Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Zebra   /zˈibrə/   Listen
Zebra

noun
1.
Any of several fleet black-and-white striped African equines.



Related searches:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Zebra" Quotes from Famous Books



... saw the Rhinoceros, which has been 23 years there; there is likewise a lion, with a little dog in the same den, as his companion, and a zebra. ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss

... The baby zebra ne'er should roam So very far away from home, Lest someone, thinking her striped gown Was candy-stick, might ...
— Animal Children - The Friends of the Forest and the Plain • Edith Brown Kirkwood

... the elephants suggested to us the taming of other animals, for purposes, not merely of pleasure, but of utility. The first attempt was made upon the zebra, and was successful. Though the old animals were useless, the foals, when captured quite young, were tolerably tractable and not particularly shy; and in the second generation our tame zebras were not distinguishable from ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... some other colour. He chose the different shades of green, squeezing the paint out on his plump little legs and arms, and rubbing it around with his fore finger until he was encircled with as many stripes as a zebra. Although the day was warm for the early part of April, the sudden change from his customary clothes and spring flannels to nothing but the airy bathing suit and war-paint made him a trifle chilly; so he completed his ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston

... very imperfect account of the Zebra, which exactly resembles the ass, except in colour, and is by no means larger. One died lately in Edinburgh, after being exhibited as a show, which was as quiet and gentle as ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr

... I'll accept him as an adopted grandson, my dear. I think there'll be money enough for everybody. But about this scalawag of a man that fathered him. I'll have to know who he is. We have a suit of zebra clothing waiting ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... the Marsupialia family which does not exist out of the small island of Tasmania is the zebra-wolf, the most savage and destructive of all the marsupials. This ferocious beast is about the size of the largest kind of sheep-dog. Its short fur is of a yellowish-brown color, and its back and sides are handsomely marked with black stripes. It is a fleet runner, ...
— Harper's Young People, March 2, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... horses which lay upon the ground in the neighborhood of some ruined buildings. They were of the size of life, and represented, cut from solid limestone, the heads and necks of horses with the mane clipped, so that it stood up from the ridge of their necks like the mane of the zebra. The workmanship of the figures was artistic, and the inference made at the time was, that these figures had served as bas reliefs on ruins in that vicinity. On mentioning the fact of the existence of these figures to Dr. Carl Hermann Berendt, who was ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.

... raptores; to this tribe belongs the family of the shrikes, so deadly to all the lesser field birds. In the genus bos, we have, in the sub-typical group, the bison, "wild, revengeful, and shewing an innate detestation of man." In equus, we have, in the same situation, the zebra, which actually shews the stripes of the tiger, and is as remarkable for its wildness as its congeners, the horse and ass, are for their docility and usefulness. To quote again from Mr. Swainson, "the singular threatening aspect which ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... tiger, the leopard, still remain the same, as does the ass and the zebra. As God created and man named them, with all animal life, subject to the will of man, so do they all continue to remain and reproduce, each true to its type, free from imperfections or disease; also the same in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various

... nonsense into importance by attempting a reply. Such men must be left to follow out their inevitable instincts. They are not worth the trouble necessary to civilize them. Mr. Rarey succeeded in taming a zebra from the London Zooelogical Gardens; but a single lesson could not permanently reclaim the beast, and it soon relapsed into its native and normal ferocity. One experiment sufficed to show the power of the artist; no possible increase of value ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various

... most dingy shade of yellow-brown. It had a little band of brown ribbon round it, which ended neatly in a pair of strings; these were tied under Grannie's chin. Instead of her black cashmere shawl she wore one of very rough material and texture, and of a sort of zebra pattern, which she had picked up cheap many and many years ago from a traveling peddler. She wore no gloves on her hands, but the poor, swollen, painful right hand was wrapped in a corner of the zebra shawl. On her left arm she carried her ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade

... profusion of antelopes,—thirty-one species have been enumerated,—including such noble animals as the eland and koodoo, such beautiful ones as the springbok and klipspringer, such fierce ones as the blue wildebeest or gnu. There were two kinds of zebra, a quagga, and a buffalo, both huge and dangerous. Probably nowhere in the world could so great a variety of beautiful animals be seen or a larger variety of formidable ones ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce

