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Protuberance   /proʊtˈubərəns/  /prətˈubərəns/   Listen
Protuberance

noun
1.
Something that bulges out or is protuberant or projects from its surroundings.  Synonyms: bulge, bump, excrescence, extrusion, gibbosity, gibbousness, hump, jut, prominence, protrusion, swelling.  "The hump of a camel" , "He stood on the rocky prominence" , "The occipital protuberance was well developed" , "The bony excrescence between its horns"
2.
The condition of being protuberant; the condition of bulging out.



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"Protuberance" Quotes from Famous Books



... rifle at a distance of five yards is capable of driving a bullet 55 inches or nearly five feet into a log of pine-wood. Many examples of long tracks will be referred to later, but the following instances may be of interest in this relation. A bullet entering at the occipital protuberance traversed the muscles of the neck, passed through the thoracic cavity, fractured the bodies of the third and fourth and grooved the seventh and eighth dorsal vertebrae, grooved the seventh and eighth and fractured the ninth and tenth ribs, traversed the muscles of the back ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins

... Ensign, by this elevation of the bone, and the protuberance of the more fleshy parts, that the peculiarity is an exception. I should rather have said that the nose originally inclined to the Roman. The departure from regularity has been produced by some casualty of their warfare, ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper

... had a bare fallow—we mean a clean shave; that of course was followed by a full crop of hair all over, except on his upper lip; then he had a soldier's shave, off by the ear; which in turn was followed by a Newgate frill. The latter was his present style. He had now no whiskers, but an immense protuberance of bristly black hair, rising like a wave above his kerchief. Though he cared no more about hunting than his master, he was very fond of his red coat, which he wore on all occasions, substituting a hat for a cap when 'off duty,' as he called it. ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... and fifty miles. With the exception of a black streak which divides the ring throughout its whole contour into two parts of unequal breadth and of different brightness, this strange colossal bridge without foundations had never offered to the most experienced or skillful observers either spot or protuberance adapted for deciding whether it was immovable or endowed with a motion of rotation. Laplace considered it to be very improbable, if the ring was stationary, that its constituent parts should be capable of resisting by mere cohesion the continual attraction of the planet. A movement of rotation ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... side to the slanting sun, letting the light shine under her copper. She was so deep, however, nothing could be made out on the smooth green surface that showed like a started plank end. Only here and there a lump or protuberance appeared, showing a bunch of marine growth, or a bent edge of a plate where it had started to rip off. The water of the Indian Ocean is always remarkably clear, and this day during the still weather it was like liquid air. Objects were as distinctly ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains

... known it, and no use cryin' over spilt milk," returned her mother. Mrs. Lemuel Foster had raised her pompadour exceptionally high this morning, and the knot at the back of her head had the psyche-like protuberance reserved for ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham

... presented themselves.' Even Gray found that Mount Cenis carried the permission mountains have of being frightful rather too far, and Wordsworth and Shelley would have resented the Johnsonian description of a Highland Ben as 'a considerable protuberance.' Indeed, Goldsmith's bare mention of that object, so dear to Pope and his century,—'grottoes'—reminds us we are not yet in the modern world. Yet the boldness of the sage, and the cheerfulness of ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask

... Earle's business-like directness and the protuberance of her bust in conclusion, by way of reasserting her satisfaction with the results of her action, there was a touch of plaintiveness in her confession which suggested the womanly author of "Hints on Culture and Hygiene," rather than the man-hater. ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... heard the organ, beyond partitions, launching its waves of sound through the hall. They seemed to be very near it, and the whole place vibrated. The policeman was a tall, lean-faced, sallow man, with a stoop of the shoulders, a small, steady eye, and something in his mouth which made a protuberance in his cheek. Ransom could see that he was very strong, but he believed that he himself was not materially less so. However, he had not come there to show physical fight—a public tussle about Verena was not an attractive idea, except perhaps, after ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James

