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Pinion   /pˈɪnjən/   Listen
noun
Pinion  n.  (Zool.) A moth of the genus Lithophane, as Lithophane antennata, whose larva bores large holes in young peaches and apples.


Pinion  n.  
1.
A feather; a quill.
2.
A wing, literal or figurative. "Swift on his sooty pinions flits the gnome."
3.
The joint of bird's wing most remote from the body.
4.
A fetter for the arm.
5.
(Mech.) A cogwheel with a small number of teeth, or leaves, adapted to engage with a larger wheel, or rack (see Rack); esp., such a wheel having its leaves formed of the substance of the arbor or spindle which is its axis.
Lantern pinion. See under Lantern.
Pinion wire, wire fluted longitudinally, for making the pinions of clocks and watches. It is formed by being drawn through holes of the shape required for the leaves or teeth of the pinions.


verb
Pinion  v. t.  (past & past part. pinioned; pres. part. pinioning)  
1.
To bind or confine the wings of; to confine by binding the wings.
2.
To disable by cutting off the pinion joint.
3.
To disable or restrain, as a person, by binding the arms, esp. by binding the arms to the body. "Her elbows pinioned close upon her hips."
4.
Hence, generally, to confine; to bind; to tie up. "Pinioned up by formal rules of state."





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Pinion" Quotes from Famous Books



... such a friend, thy dart, on dainty pinion Of blossoms, shot from lotus-fibre string, Reduced men, giants, gods to thy dominion— The triple world has ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... on her worn weather-stained face, as the cantineer and a corporal enter with ropes and proceed to pinion ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... seeing more in her face than her voice interpreted to his sullen ears, took her sullenly in his arms, and carried her to the cabin. Her eyes glanced around the bright party-colored walls, and a faint smile came to her lips as she put aside her bonnet, adorned with a companion pinion of the ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... floating rushes from gleaming pinnacle to seething valley with a heavy, melancholy sobbing of water all about her decks, and her narrow, distended band of maintopsail hovering overhead black as a raven's pinion in the flying hoariness. We were washing through it at twelve or thirteen knots an hour, though the ship was as stiff as a madman in a strait-jacket, with the compressed wool in her hold and loaded down ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... steps as a reduction mechanism, usually for an extraordinarily high ratio, but here the technical details are so etherial that one must doubt whether such devices were actually realized in practice. Thus Vitruvius writes of a wheel 4 feet in diameter and having 400 teeth being turned by a 1-toothed pinion on a cart axle, but it is very doubtful whether such small teeth, necessarily separated by about 3/8 inch, would have the requisite ruggedness. Again, Hero mentions a wheel of 30 teeth which, because of imperfections, ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price


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