Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Tarantula   Listen
noun
Tarantula  n.  (pl. E. tarantulas, L. tarantulae)  (Written also tarentula)  (Zool.) Any one of several species of large spiders, popularly supposed to be very venomous, especially the European species (Tarantula apuliae). The tarantulas of Texas and adjacent countries are large species of Mygale.
Tarantula killer, a very large wasp (Pompilus formosus), which captures the Texan tarantula (Mygale Hentzii) and places it in its nest as food for its young, after paralyzing it by a sting.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Tarantula" Quotes from Famous Books



... raged in a certain city one of those fashionable epidemics which occasionally attack our youthful population. It wasn't the music mania, nor gymnastic convulsions, nor that wide-spread malady, croquet. Neither was it one of the new dances which, like a tarantula-bite, set every one a twirling, nor stage madness, nor yet that American lecturing influenza which yearly sweeps over the land. No, it was a new disease called the Art fever, and it attacked the young women of the community with ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott

... pretended that it was a long, weary trek through the most poisonous jungles to the coast of Peru; and when Greg walked right into a spider's web with a huge yellow spider gloating in the middle of it, he said he'd been bitten by a tarantula. We told him that we should have to leave him there to die, for we must press on to the sea, but he cured himself by eating a magic sweet-fern leaf and came running after us, tripping over his sash. The trekking took a long time, and when we reached the end of the point ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price

... a sidewinder crawling over you, and a tarantula nestling in your ear. Don't think ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... two scorpions in the ring, by way of variation we used to catch another sworn foe and match him against a scorpion. This was the tarantula, a great hairy spider with a leg-spread covering the palm of the hand, another of the unpleasant inhabitants of El Chauth. Against this creature, however, it was always a shade of odds that the scorpion would win, though there was ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... again for half-an-hour. The final swish of a bat's wing came to my ear, and the light of a fog-dimmed day slowly tempered the darkness among the dusty beams and rafters. From high overhead a sprawling tarantula tossed aside the shriveled remains of his night's banquet, the emerald cuirass and empty mahogany helmet of a long-horned beetle, which eddied downward and ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... of the Corybantes," says Plutarch in his Essay on Love, "there is a way to allay these extravagant transports, by changing the measure from the Trochaic to the Spondaic, and the tone from the Phrygian to the Doric:" just as with the dancers of St. Vitus, and those bit by the Tarantula. Hecker states, "The swarms of St. John's dancers were accompanied by minstrels playing those noisy instruments which roused their morbid feelings; moreover, by means of intoxicating music, a kind of demoniacal ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... concerning Substances, we are liable to all the former inconveniences: v. g. he that uses the word TARANTULA, without having any imagination or idea of what it stands for, pronounces a good word; but so long means nothing at all by it. 2. He that, in a newly-discovered country, shall see several sorts of animals and vegetables, unknown to him before, may have as true ideas of ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke

... and mine are a little bitten by this tarantula. I am concerned for them. We must not pander to the mob's leaders, for they are not, and never have been, the many-headed thing itself. They, not the mob, are 'out to kill,' as you say. But that State will soon perish ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts

... and a low, inarticulate murmur of voices, out in front and a little to the left, gave me fresh hope. Warned by past failures, I thought best to forego the erect posture to which our species owes so much of its majesty. I therefore dropped on all-fours and went like a tarantula till I distinguished two horses walking slowly abreast, jammed together; the riders presenting an indistinct outline of two individuals rolled into one; and it was from this amalgamation that the low, pigeon-like murmurs proceeded. An instinct of delicacy prompted me to pause, and let the Siamese ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... Hy, chasin' up and down glass mountains, eatin' prickly pear, drinking rarely, and cullin' a rattlesnake here and there to twine in our locks. It will seem like old times, dropping a rock in your boots in the mornin' to quell the quivering centipede and the upstanding and high-jumping tarantula." ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips

... Ingra with the pistol and pulled the trigger. There was not a sound! The sickening remembrance then burst over me that I had not reloaded the pistol since Edmund had emptied its whole chamber in the closing fight with the tarantula of the swamps. Ingra, followed by his man, sprang upon me like a tiger. In a twinkling I lay on my back, and before I could recover my feet, I saw Juba and Ingra in a deadly struggle, while the other ran away and disappeared. Jumping up ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss

... the tarantula is a kind of spider, taking its name from the city of Taranto in southern Italy. Tradition, which modern science cannot corroborate, has it that the bite of the tarantula produces a sort of sleeping sickness known as ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos

... you begin to talk about love, coz, I shall tumble into such a laughing convulsion that I shall not recover from it for this next three days. Love! that stupid word broke the neck of my famous master, Pietro. But for this tarantula-dance the great hawk-nose would still be sitting as professor at his lecturing desk, and tickling the young goslings with philosophy and wisdom as they perkt up their yellow beaks to catch the crumbs he dropt into them. Marry! old beldam, this monkey-trick of love, this Platonic ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck

... hiding-place, he saw no living thing, save a brown lizard (it was of the tarantula species) rustling away through the sunshine. To all present appearance, this venomous reptile was the only creature that had responded to the young Count's efforts to renew his intercourse with the ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... her, too. She was the Tarantula, Jim Porter, another sail-carrier. Around the point and across she tore and over toward the sands beyond, swung off on her heel to her skipper's heave, came down by the wreck of a big three-master ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly

... during this same year of 1858, when some exploring tarantula seemed to have bitten all the colonies, Frank Gregory left the Geraldine mine on the Murchison, where it will be remembered the gallant Austin and party arrived in such a critical state, to endeavour to reach the Gascoyne and the upper reaches of ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc

... queer stories about you shootin' one or two men in a peculiar way, but I never believed 'em. Now if you're just havin' a little fun with me, Shark, put your gun up, and we'll get on Bolivar and vamose. If you mean to shoot—shoot, you blackhearted son of a tarantula!" ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... if I don't stand up I can set down. I run a square game myself an' I want a square game from the other fellow. Now, Doc, you just so much as say 'Boo' about this thing, an' by the Nine Gods o' War I'll kill you. D'ye understand, Doc? I'll kill you like I would a tarantula. An' when they come to ask you the name o' the man you 'tended at the Hat Ranch you tell 'em his name is— lemme see, now—yes, his name is Roland McGuire. That's a nice name, an' it corresponds to the initials on ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne

... gaze, the canyon below. The steely walls hurt my eyes; the sky was like hot copper. Though nearly wild with heat and aching bones and muscles and the long hours of wait—wait—wait, I was ashamed to complain, for there sat the old man, still and silent. I routed out a hairy tarantula from under a stone and teased him into a frenzy with my stick, and tried to get up a fight between him and a scallop-backed horned-toad that blinked wonderingly at me. Then I espied a green lizard on a stone. The beautiful reptile was about a foot ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey

... more bother than they're worth," and indeed this is a universal complaint in the Colonies. I slept in a small room, and the last night but one observed in a corner of the ceiling, above the bed, what seemed to be a large spider. On mentioning this the next morning, I learnt that it was a tarantula, and was of use in catching insects. "Oh, but," I said, "doesn't it come down at night?" "Oh, no," said my friend, "it never comes below this," marking a spot about a yard above my head. This was not very reassuring, as there appeared nothing ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton

... which by careful investigation can be found. Among others the Arabesque, Chinese fret, Circle, Comb, various forms of the Cross, Mina Khani, Octagon, the S form, Scroll, Serrated leaves, Shah Abbas, the Star,—six or eight pointed,—the Tarantula, Triangle, the ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt

... to you, Greta, I thought. She's the maniac in the company. She's the one who terrorized you with the boning knife in the shrubbery, or sicked the giant tarantula on you at the dark end of the subway platform, or whatever it was, and the others are covering up for. She's going to smile the devil-smile and weave those white twig-fingers at you, all eight of them. And Birnam Wood'll come to Dunsinane and you'll be burnt at the stake by men in armor or drawn ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... I heard a voice, at once familiar and strange. For a moment I could not place it; it had a wild note that baffled me. Then I saw black Frank, cleaver in hand, come bounding out of the darkness. His arms and legs, like the legs of some huge tarantula, flew out at all angles as he ran, and in fierce gutturals he was yelling ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes

... There is neither tarantula nor scorpion to be feared in the Blue Ridge; the harmless lizard is called scorpion by the mountaineer. Nor are there large poisonous reptiles. There are snakes of lesser caliber, but only rattlers and copperheads among them ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... come from? Was he born in a buffalo wallow at the foot of some rock-ribbed mountain, or did he first breathe the thin air along the brink of an alkali pond, where the horned toad and the centipede sang him to sleep, and the tarantula tickled him under the ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... is said to have been cured by the afflicted person paying a visit to the tomb of the saint, near Ulm, every May. Indeed, there is no little reason in this assertion; for exercise and change of air will change many obstinate diseases. The bite of the tarantula is cured by music; and this only by certain tunes. Turner, whose ideas are so extravagantly absurd, where he asserts, that the symptoms of hydrophobia may not appear for forty years after the bite of the dog, and who maintains that "the slaver or breath of such a dog is ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... strangely like it, yet strangely unlike it, had been going on in Italy. There, too, epidemics of dancing and jumping seized groups and communities; but they were attributed to a physical cause—the theory being that the bite of a tarantula in some way provoked a supernatural intervention, of which dancing was the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... the earliest account of this strange disorder. Nobody had the least doubt that it was caused by the bite of the tarantula, a ground-spider common in Apulia: and the fear of this insect was so general that its bite was in all probability much oftener imagined, or the sting of some other kind of insect mistaken for it, than actually received. ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker

... "Hydrophobia B. Tarantula! I'm a curly wolf! I can't be handled 'cause I'm full of quills! I've got seventeen rattles an' a button, an' ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx

... a tarantula strolling round the table towards her the other day she nearly had a fit," ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield

... to put on an overcoat, originally of a long-haired, woolly fabric, but now completely bald from age, when suddenly, as if bitten by a tarantula, he began to execute around the room a polka of his own composition, which at the public balls had often caused him to be honoured with the particular attention of ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger

... greenroom. From the moment she caught sight of Vaudrey standing within the range of her opera-glasses, she was seized with the eager desire to make him an habitue of her salon, the new salon that had just been launched. Madame Marsy was bitten by that tarantula whose bite makes modern society move as if afflicted with Saint Vitus's dance. A widow, rich and still young, very much admired, she had set herself to play the role of a leader in society to pass away the time. She was one of those ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... houses and Indian huts were adorned with collections of insects pinned on the walls in patterns, among which figured scorpions some three inches long; and the centre-ornament was usually a tarantula, said to be one of the most poisonous creatures of the tropics, a monstrous spider, whose dark grey body and legs are covered with hairs. A fine specimen will have a body about as large as a small hen's egg, and, with his legs in ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... just too long for him and just long enough for Davidge, who went at him football fashion, hurling himself through the air like a vast, sprawling tarantula. Nicky's grip on the bomb relaxed. It fell from his hand. Davidge swiped at it wildly, smacked it, and knocked it out of bounds beyond the deck. Then Davidge's hundred-and-eighty-pound weight smote the light and wickery frame of Nicky and sent him collapsing backward, ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... The Porter with the High Roman nose, who certainly was familiar with Universal History, used often to say to me, "Respected Herr Receiver, Italy is a beautiful country; the dear God takes care of every one there. You can lie on your back in the sunshine and raisins drop into your mouth; and if a tarantula bites you, you dance with the greatest ease, although you never in your life before learned to dance." "Ay, to Italy! to Italy!" I shouted with delight, and, heedless of any choice of roads, hurried on along the first ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... stream; Ne'er so little a creeping thing But from out its hold doth spring: See the mouse, and see its mate Scour along, nor stop, nor wait; See the serpent and the snake For the nearest highlands make; The tarantula I view, Emmet small and cricket too, All unknowing where to fly, In the stifling waters die. See the goat and bleating sheep, See the bull with bellowings deep. And the rat with squealings shrill, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow

... universal belief regarding an eclipse of the moon is that a gigantic tarantula[2] has attacked the moon and is slowly encompassing it in its loathsome embrace. Upon perceiving the first evidences of darkness upon the face of the moon, the men rush out from the houses, shout, shoot arrows toward the moon, slash at trees with their bolos, play the drum ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... or tree-snake, less deadly, one of which I once shot seven feet long. The Cape is also infested by scorpions, whose sting is little less virulent than a snake-bite; and by the spider called the tarantula, which is extremely dreaded.—The Cape, by A. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various

... confess to this fear, but many of them, ruled by it, covered their heads with the bedclothes every night. In my rounds, besides clouds of bloodthirsty mosquitos, I frequently saw centipedes crawling along the floor or wall or up the netting, and sometimes a large tarantula would dart forth from his hiding-place in some nook or corner. The centipedes were often six or seven inches long. They were especially numerous during or immediately after rainy weather. Little gray and green lizards (mo-o) glided about the verandas, but they were harmless. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various

... Do you not know that the tarantula, which is no bigger than a threepenny bit, (13) has only to touch the mouth and it will afflict its victim with pains and drive him out of ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon

... "and was taking advantage of my chances. Grumkow came up, and interrupted me in the middle of a minuet: 'EH, MON DIEU MADAME!' said Grumkow, 'you seem to have got bit by the tarantula! Don't you see those strangers who have just come in?' I stopt short; and looking all round, I noticed at last a young man dressed in gray, whom I did not know. 'Go, then, embrace the Priuce-Royal; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... filly of American pedigree,—Chu-Chu, forgetful of plank- roads and cobble stones, wild with excitement, twinkling her small white feet beneath me? George laughs out of a cloud of dust, "Give her her head; don't you see she likes it?" and Chu-Chu seems to like it, and, whether bitten by native tarantula into native barbarism or emulous of the roan, "blood" asserts itself, and in a moment the peaceful servitude of years is beaten out in the music of her clattering hoofs. The creek widens to a deep gully. We dive into it and up on the opposite ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte



Words linked to "Tarantula" :   genus Lycosa, Theraphosidae, hunting spider, spider, Lycosa, Lycosa tarentula, family Theraphosidae, European wolf spider, wolf spider



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com