... were of the same type that we had seen in other districts, but they appeared sickly, and many of the children were extremely delicate. There was the usual protuberance of the abdomen to which I have before alluded; and I found upon examination of the children that an enlargement of the spleen was a chronic complaint. This is due to repeated attacks of ague. I drew the ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... Tom is a fine specimen of the genus. He is about fifteen hands high, rising thirty, herring-bowelled, small head, large ears, close mane, broad chest, and legs a la parentheses ( ). His dress is a long brown-holland jacket, covering the protuberance known in Bavaria by the name of pudo, and in England by that of bustle. His breeches are of cord about an inch in width, and of such capacious dimensions, that a truss of hay, or a quarter of oats, might be stowed away in them with perfect convenience: not that we mean to insinuate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... radicle had protruded from a bean laid on its side, a flattened solid lump projected .1 of an inch, in the same horizontal plane with the bean. This protuberance consisted of the convex summit of the arched epicotyl; and as it became developed the two legs of the arch curved themselves laterally upwards, owing to apogeotropism, at such a rate that the arch stood highly inclined after ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin

... was but an easy load to carry. The bodies were short and compact, and thickly covered with strong, dark-coloured bristles. Round the neck was a whitish band, while the under part of the body was nearly naked. Instead of a tail, there was merely a fleshy protuberance. ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston

... On his way to the house, as always when he knew that they were to meet, he formed a picture of her in his mind; and the necessity, if he was to find any beauty in her face, of fixing his eyes on the fresh and rosy protuberance of her cheekbones, and of shutting out all the rest of those cheeks which were so often languorous and sallow, except when they were punctuated with little fiery spots, plunged him in acute depression, as proving that one's ideal is always unattainable, and one's actual happiness ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... a board at a certain distance from the orchestral conductor. To this latter's desk is affixed a key of copper, something like the ivory key of a pianoforte; it is elastic, and provided on the interior side with a protuberance of about a quarter of an inch long. Immediately beneath this protuberance is a little cup, also of copper, filled with quicksilver. At the instant when the orchestral conductor, desiring to mark any particular beat of a bar, presses the copper key with ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz

... appeared a double row of large wolfish teeth. The eyes were sunken—their whites mottled with yellowish flakes. Heavy dark brows shadowed them, standing far apart, separated by the broad flatfish nose, the nostrils of which stood so widely open as to cause a protuberance on each side. Large ears were hidden under a thick frizzled shock that partook of the character both of hair and wool. Over this was bound, turban fashion, an old check Madras kerchief that had not ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid

... the case of a healthy girl of sixteen who found one morning while combing her hair, which was black, that a strip the whole length of the back hair was white, starting from a surface about two inches square around the occipital protuberance. Two weeks later she had patches of ephelis ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... now, he had done what he could. The thought brightened him, and he patted his short ribs musingly. There was a friendly protuberance there on either side. His belt sagged comfortingly. He opened the pack which he was tying with his blanket behind his saddle, and from it he filled with cartridges the pockets of his rough ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... Penguins' Rock. It was just a little protuberance of the cliff, and on the narrow ledges of rock the birds' heads might be seen ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... which we searched through: no girth, however, was forthcoming. "He has got it buckled round his middle beneath his pantaloons, mon maitre," said Antonio, whose eyes were moving about like those of a lynx; "I saw the protuberance as he stooped down. However, let us take no notice: he is here surrounded by his countrymen, who, if we were to seize him, might perhaps take his part. As I said before, he is in our power, as we ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... to my stock caused a considerable protuberance in front, which I abated in a measure by shaking the bits of bread around my waist, and distributing the plugs of tobacco among the ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... extraordinary peculiarity of these addresses from the stump was the immense protuberance they exhibited of the personal pronoun. In Mr. Johnson's speech, his "I" resembles the geometer's description of infinity, having "its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere." Among the many kinds of egotism in which his eloquence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

... as far as the wall of the graveyard, which time has caused to swell like a protuberance on the side of the park, and which is so ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel

... Africa, they would be selected by some novel-monger, as the scene of some dark and mysterious murder, or as the habitation of a gang of banditti, or perhaps of the ghost of some damsel, who might have deliberately knocked her brains out against some rocky protuberance, on account of a faithless lover. They were followed a long while by hundreds of the natives, and who annoyed them so much by their noises and curiosity, that they were compelled to resort to violent measures to drive them away; but this was a line of conduct rarely adopted towards them, and never ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... Uncheedah talking with a man outside the teepee, so he quickly took up his paints. Ohitika was a jet-black dog, with a silver tip on the end of his tail and on his nose, beside one white paw and a white star upon a protuberance between his ears. Hakadah knew that a man who prepares for death usually paints with red and black. Nature had partially provided Ohitika in this respect, so that only red was required ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... the old gentleman stopped groaning and stared at him with eyes of crab-like protuberance. The crimson flush deepened on his cheeks, and his white whiskers appeared to bristle with wrath. He was ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey

... feet of the soft shaly substance known to the quarriers as caulm; and fourthly, of more than nine feet of gray pavement, immediately under which, in a soft, argillaceous stratum, lay the organism. It was about four feet in length, bulged out at the lower end into a bulb-like protuberance, which may have been, however, merely an accidental result of its state of keeping; and threw off, at an acute angle, two branches about a foot from the top. It was covered with a bark of brittle coal, which is, however, wanting in all the fragments that have been preserved; ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... strength. The oar snapped in two and we fell forward against the wall. We tore off some of the strips of hide from the raft and tried to fasten them to the wall on either side, but there was no protuberance that would hold them. Nothing remained ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout

... after removing the vegetables, and adjusting her clothes, took her up in his arms, and carried her with true Irish hospitality to a neighbouring public-house, where seating her, she opened her eyes, which being black, shone like two stars over the red protuberance of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... inch in length. The creature is unable to make use of them, not only in the liquid honey upon which it lives, but even on a solid surface. If we take the larva from the cell and place it on a hard substance, to observe it more readily, we see that the inordinate protuberance of the abdomen, by lifting the thorax from the ground, prevents the legs from finding a support. Lying on its side, the only possible position because of its conformation, the larva remains motionless or only makes a few lazy, wriggling ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... blinked, brought his hand up to his head as he continued to view the browsers. There were three of them: two larger and with horns, the other a smaller beast with less of the ragged fur and only the beginning button of a protuberance on the nose; it was probably ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton

... Fortis)'.—This may be used with advantage to destroy warts or fungous excrescences. A little of the acid should be dropped on the part and bound tightly down. The protuberance will slough off and healthy granulations will spring up. A surer application, however, is the ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... Man pointed to the dull, smooth, black side of the mountain, without a crag, break, or protuberance, and said ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... very thing; but to Leon's astonishment, as soon as it got fairly out of the bushes, he noticed a singular-looking hunch upon its back, just over the shoulder. At first he could not make out what this was, as he had never heard of such a protuberance, besides, the tail half hid it from his view. All of a sudden the animal turned its head backwards, touched the hunch with its snout, gave itself a shake, and then the odd excrescence fell to the ground, and proved to be a young ant-eater, with bushy tail and long ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... in the lower carnassial or first molar, which impinges on the upper carnassial or fourth premolar; it has a protuberance behind, termed the heel, which is prominently marked, but it is in the molars in which the greatest deviation from the specially carnivorous dentition occurs. The incisors are somewhat larger than, but the canines and premolars approximate to, those of the ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... cave of Engis—viewed from the right side. 'a' glabella, 'b' occipital protuberance, ('a' to 'b' ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... great discovery was finally ascertained in 1748. Nutation is a real "nodding" of the terrestrial axis produced by the dragging of the moon at the terrestrial equatorial protuberance. From it results an apparent displacement of the stars, each of them describing a little ellipse about its true or "mean" position, in a period ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... evenly and not get walked over at the side. And people had pretty feet then, with arched insteps, and walked with an air of dignity. Some of the gouty old men had to be measured for a tender place here or a protuberance there, or ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas

... laughed at him. After dinner, he took Laura by the hand, and asked her if she would be "so sweet as to play to him." She complied, through sheer astonishment. He sat by the piano, with his watch-chain resting in folds, like a golden serpent, on the sea-green protuberance of his waistcoat. His immense head lay languidly on one side, and he gently beat time with two of his yellow-white fingers. He highly approved of the music, and tenderly admired Laura's manner of playing—not as poor ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins

... in Erse is said to signify the Yellow Rock, is a double protuberance of stone, open to the main sea on one side, and parted from the land by a very narrow channel on the other. It has its name and its colour from the dung of innumerable sea-fowls, which in the Spring chuse this place as convenient ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson

... serf, whom I yet recall immensely admiring for his nobleness; I forget everyone but Miss Mestayer, who gave form to my conception of the tragic actress at her highest. She had a hooked nose, a great play of nostril, a vast protuberance of bosom and always the "crop" of close moist ringlets; I say always, for I was to see her often again, during a much later phase, the mid-most years of that Boston Museum which aimed at so vastly higher a distinction than the exploded lecture-room had really done, though ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... detached, and so far back from the sidewalk that interlocking trees conceal its second-story windows, an alcove was frankly a bulge on its red-brick exterior. Where the third-floor bath-room, an afterthought, led off the hallway, it jutted out, a shingled protuberance on the left end of the house. A tower swelled out of its front end, and all year round geraniums and boxed climbing vines bloomed ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst

... habit than anything I cast a furtive glance in the direction of the little spot I knew so well, and it suddenly struck me that there was a change in the surface of the soil that concealed our treasure ... as though there were a little protuberance where there had been a hollow, and the bits of rubbish were disarranged. "What does that mean?" I wondered. "Can someone have guessed our secret and ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... fat old Dutchman, in particular, was so taken aback, he threw himself down flat, with his face to the deck, hoping thus to escape with his life. Unfortunately for his peace of mind, however, his posterior protuberance was of such enormously aldermanic dimensions, that it projected above the defenses, and became a fine and laughable target for the savage marksmen, who aimed the great majority of their shots thereat. As the bullets tore through the old fellow's unmentionables, and raking ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison

... what he had. His hands stroked it from one end to the other. One end was rounded. The other was a circle with an odd-shaped hole running into it. Rick poked his finger in, but couldn't feel the end of the depression. The only protuberance on the thing was a band near the rounded end. The band felt like metal, and had two rings projecting from it. The rest of the cylinder didn't feel like metal. The texture was that ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin

... to-morrow. Oh! he has a foul nose! I never see it without longing to cut it off. By the by, Dr. Hunter (the murderer of St. Pierre) [55] told me that I had exactly Lavater's nose, to my no small satisfaction, for I did not know what to make of that protuberance, or promontory of mine. I could not compliment him. He has a very red drinking face: little good humoured eyes, with the skin drawn up under them, like cunning and short-sightedness united. I saw Dr. Hunter again yesterday. I neither like ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... specimens, the diameter of the rounded head. The rayed divergent protuberances are the direct producers and bearers of the propagating cells, spores, or conidia, and are called sterigmata. Every sterigma at first produces at its point a little round protuberance, which, with a strong narrow basis, rests upon the sterigma. These are filled with protoplasm, swell more and more, and, after some time, separate themselves by a partition from the sterigma into independent cells, spores, ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... terrestrial precession can not be explained on the basis of an Earth with a thin solid surface shell and a liquid interior, for the attractions of the Moon and Sun upon the Earth's equatorial protuberance would cause the surface shell to shift over the fluid interior, instead of swinging ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... little men did— And having valiantly ascended Upon the Mighty Man's protuberance, They did so strut!—upon my soul, It must have been extremely droll To see ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... its favour; but by placing a number of stakes simultaneously in intricate combinations, or by graduating them according to results, he imagines that he can invert the situation, when all he can do is to disguise it. He often disguises it most effectually; but in the long run he does no more. Like a protuberance in an air cushion, which if pushed down in one place reappears in another, the original advantage of the bank infallibly ends in reasserting itself. The system-monger fails to see this for one reason only—that, having disguised, he thinks that he has eliminated, ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock

... appear distinctly in after life, though its place is seen in figure 167 to be indicated by a slight indentation. The labrum is distinctly defined by a well marked suture, and forms a squarish, knob-like protuberance, and in size is quite large compared to the clypeus. From this time begins the process of degradation, when the insect assumes its Thysanurous characters, which consist in an approach to the form of the Myriopodous head, the front, or clypeal region being reduced ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard

... bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discolored bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank. A nice spot, cried Flask; just let me prick him there once. Avast! cried Starbuck, there's no need of that! But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville



Words linked to "Protuberance" :   protuberate, frontal eminence, nub, condition, mogul, protuberant, nubble, caput, belly, wart, status, projection, snag



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