... of Northumberland and Galloway, the unicorn from the regions of Nepaul or Thibet, the rhinoceros and the river-horse from Senegal, with the elephant of Ceylon or Siam. The ostrich and the cameleopard, the wild ass and the zebra, the chamois and the ibex of Angora,—all brought their tributes of beauty or deformity to these vast aceldamas of Rome: their savage voices ascended in tumultuous uproar to the chambers of the capitol: a million of spectators sat round them: standing in the centre was a single ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... by means of sticks. The fat is then removed, and after being mixed with red ochre is rubbed over the body, which has previously been carefully denuded of hair, as is done in the ceremony of initiation. The legs and arms are covered with zebra-like stripes of red, white, and yellow, and the weapons of the dead man are ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow

... North American Birds Sacred to the Memory of Exterminated Birds Whooping Cranes in the Zoological Park California Condor Primated Grouse, or "Prairie Chicken" Sage Grouse Snowy Egrets in the McIlhenny Preserve Wood-Duck Gray Squirrel Skeleton of a Rhytina Burchell's Zebra Thylacine, or Tasmanian Wolf West Indian Seal California Elephant Seal The Regular Army of Destruction G.O. Shields Two Gunners of Kansas City Why the Sandhill Crane is Becoming Extinct A Market Gunner at Work on Marsh Island Ruffed Grouse ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... unbroken, generally proves a match for an old bull buffalo, which in size and strength greatly surpasses the most powerful breed of English cattle: the lion also preys on all the larger varieties of the antelopes, and on both varieties of the gnoo. The zebra, which is met with in large herds throughout the interior, is also a favorite object of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... sign over the front door, announcing "Man Wanted Imediate. Inquire Within." The door of the Come-Outer chapel was nailed fast and Captain Zeb Mayo's old white horse wandered loose along the main road ringed with painted black stripes like a zebra. Captain Zeb was an angry man, for ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln

... fulfils all these conditions is that of the series of extinct animals which culminates in the horses, by which term I mean to denote not merely the domestic animals with which we are all so well acquainted, but their allies, the ass, zebra, quagga, and the like. In short, I use "horses" as the equivalent of the technical name Equidae, which is applied to the whole group of existing ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... I've been wondering about the people in Casperton. Like Doc Welch. I used to see him in the street with his little black bag. I always thought it was full of pills and scalpels; but maybe it really had zebra's tails and toad's eyes in it. Maybe he's really a magician on his way to cast spells against demons. Maybe the people I used to see hurrying to catch the bus every morning weren't really going to the office. Maybe they go ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer

... hand up to his eyes and rubbed them. Curious mechanisms the eyes.... That deer in line with the vision—not a zebra? A zebra after all these years? And yet ... curious, indeed, the eyes! ... a zebra.... Who ever heard of a deer with stripes? The big hand rose from the eyes and ran through the hair which he had always worn rather long. It would seem strange to have it cut ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington

... create anything. I knew a man once who drew a horse on a bit of paper to amuse the company and covered it all over with many parallel streaks as he drew. When he had done this, an aged priest (present upon that occasion) said, "You are pleased to draw a zebra." When the priest said this the man began to curse and to swear, and to protest that he had never seen or heard of a zebra. He said it was all done out of his own head, and he called heaven to witness, and his patron saint (for he was of the Old English Territorial Catholic Families—his patron ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc

... been doing to your face? my, but you are ugly!" The skin on the blistered side has peeled off in little strips, leaving the new skin very white in between the parched brown of the old, so I expect I do resemble a zebra or an Indian with his war paint on. The post, which is only a camp as yet, is located at the upper end of a beautiful valley, and back of us is a canon and mountains are on both sides. Far down the valley ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe

... shoulder, and very often stripes on his legs. I, myself, saw a pony of this description a short time ago, in a baker's cart, near Rothesay, in Bute: it had the long stripe down the back, and stripes on the shoulders and legs, just like those of the Ass, the Quagga, and the Zebra. Now, if we interpret the theory of recurrence as applied to this case, might it not be said that here was a case of a variation exhibiting the characters and conditions of an animal occupying something like an intermediate position between the Horse, the Ass, the Quagga, ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley

... "You are as timid as a zebra. During the Flood, we sailed days and days and days, going backward. It didn't make a particle of difference how we went—it was as safe one way as another, and we got just as far away in the end. Our main object now is to get away from the pirates, and that's what we are doing. Don't get emotional, ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs

... commissioned, without a dimple of a smile. Philip bowed to her stiffly, as we bow to a commanding officer who has insulted us and will hear of it. But for that, Con would have manoeuvred against his wife to send him downstairs at the lady's heels. The fellow was a perfect riddle, hard to read as the zebra lines on the skin of a wild jackass—if Providence intended any meaning when she traced them! and it's a moot point: as it is whether some of our poets have meaning and are not composers of zebra. 'No one knows but them above!' he said aloud, apparently ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... the tropics develop with a rapidity equalled only by their violence. A second flash of lightning rent the darkness, and was followed by a score of others in quick succession. The sky was crossed and dotted, like the zebra's hide, with electric sparks, which danced and flickered beneath the great ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... and painted to resemble a zebra," muttered John. "The fellow has no property as respectable as the basest ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... to go out to his field work; but his heart couldn't of been in it that day. I'll bet he could of found the carcass of a petrified zebra with seven legs and not been elated by it. He had only the sweet encouragement of Lydia to brace him. He was depending pathetically on ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... Invertebrata, Birds than Reptiles, and so on. But when we proceed to smaller subdivisions, such as genera and species, it is usually impossible to say that the one type is more highly organized than another type. A horse, for instance, cannot be said to be more highly organized than a zebra or an ass; although the entire horse-genus is clearly a more highly organized type than any genus of animal which is ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... our older travellers with the zebra, is the Gur-i-khar of Persia, where it is the noblest game from which kings did not disdain to take a cognomen, e.g., Bahram-i-Gur. It is the "wild ass" of Jeremiah (ii. 24: xiv. 6). The meat is famous ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... The celebrated zebra wood with its golden stripes cannot exceed in quaint beauty the grain of unpainted chestnut, prepared simply with a coat or two of oil. The butternut has a rich golden brown, the very darling color of painters, a shade so rich, and grain so beautiful, that it is of itself as charming to ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... wild place where they would find game in abundance, and where the forests held the great rhinoceros, plenty of elephants, and amongst whose open glades the tall giraffe browse the leafage of the high trees. There in the plains were herds of buffalo too numerous to count, quagga, zebra, gnu, eland, and bok of all kinds. There was a great river there, he said, full of fish, and with great crocodiles ready to seize upon the unwary. The hippopotamus was there too, big and massive, ready to upset boats or to attack ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn

... glowed a proud, fierce spirit that transformed them. His head was high but his eyes roved from right to left restlessly, never still save when they paused for a flickering instant to examine some gazelle, some distant herd of zebra or wildebeeste standing in the vista of the flat-topped trees. His nostrils slowly expanded and contracted with his breathing, as do those of a spirited horse. In contrast to the gait of the white man he stepped vigorously and proudly as though the long day had not touched his strength. He wore ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al

... the true horses and the asses, which latter also include the zebra and quagga. Apart from the decided external differences between the horse and ass, they have one marked divergence, viz. that the horse has corns or callosities on the inner side of both fore and hind limbs, whilst the asses have them only on the fore limbs; but this is a ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... been a few recent additions to our list of domestic animals. The turkey and the guinea fowl are examples, and perhaps within another generation we may be able to add the zebra. And there may be many other animals fitted to enrich and adorn human life which would make no insuperable resistance to domestication if wisely and patiently handled. Here is a noble opening for carrying out in its kindest ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... to sit in the "Royal Box" (which was the corner with a shawl round it, and a cushion for her feet). She dressed him a little doll, who was master of the ring, and he had lots of animals in his procession. Two elephants and a bear on hind legs, and a bear on four legs, a zebra, a tiger, a big squirrel, some tin horses, and some lovely horses covered with real hair, a set of performing ...
— Humpty Dumpty's Little Son • Helen Reid Cross

