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




Drone   /droʊn/   Listen
Drone

verb
(past & past part. droned; pres. part. droning)
1.
Make a monotonous low dull sound.
2.
Talk in a monotonous voice.  Synonym: drone on.






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 |





"Drone" Quotes from Famous Books



... glorious in thought, depend upon our own exertions. This is as true of women as of men. Then the idler is a leech on himself—his own despoiler. An idle woman is as base a thing as an idle man. She was made for usefulness. A drone in any hive is a base bee—a nuisance, ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver

... sobolifera on the pupae of Cicada in the West Indies. A romantic account is given of this in an extract cited by Dr. Watson in his communication to the Royal Society.[O] "The vegetable fly is found in the island Dominica, and (excepting that it has no wings) resembles the drone, both in size and colour, more than any other English insect. In the month of May it buries itself in the earth and begins to vegetate. By the latter end of July, the tree is arrived at its full growth, and resembles a coral branch, and is about three ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... enormous dynamos, cathode tubes a hundred feet long, masses and mountains of such fantastic apparatus as he had never encountered. The air was bluish, electric. From the black substance came a phosphorescent radiance. The triumphant drone of motors and a terrific crackle of electricity were everywhere. Off to his right purple-blue flames the size of Sequoia trees flickered around a group of what looked like condensers as huge as Gibraltar. At the base of the central tower half a mile distant Phobar could ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei

... mention, were freely handed about; so that half-an-hour which passed before the sermon began was agreeably spent. In the meanwhile, mass was being celebrated in the main hall of the temple, and the monotonous nasal drone of the plain chant was faintly heard in the distance. So soon as this was over, the lay clerk sat himself down by the hanging drum, and, to its accompaniment, began intoning the prayer, "Na Mu Miyo Ho Ren Go Kiyo," the congregation fervently joining ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford

... and fifty-five. Georgius Secundus was then alive, - Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year when Lisbon-town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. It was on the terrible Earthquake-day That the Deacon ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... birds in a cloud fly up From their sweet feeding in the fruit; The droning of the bees and flies Rises gradual as a lute; Is it for fear the birds are flown, And shrills the insect-drone? ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare

... for walking. And at the end of a twenty-mile hike in heavy marching order he would casually stroll alongside some sweating soldier and drone out, ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes

... not, dearest husband? You would not have your wife a drone in these days, when the world all round us ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson

... silver, and snowy covers of the supper room were visible. Here a high-light gleamed upon a bare shoulder; there, a stalwart male back showed, blocked out in bold black upon the bright canvas. Waiters flitted noiselessly about. The drone of that vocal orchestra filled the place: the masculine conversation, the brass and wood-wind—the sweeter tones of women, the violins; their laughter, ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... of a teacher struggling through the awful mud in gum-boots indicates that we have not travelled beyond the range of the little red schoolhouse. Stray wee figures splashing their way schoolward look dreary enough, and I seem to hear the monotonous drone of "seven times nine," "the mountains of Asia," "the Tudor sovereigns with dates of accession," and other things appertaining to "that imperial palace whence I came." All the summer afterwards, when mosquitoes are plenty and food scarce, ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... of this universal hurry, no man ought to be so little influenced by example, or so void of honest emulation, as to stand a lazy spectator of incessant labour; or please himself with the mean happiness of a drone, while the active swarms are buzzing about him: no man is without some quality, by the due application of which he might deserve well of the world; and whoever he be that has but little in his power, should be in haste to do that ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... landsman 'gins to mow The perfumed crop on grounds above, And sailors chant the "yeo, heave yeo," Then young hearts wake to life and love. When still and slow the murmuring swell Of ocean, rising from his throne, O'erleaps the beach, and matin's bell To prayer invites the college drone; Then, when the pennant floats on high, And anchor's weigh'd again to rove, And tuneful larks ascend the sky, Then young hearts wake to life and love. When, by unerring nature's power, Creation breaks the spell of night, And plants their leaves expand and flow'r, And all around ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... in the Valley of the Mills; and in some of them lights were burning; and the drone of the mill-stones, where the women were still grinding, came out into the night like the humming of drowsy bees. As the women heard the pattering and bleating of the flock, they wondered who was passing so late. One of them, in a house where there ...
— The Sad Shepherd • Henry Van Dyke

