinations as he had always been since. Andrew's only reply to his assertion that he was a literary man was a rather severe and prolonged scrutiny of his oily locks, his dainty mustache, his breast-pin, his watch-seals, and finally his straps and his boots. For Andrew firmly believed that neglected hair, Byron collars, and unblackened boots were the first signs of ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston

... in the shelter of a pilchard house, one of the long buildings where these silvery, oily relatives of the herring are salted before being pressed in barrels and sent away to the Mediterranean ports by hundreds of tons every year. The building took the brunt of the roaring wind and spray torn from the huge billows that ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn

... looked at the oily heave of the leaden and cheerless Atlantic, and its somber tones found reflection in her ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... regretfully, rubbing his ear with a black and oily lump of cotton waste, "why didn't I think of that, now? I was trying to think of something as 'ud amuse him only this morning, and I couldn't think of anything better than a guinea-pig. And a young chap I know's going to fetch that over for him ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit

... young man on Earraid in these days, and we were much together, bathing, clambering on the boulders, trying to sail a boat and spinning round instead in the oily whirlpools of the roost. But the most part of the time we spoke of the great uncharted desert of our futures; wondering together what should there befall us; hearing with surprise the sound of our own voices in the empty vestibule of youth. ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... very glad Dr. MacDaniels' paper preceded mine, because it does give you a very much better picture of the development of all of our oily nuts, excepting the filbert and, of course, the almond to some extent. But we take in pecans and the hickories and for the walnuts the situation is ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various

... doctor was being talked about. Nekhludoff had known that for some time; but when he saw the doctor sitting by her couch, his oily, glistening beard parted in the middle, he not only remembered the rumours about them, but felt greatly disgusted. By the table, on a low, soft, easy chair, next to Sophia Vasilievna, sat Kolosoff, stirring his coffee. ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... never slackened its speed. So great was the momentum that had both sets of brakes been in working order it is doubtful whether they would have stopped the vehicle. The speed was so great now that one of the journals became hot and the oily waste that was packed in it caught fire, making what railroad men ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood

... sloped downward thirty feet and debouched upon a rippled ramp of ooze outside. It was daylight out there now. From my perch I could see the sullen heavy walls of a ridge. Mist hung against them, but the early morning sunlight came down in shafts penetrating the mist and striking the oily surface of a spread of water left here in the depths of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... peasants-poor men, bent and scarred in the brute struggle for existence; here the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary leaders-Avksentievs, Dans, Liebers,-the former Socialist Ministers-Skobelievs, Tchernovs,-rubbed shoulders with Cadets like oily Shatsky, sleek Vinaver; with journalists, students, intellectuals of almost all camps. This Duma crowd was well-fed, well-dressed; I did not see more than three proletarians ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed

... thick and strong, and the snake does not dash himself against it to get out. He would not take the trouble to do that, for he moves slowly, and when you see him at the Zoo you would think him very lazy. There he lies, with his oily body, covered with little scales, hanging round the branch of a dead tree which has been put into his house, or perhaps lying coiled up on the gravel floor in rings and rings, so beautifully neat that you wonder how he can take the trouble to fold himself up so nicely before he ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... oily grass which is found on the prairie, and which is called mesquite grass, and ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever

... The oily water shimmered in smooth heavings as the clumsy boat advanced upon it. The white houses on the hills gleamed out from their palms. As the boat came closer to the wharf, the travelers could see the crowds of foreign-looking people, with swarthy faces and cheap, ungraceful ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... tissue of small vesicles filled with oily matter, in which there is no sensation, and a layer of which lies under the skin and gives smoothness ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... more or less superior or inferior to one another precisely as they approximate to or recede from the typical standard in color and form, due allowance being made for age and sex. The standard is an oily, shining black, and as far as the conformation of the head and face is concerned and the relative proportion of nervous matter outside of the cranium to the quantity of cerebral matter within it, is found between the simiadiae[257] and the Caucasian. ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... from it gaunter, and horribly squeezed within the littleness of a torturing jacket. His bony legs, in trousers too wide and too short, break off at the bottom in long and mournful shoes, with hillocks, and resembling crocodiles; and their soles, being soaked in paraffin, leave oily footprints, rainbow-hued, in the ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse

... oily-faced little dealer in pillow shams, smiled slyly. He had thick black ringlets, parted exactly down the middle of his scalp, hanging to his shoulders, and a luxuriant black curly beard reaching to his middle; in addition to which he ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... is infested with those huge crocodiles called decrepitude and death. Many physicians may be seen afflicted with all the members of their families, although they have carefully studied the science of Medicine.[82] Taking bitters and diverse kinds of oily drugs, these succeed not in escaping death, like ocean in transcending its continents. Men well-versed in chemistry, notwithstanding chemical compounds applied judiciously, are seen to be broken down by decrepitude like trees broken down by elephants. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... upstairs, Coonie, the house-boy, bringing up the rear with an armful of sticks and some fat splinters of lightwood, which were soon blazing with an oily sputter. Coonie scented a story, and his bullet pate was bent over the fire an unnecessarily long time, as he blew valiant puffs upon the flames which no longer needed his assistance, and arranged and rearranged his skilfully ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various

... goose.) Through the path up by the well-sweep, where the moss-covered bucket hangs dripping with the purest of water. Beyond the corn-barn to the butternut-trees,—by this time, they have dropped their rich, oily fruit; and the chestnut-burrs, split open, and lying on the sunny ground. Then round to the house again, where the slant October sun shines in at the hospitable open door, where the little wheel burrs contentedly, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... corsets which crushed their breasts and obliterated the prominent curves of their hips, displaying with stately pride, above the motley hued handkerchiefs, gold chains and enormous crucifixes. There were brown faces and olive, with great eyes of dramatic expression; coppery virgins with glossy, oily hair divided by a part which their rough combing ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... the drifters, against the red west, As they shot their long meshes of steel overside; And the oily green waters were rocking to rest When Kilmeny went out, at the turn of the tide. And nobody knew where that lassie would roam, For the magic that called her was tapping unseen, It was well nigh a week ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke

... folklore, throughout the whole of Central Burma. Mud volcanoes occur at Minbu, but they are not in any sense mountains, resembling rather the hot springs which are found in many parts of Burma. They are merely craters raised above the level of the surrounding country by the gradual accretion of the soft oily mud, which overflows at frequent intervals whenever a discharge of gas occurs. Spurs of the Chin hills run down the whole length of the Lower Chindwin district, almost to Sagaing, and one hill, Powindaung, is particularly noted on account of its innumerable cave temples, which are said to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... or emollient purposes, al-Zahw[a]r[i] suggested medications, such as egg white, salt water (normal saline), sap of psyllium, several ointments, "duhn" of rose, and other "adh[a]n" (plural of "duhn," the fatty or oily essences extracted from ...
— Drawings and Pharmacy in Al-Zahrawi's 10th-Century Surgical Treatise • Sami Hamarneh

... his satchel, and was looking for a little vial. He found it almost empty. But there were four or five drops of the yellowish, oily liquid. He poured them on his handkerchief and held it close to the lady's mouth. She was still breathing regularly though slowly, and as she inhaled the pungent, fruity smell, like the odour of a jargonelle pear, a look of relief flowed over ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke

... places—with names like Gran' Bassam Little Popo, names that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister backcloth. The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform somberness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf heard now and then ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad



Words linked to "Oily" :   insincere, fat, oiliness, dirty, fatty, soiled, coated, unclean, oil



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