... variegation; colors, dichroism, trichroism; iridescence, play of colors, polychrome, maculation, spottiness, striae. spectrum, rainbow, iris, tulip, peacock, chameleon, butterfly, tortoise shell; mackerel, mackerel sky; zebra, leopard, cheetah, nacre, ocelot, ophite[obs3], mother-of-pearl, opal, marble. check, plaid, tartan, patchwork; marquetry-, parquetry; mosaic, tesserae[obs3], strigae[obs3]; chessboard, checkers, chequers; harlequin; Joseph's coat; tricolor. V. be variegated &c. adj.; variegate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... that 'aside' and bounced a stage-brace on her think tank. If she had gone on again that night it would have been in a wheeled chair. Another stunt she did was to put lampblack all over the tenor's glove and he wiped it off on the prima's shoulders so she looked like a zebra in a bathing suit, and every time she would tell the firemen when the chorus men were getting fresh courage by smoking cigarettes in their dressing rooms, but that is all over now and my stage career is ended until I spend all this surplus cash. I take it ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey

... Henry Leek, each with a cup in hand, experienced a certain difficulty in maintaining the interview at the pitch set by Matthew and Henry. Mrs. Leek, their mother, frankly gave way to soft tears, while eating bread-and-butter, jam and zebra-like toast. John took everything that Alice offered to him in ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... straight line reaching from one side of the ring to the other. In the middle stood the elephant, with the summer house, as Billy called it, on his back; next him stood a camel; next the camel a giraffe; next the giraffe a horse; next the horse, a zebra, and last a little Shetland pony. On the other side of the elephant were more animals standing ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery

... women. The men were hideously painted—more hideously than usual. Among them moved a weird and grotesque figure, a tall figure that went upon the two legs of a man and yet had the head of a buffalo. A tail dangled to his ankles behind him, and in one hand he carried a zebra's tail while the other clutched a bunch of ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Venice to study the remains of Italian Gothic, and the results of their studies were seen in the surface treatment of many London facades, especially in the cusped window arches, and in the stripes of coloured bricks which give a zebra-like appearance to the architecture of the period. But, in general, working architects were rather contemptuous of Ruskin's fine-spun theories, which they ridiculed as fantastic, self-contradictory, and super-subtle; rhetoric or metaphysics, in short, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... guess," says I. "By the way you're gawpin' at it, though, it might be a young zebra or a baby hippopotamus. But it's just a mere ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford

... old seafaring man like myself," he continued, in a confidential voice, "it's different. Why, if I should wear all the hash marks I rate I'd look like a zebra. So I just don't wear any. You know how it is. But when I like a girl I stick to her. Now from the very first moment I laid eyes ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.

... say much, but she watched one of Jim's big ears turn to violet and the other to rose, and wondered that his tail should be yellow and his body striped with blue and orange like the stripes of a zebra. Then she looked at Zeb, whose face was blue and whose hair was pink, and gave a little laugh ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.

... the animals, like the zebra and the tiger, haven't got any poetry, because they are so difficult to rhyme to. The Lamb knows quite well which are the ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit

... marks and "Dead Tree" brand indicated that he was of Spanish extraction. Intelligently ridden with a light rider he was First Choice on which to make this run. That was finally agreed to by all. There was no trouble selecting the rider for this horse with the zebra marks. The lightest weight was Billy Edwards. This qualification gave him the preference over ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams

... tossing in the breeze; the clowns, the tumblers, the strong men, and the riders flying about in the air as if the laws of gravitation no longer existed. But, best of all, was the grand conglomeration of animals where the giraffe appears to stand on the elephant's back, the zebra to be jumping over the seal, the hippopotamus to be lunching off a couple of crocodiles, and lions and tigers to be raining down in all directions with their mouths, wide open and their tails as stiff as that of the famous ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott

... along just as the bob cat jumped off the platform, and struck pa on the back, and the cat spit at pa, and pa fell over among the sacred cattle and rolled under a cow and got on his knees, when the animals all began to roar, and pa crawled behind a bale of hay, and a zebra stepped on pa's face, and pa yelled "Hey, Rube," which is a grand hailing sign of distress when circus men want to fight, and about a hundred of the canvasmen came running with tent stakes to hit ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck

... made his face all eager, yet left it shy; and she decided that he was nice. Soon after, she had gone with the Ercotts to see his 'things'; for it was, of course, and especially in those days, quite an event to know a sculptor—rather like having a zebra in your park. The Colonel had been delighted and a little relieved to find that the 'things' were nearly all of beasts and birds. "Very interestin'" to one full of curious lore about such, having in his time killed many of them, and finding himself ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy



Words linked to "Zebra" :   Equus, equid, equine, Equus zebra zebra, Equus Burchelli, zebra crossing, Equus grevyi, genus Equus



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com