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Swath   /swɑθ/   Listen
Swath

noun
1.
The space created by the swing of a scythe or the cut of a mowing machine.
2.
A path or strip (as cut by one course of mowing).  Synonym: belt.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Swath" Quotes from Famous Books



... with war maps, of course. In Rome the prevailing map was that highly colored, imaginative rearrangement of southern Europe to fit the national aspirations. The new frontier ran along the summits of the Alps and took a wide swath down the Adriatic coast. It was a most flattering prospect and lured many loiterers to the shop windows. At the office of the "Giornale d'Italia" in the Corso there was displayed beside an irredentist map an approximate sketch of what Austria was willing to ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... of pale yellow roses, intermingled with climbing fuchsias, cast shade and sweetness over them; the porch was bordered by a wide swath of calla lilies, also in full flower, while just beyond these a great shrub of poinsettia dazzled the sight with its ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond

... Chip spread his men to the right and left of the trail, so that in moving forward a wide swath ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton

... your old man is planted, and that you might have some natural delicacy and wish to refrain from giving him a jar. But come down for an hour and let me talk to you, anyway. The new statesman from Leith is cutting a wide swath. Not a day passes but his voice is heard roaring in the Forum; he has visited all the State institutions, dined and wined the governor and his staff and all the ex-governors he can lay his hands on, and he has that hard-headed and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... there, said to that proud wooer, 'Lord Eurymachus, if there might be a trial of labour between us two, I know which of us would come out the better man. I would that we two stood together, a scythe in the hands of each, and a good swath of meadow to be mown—then would I match with thee, fasting from dawn until evening's dark. Or would that we were set ploughing together. Then thou shouldst see who would plough the longest and the best ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum

... here, dad," I cut in, getting a bit hot under the collar myself, "by all the laws of nature, there must have been a time when you were twenty-five years old and cut a little swath of your own. And, seeing you're as big as your offspring—six-foot-one, and you can't deny it—and fairly husky for a man of your age, I'll bet all you dare that said swath was not of the narrow-gage variety. ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower

... that several of his pets were mere straw men, and dashed violently and madly into and through Punk's interference, and downed him on the 15-yard line; how the spectators looked on in silent amazement at this unexpected beginning; how promptly Tug's men were lined up, a broad swath completely opened with one quick gash in Clayton's line, and the ball shoved through and within five yards of the goal-posts, almost before Clayton knew it was in play; how Clayton called his men to one side, and rebuked them, ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes

... born in him. To be sure he had been prepared to dislike sheep, and that was why he was unreasonable. But on the other hand this band of sheep had left a broad bare swath, weedless, grassless, flowerless, in their wake. Where sheep grazed they destroyed. That was what Jean ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey

... come to us directly from our neighbors, but authoritatively from a friend of theirs, who was also a friend of ours, and we could not very well hold back. So, in the cool of the early evening, when I had quite finished rasping my lawn with the new mower, I left it at the end of the swath, which had brought me near the fence, and ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo

... you're my cousin, but you've gone too fur.' He laffed, and we went into the field together to mow. He was just startin' on his swath when I cum behind him and cut his head clean off ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... horrible scene was enacted were few. Then came the tornado of water, leaping and rushing with tremendous force. The waves had angry crests of white and their roar was something deafening. In one terrible swath they caught the four trains and lifted three of them right off the track, as if they were only a cork. There they floated in the river. Think of it, three large locomotives and finely varnished Pullmans floating around, and above all the hundreds of poor unfortunates who were unable ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... instantly, leaving the lawn-mower exactly where it was, in the middle of a swath. With an answering wave he crossed to the west room window and, with an ease which surprised his audience, drew his long slimness up the pillar of the porch and clambered over the railing into the ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... splints, white bandages, and literally festooned with those little hanging bottles that contain everything from blood plasma to food and water, right on down to lubrication for the joints. I tried to dig his face under the swath of bandage but I couldn't make out much more than the fact that it was a face and that the face was half ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith

... milky kernels. Ringtail dearly loved sweet corn and he ate until his round, furry sides were distended and he could hold no more. Then he ran up and down through the rustling field, bearing down great quantities, merely sampling their sweetness and leaving behind a wide swath of ruin. ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer

... soliloquy off in the middle to watch the Blackbird slide out of sight behind a point. He knew all about Jack MacRae's operations, the wide swath he was cutting in the matter of blueback salmon. The Folly Bay showing to date was a pointed reminder. Gower's cannery foreman and fish collectors gave him profane accounts of MacRae's indefatigable raiding,—as it suited them to regard his ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... the road, walking sadly homewards. At the same time two hands stretched out of the dense shadow into the lane of moonlight that shone down an alley way she was passing and that cut a dazzling swath in the blackness made still blacker by the surrounding brilliancy. "I've been wondering if you ever would finish that pitch ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller

... our men flung the Raider line back from it—broken—shattered. The next instant our leaders were striding through the mass like raging lions. Carrigan, Limber Jim, Larkin, Johnson and Goody each smote down a swath of men before them, as they ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... proficiency in this art, as well as several others. My fingers are not the only part of me that has suffer'd with sores within this fortnight, for I have had an ugly great boil upon my right hip & about a dozen small ones—I am at present swath'd hip & thigh, as Samson smote the Philistines, but my soreness is near over. My aunt thought it highly proper to give me some cooling physick, so last tuesday I took 1-2 oz Globe Salt (a disagreeable ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow

... step this long, swaying line of Irishmen moved to the assault with as much indifference apparently to their fate as "sheep going to the shambles." Not a shot was fired from this advancing column, while the shells from our batteries cut swath after swath through their ranks, only to be closed again as if by some mechanical means; colors fall, but rise and float again, men bounding forward and eagerly grasping the fallen staff, indifferent of the fate that awaited ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... had joined us a few moments before, "the Doctor takes a wide range, or, as the farmers say, carries a wide swath, and has some notions of things which in my view have as little foundation in true philosophy as they have warrant in Scripture; but, if he sometimes speculates falsely, he lives truly, which is by far the most important ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... author. There was rapt attention and naught else in his pose and on his face the while the Rev. Wickliffe, swinging his scythe of righteousness, mowed for a solid hour in Satan's weedy back yard, so that the penitents fell in a broad swath. ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... Dumfarthing, the History of the Progress of Disruption in the Churches of Scotland in ten volumes; such also as that Catherine Dumfarthing was wearing a green and gold winter suit with Russian furs and a Balkan hat and a Circassian feather, which cut a wide swath of destruction among the young men on Plutoria Avenue every afternoon as she passed. Moreover by the strangest of coincidences she scarcely ever seemed to come along the snow-covered avenue without meeting the Reverend ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... to be rocky, and that, no doubt, was the reason pine thickets had grown up on it, The wagon kept right at our heels, and many times had to wait. We cut a way through thickets, tore rotten logs to pieces, threw stumps aside, and moved windfalls. Brawny Nielsen seemed ten men in one! What a swath he hacked with his big axe! When I rested, which circumstance grew oftener and oftener, I had to watch Nielsen with his magnificent swing of the axe, or with his mighty heave on a log. Time and again he lifted tree ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey

... good sermon that day, but it was no more impressive than the besweated lesson of the pasture-field, which taught us that no more depends upon the thing you do than upon the way you do it. The difference between the clean swath of that harvester in front of our house and the ragged work of his neighbor is in the way he swings the scythe, and not in the scythe itself. There are ten men with one talent apiece who do more good than the one man with ten talents. ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage



Words linked to "Swath" :   course, space, track, path



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