... she laved herself, singing softly the while to herself as is customary with many Polynesian native women when bathing, when suddenly, through the humming drone of the beating surf on the windward reef, she heard ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke

... sing they presented a few score of heads and shoulders above the squares and oblongs of dark woodwork; when they sat or knelt the nave seemed to be suddenly emptied of worshippers, and the drone of the responses mounting up to the raftered roof had a curious effect, and seemed to be the voice of the old church itself, paying its tribute to the unseen mysteries of ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall

... Central Africa folds softly over the picture, the multiform life of earth swiftly re-awakens; birds and butterflies hover in the air, the monkeys chatter merrily, and leap from bough to bough. The sounds which then arise—song and hum and murmur, the roll of the river, the drone of insects, the cries of the wild beasts—all seem to blend in one grand vesper harmony—one choral hymn of thanksgiving to the Lord of life. These are generally hushed as the night advances; and then swarms of ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... she did glance up, and all the school glanced with her. The drone of the reader hushed. The door opened softly, and upon the threshold stood Zora. Her small feet and slender ankles were black and bare; her dark, round, and broad-browed head and strangely beautiful face were poised almost defiantly, crowned with a misty mass ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... he, 'shake up that drone and drunkard, Carlton; tell him that his master directs that the travelling carriage shall be at the door ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... vague white rays. Soon, when the sun shall have risen, these rays will lengthen and become beautifully golden. The cocks and the cicalas make themselves heard, and now Madame Prune will begin her mystic drone. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti

... a kind cricket fluttered, Perched upon the place Vacant left, and duly uttered 'Love, Love, Love,' whene'er the bass Asked the treble to atone For its somewhat sombre drone." ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers

... strange and staidly conventional. Most of the stores were brick instead of wood with false fronts. The sidewalks were cement instead of boards. The main street was even paved. A sort of New England respectability and quietness hung over it. There was not a single saloon, and the drone of the little marble in the roulette wheel was gone from the land. Even the horses, hitched by drooping heads to racks, were scarce, and their place was taken by numerous tin automobiles of popular make and ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter

... to be nearly refined without being quite refined is as harrowing as singing just a little off the key. To be far off the key is to be in another key, but to smite at a note and muff it is excruciation. Better far to drone middle C than to aim at high C and miss ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... over and over; Swinburne's "Triumph of Time," and four lines of it rang in his memory afterward on warm nights when he saw the fireflies among dusky tree trunks and heard the low drone of many frogs. Then Eleanor seemed to come out of the night and stand by him, and he heard her throaty voice, with its tone of a ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... love the home Of a lazy drone, And a bed on a cushioned knee; But in wild free ways I will spend my days, And at night on ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning

... Convention;[31108] during the interval, it crops out and shines through all his compositions, harangues, or reports, in exordiums, parentheses and perorations, permeating every sentence like the drone of a bag-pipe.[31109]—Through the delight he takes in this he can listen to nothing else, and it is just here that the outward echoes supervene and sustain with their accompaniment the inward cantata which he sings ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... "not industry alone. Keep good company, my boy. Keep good hours. Never forget that a gentleman must look like a gentleman, dress like a gentleman, frequent the society of gentlemen. To be a mere bookworm is to be a drone in the great hive. I hate a drone—as I hate ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

... wants a clearing out, like what you are getting in Ireland, before a healthy regeneration can set in. The religion is faulty; the habits and traditions of the race are faulty; Jean Baptiste is the drone in our colonial hive. He won't gather honey: he will just live, indolently drawling through an existence diversified by feast and fast days; and all his social vices flourish in shelter of this seignorial system—this—this upas-tree which England ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... back seven years till again in the Town Hall he heard a magnetic voice assuring the citizens that the town lacked just three essentials—experience, money and imagination, and that the speaker would supply them all. It was a far cry from that evening to the deep drone of the rail mill, and Filmer, detaching himself from the picture in which he formed a part, began now to perceive its dramatic vitality. Were Clark taken out the whole thing ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan

... facility with which they could retrace their steps saved them from the fear of going astray. Through the vast forest a deathlike silence reigned; and this silence was not made up of an infinity of tiny sounds, like the silence of a summer day when the crickets whirr in the treetops and the bees drone in the clover-blossoms. No; this silence was dead, chilling, terrible. The huge pine-trees now and then dropped a load of snow on the heads of the bold intruders, and it fell with a thud, followed by a noiseless, ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... buzz of small life in hot sunshine, a cooing of doves, and a sleepy drone of well-wheels across the fields. Slowly and impressively the lama began. At the end of ten minutes the old soldier slid from his pony, to hear better as he said, and sat with the reins round his ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling

... the year, but the warmth was as that of a soft summer day in England. The lazy drone of bees hung on the air, and somewhere among the tamarisks a small, persistent bird, called and called perpetually, receiving ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell

... discovered the ringleader of these "gluttonous loiterers." Him he "worthily punished," and calling the others together, he told them very plainly that any man among them who did not do his share should be banished from the fort as a drone, till he mended ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

... harsh elements of landscape, mentioned above, were those which earliest captivated his infant attention, and he added that the square space, with the church in the midst of it, was filled all day long with the dull and droning sound of many waterfalls, while from dawn to dusk this drone of waters was constantly cut through by a sound that was like the sharp screaming and moaning of women. This was caused by hundreds of saws at work beside the waterfalls, taking advantage of that force. "Afterwards, when I read about the guillotine, I always thought of those saws," ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... sing they can hear the gentle drone of the Doctor's soft voice in the intervals in the music, reading in some nearby room to his daughter. They are reading Tennyson's "Maud" and sometimes in the emotional passages his voice breaks and his eyes fill up and he cannot go on. At such times, the daughter puts ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... of having thrown off the bonds of earth-bound folk; of soaring above the noise and dust of highways; of being free from the obstructions of traffic; of sweeping forward smoothly, swiftly, and serenely—the land stretching below in an ever-changing panorama, with the drone of the motor in one's ears, and a wine-like exhilaration in the rush of the air: these, and others more obscure, are among the ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White

... white frame building, oblong in shape, had four windows with green outer blinds on each of its two sides, and a door at the end nearer the road. As Webb traversed the open space, where, on Sundays, horses were hitched to the trees and saplings, a drone as of countless bees fell on his ears. To a native this needed no explanation. During five of the week-days the building was used as a schoolhouse. The sound was made by the students studying aloud, and John's niece, Dolly Drake, ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben

... of Bathrolaire Rises at night, when revelry begins, A white unreal orb, a sun that spins, A sun that watches with a sullen stare That dance spasmodic they are dancing there, Whilst drone and cry and drone of violins Hint at the sweetness of forgotten sins, Or call the devotees of shame to prayer. And all the spaces of the midnight town Ring with appeal and sorrowful abuse. There ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker

... Burgundian vineyards. Close at her father's side was the gentle Evangeline seated, Spinning flax for the loom, that stood in the corner behind her. Silent awhile were its treadles, at rest was its diligent shuttle, While the monotonous drone of the wheel, like the drone of a bagpipe, Followed the old man's songs and united the fragments together. As in a church, when the chant of the choir at intervals ceases, Footfalls are heard in the aisles, or words of the priest at the altar, So, in each pause of the song, with measured ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... commenced for him. Dependent on a sister of his, everybody in the farmhouse treated him as a beggar who is eating the bread of strangers. At every meal the very food he swallowed was made a subject of reproach against him; he was called a drone, a clown, and although his brother-in-law had taken possession of his portion of the inheritance, he was helped grudgingly to soup, getting just enough ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... drone, for he prefers the chimney-corner to the field, even although it cannot have been very cold if the weather was open enough to admit of ploughing. And he is a great fool, too, for he buys his comfort at a very dear price, as do all men who live for to-day, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... not counterfeit, the law was observed. After he got the land he was under no necessity of doing anything more than hold on to it, which same he could do equally well, whether in Chicago or buried in the depths of Kamschatka. If he chose, he could get chronically drunk; he could gamble, or drone in laziness; he could do anything but work. Nevertheless, the land and all its values which others created, were his forever, to enjoy and dispose of as suited ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... led the way into the parlour, took the book from the shelf, put it on the table within the little circle of light cast by a shaded candle, and began. It was dull enough, though I had borne such tribulations before, and the drone of my aunt's voice would have sent me to sleep, as it had done at other times, even in a straight-backed chair, had I not been so full of my discovery, and chafed at this delay. Thus all the time my aunt read of spiritualities and saving grace, I had my mind on diamonds and all kinds of ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner

... dead man's chest' never was used as a chanty. It would require too much bass; but it was used as a drone, which it is. An abstracted man would use a line, or may be, the whole verse, or the first line, used as ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock

... been a scandalous pluralist, restless and greedy, continually seeking and obtaining additional preferment, and as often being forced to resign. He was not the man to prosecute such a work as was to be done at Burgh; "he lived even as a drone in a hive; as the drone eateth and draggeth forward to himself all that is brought near, even so did he."[8] It is likely that for eight years after the death of John de Sais nothing was done to advance the building. But the Prior of S. Neots, ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting

... cheered myself by the air. "Never a roar of the drone or a sob of the chanter but's in the ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro

... ourselves—shall we never heed the teachings of Philosophy (unless perchance they have been sounding in our ears like and enchanter's drone):— ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus

... The drone of an aeroplane high in the midnight sky came to them at intervals. At last the sound died ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers

... the decision on the evidence of the medical expert. Then the secretary arose and began to read the indictment, loud and with distinctness, but so rapidly that his incorrect sounding of the letters l and r turned his reading into one continuous, weary drone. The judges leaned now on one side, now on the other side of their arm-chairs, then on the table, and again on the backs of the chairs, or closed their eyes, or opened them and whispered to each other. One of the gendarmes several times ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy

... the drone-pipes is heard, and Montfleury enters, enormously stout, in an Arcadian shepherd's dress, a hat wreathed with roses drooping over one ear, blowing into a ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand

... came back to haunt a lad. By holding tight to the memory he could see that her eyes were blue like his own, but her hair was black. He could hear the ring of her laugh as she told him Irish stories, and the soft drone of her voice as she sang him old Irish songs. It was she who told him about the fairies and witches that lived up behind the peat-flames. He remembered holding her hand and putting his cheek against it when the goblins came too near. Then the picture would go out, like a picture ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice

... wait. The Scientist's voice went on and on like the drone of an electric fan, interrupted only by an occasional murmur from Mother or Dad. For a while David sat in bed twisting the sheets in his hands; then he got up and paced the room in his bare feet. It seemed to him that three or four whole nighttimes had passed before he finally heard all three ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd

... am more than half inclined to say that I am glad of it. I led for years a useless life, most of the time a burden to myself. I was a drone in the social hive; I added nothing to the common stock; I was of no use to any one. But now my labours not only benefit myself, but the community at large. My mind is interested all the day; I no longer feel listlessness; ...
— The Last Penny and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur

... on their backs stood staring vacantly at the walls or at the sea; monks in long grey cloaks, square hats, and long hair, passed in and out like bees about a hive, and from a distance came a musical drone, the chanting ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... sweet sage is the drone of bees, like the hum of a far city. The thinning, acrid air is tinged with the faint fragrance ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... hours had been toiling on the screes of Sgurr Dearg. By-and-by we sat down on a bank of heather, and idly watched the trough swimming at our feet. The clatter of the pony's hoofs grew fainter, the drone of bees had gone, even the midges seemed to have forgotten their calling. No place on earth can be so deathly still as a deer-forest early in the season before the stags have begun roaring, for there ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... narrow secret stair, pushed back, with much circumspection and caution, the sliding panel, listened for a moment to the low murmur of their lordships' voices, waited until each of his men had gone stealthily behind the tapestry, listened again and still heard the drone of speech, he returned as he came, and accompanied by a guard of two score, escorted the Empress to the broad public stairway that led up one flight to the door of the Wahlzimmer. The two sentinels at the foot of the stairs crossed their pikes to bar the entrance of Brunhilda, but they were ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr

... eyes with happiness. They loved their kinsman for his kindness to them. He became attached to them as helpmates; and the end of it all was, he came to Socrates and told him with delight how matters fared; "and now," he added, "they tax me with being the only drone in the house, who sit and eat the ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon

... The drone of the engine ceased and little spurts of dust shot up from the landing wheels as the young aviator at the helm of the beautiful craft applied his brakes, threw out the spark and cut off the engine. The plane ran about ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... city I found as straight as the face of parties on the other hand was deformed. But being in the federal city, I became forcibly impressed with the fact, that your smallest man has the largest expectations, though he will not object to become the nation's drone. Having made this wonderful discovery, I took up my line of march for the National Hotel, a gorgeous palace where an uncouth million meet to revel in cheap luxury. So large was the house that a pilot to guide me through its thousand galleries ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton

... during one season, enables a man who left home a beggar to return with his fortune made! He marries, sets his wives to hoe the mealies and milk the cows, and thereafter takes life easy, except when he takes a fancy to hunt elephants, or to go to war for pastime. Ever after he is a drone in the world's beehive. Having no necessity he need not work, and possessing no principle he ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne

... assembled themselves together and lowed musically to the milkers. Phoebe Lyddon and John Grimbal still stood at the farm-gate, and they watched, as a boy and an aged man came forward with buckets and stools. Then, to the muffled thud of the water-wheel and the drone and murmur of the river, was added a purr of milk, foaming into tin pails, and sharp, thin monitions from the ancient, as he called the cows by their names and bid ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... in ta right, Mistress Partan, and tat you'll pe seeing," said Duncan, who, hearing her first cry, had stopped his drone, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... Sack! Canary! Malmsey! Muscadel!"— As the last canto ceased, the Mermaid Inn Chorussed. I flew from laughing voice to voice; But, over all the hubbub, rose the drone Of Francis Bacon,—"Now, this Muscovy Is a cold clime, not favourable to bees (Or love, which is a weakness of the south) As well might be supposed. Yet, as hot lands Gender hot fruits and odoriferous spice, In this case we may think ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... of an afternoon with the sun pointing fingers through the high leaded windows, Whewel of Coggershall took you under his spell, the spell of old ghosts of long forgotten afternoons, spacious afternoons filled with the cawing of rooks and the drone of bees. English afternoons of the good old time when the dust of the post chaise was the only mark of hurry across miles of meadow land and cowslip weather. And then as you sat held by the sound ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... people open their ears, and wonder who had got into the loft: they kept their places to enjoy the treat. When the organist saw this, he pushed the interloper off the stool, with "You'll never play 'em out this side Christmas." He then began his own drone, and the congregation began to move quietly away. "There," said he, "that's the way ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... green apples blush, Before green nuts embrown, Why, one day in the country Is worth a month in town— Is worth a day and a year Of the dusty, musty, lag-last fashion That days drone elsewhere. ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various

... parts where a good shower of rain has fallen, the stridulous piercing notes of the cicadae are perfectly deafening; a drab-colored cricket joins the chorus with a sharp sound, which has as little modulation as the drone of a Scottish bagpipe. I could not conceive how so small a thing could raise such a sound; it seemed to make the ground over it thrill. When cicadae, crickets, and frogs unite, their music may be heard at the distance of ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... quite happy. "If I could just sit here forever," she mused. "If someone could enchant me, just as I am, with the sun warm on the tips of my toes and this little wind, so full of flowers, cool upon my face. If I need never again hear anything save the drone of sleepy bees, the chirping of fat robins and the hum of ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... picture, he had taken the little devil up, with no purpose but somehow because it seemed natural, and when the child laughed he knew he had made a hit and kept on, singing now, not a cradle song but a man's song, something he had not himself thought of since he heard his old grandmother drone it between smokes, while she sat by the fire and dreamed of times past. It was something about Malbrook—"gone to the army"—"hope he never'll come back." And there was Tira now, within the circle of his fascination, bending a little toward him, her eyes ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... done dinner, I slept a little as my custom is, and the last sound that I heard, and the first upon awaking, was the drone of the bees. When I awakened I thought that I would walk down to Master Richard's house and see how all fared. So I took my staff and ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson

... the season of threshing, and all day long to the drowse of the air was added, near and afar, all-pervading through the stillness, the sleepy hum of the separator. Typical voice of the prairie was that busy drone, penetrating to the ears as the ubiquitous odor of the buffalo grass to the nostril, again bearing resemblance in that, once heard, memory would reproduce the sound until recollection was ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... The drone of the brook increased his agitation and the day was well-nigh spent when the doors of the cells opened and the brethren began to appear in their white garments; and when they had found seats about the table Paul ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... as then produce These rugged ponies, lean and spruce? Are these the steers of Accomac That do the negro's drone obey? The things of childhood all come back: The wonder tales of mother day! The jail, the inn, the ivy vines That yon old English churchside cloak, Wherein we read the stately lines Of Addison, writ in his signs, Above the ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... children are grown; Fun and frolic no more he knows, Robert of Lincoln's a humdrum drone; Off he flies, and we sing as he goes, Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink, When you can pipe that merry old strain, Robert of Lincoln, come back again. Chee, ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous

... scientific person mentioned it in a lecture. The ugliest man I ever saw. Now back again, Matilda. Let me introduce you to my friends, Father Benwell. Introducing is out of fashion, I know. But I am one of the few women who can resist the tyranny of fashion. I like introducing people. Sir John Drone—Father Benwell. Father Benwell—Doctor Wybrow. Ah, yes, you know the doctor by reputation? Shall I give you his character? Personally charming; professionally detestable. Pardon my impudence, doctor, it is one of the consequences of the ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins

... spirit cries that sever The cricket's level drone! O to give o'er endeavor And let love ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody

... sunk once more upon the ground, panting like a fish; and I saw rising in his face the same dusky flush that had mantled on my father's. 'I feel ill,' he gasped, 'horribly ill; the swamp turns around me; the drone of these carrion flies confounds ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson

... literature had not prospered so much, nor displayed so broad a diffusion of intelligence and taste, as had been expected. Pope's Dunciad, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and ironic satire on the state of literature under "Augustus" (George II, the "snuffy old drone from the German hive"), brilliantly express this indignation with the intellectual and literary shortcomings of ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... perceived above him an oeil de boeuf through which this song had come, and beyond, the upper courses of cable, the blue haze, and the pendant fabric of the lights of the public ways. He heard the song break into a tumult of voices and cease. But now he perceived quite clearly the drone and tumult of the moving platforms and a murmur of many people. He had a vague persuasion that he could not account for, a sort of instinctive feeling that outside in the ways a huge crowd' must be watching this place in which their Master amused ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... he spoke, there came a swift change in the even drone of their engine,—a jarring, discordant note, slight but unmistakable, and a series of ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander

... was odorous with a thousand scents, and it was hard for them to realize that at that very moment America might be suffering from zero weather or swept by blizzards. Here life moved along serenely and dreamily, lulled by the sound of birds and drone of locusts, wrapped in the warm folds ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick

... got to the door and stood up. All was dark within, so that I could distinguish nothing by the eye. As for sounds, there was the steady drone of the snorers and a small occasional noise, a flickering or pecking that I could in no way ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson

... among the butternuts, but this is pure priggishness. When the passer-by is gone he ceases chattering and climbs back to where the little breezes can stir his tail-plumes. From somewhere under the lazy fold of a meadow comes the drone of a mowing-machine among the hay—its whurr-oo and the grunt ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... will keep it in mind. It is a complete perplexity to me, and yet certainly insects can rudely somehow judge of distance. There are special difficulties on account of the gradation in size between the worker-scells and the larger drone-cells. I am trying to test the case practically by getting combs of different species, and of our own bee from different climates. I have lately had some from the W. Indies of our common bee, but the cells ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... craft; thou who hast suffered sorely, even to this hour, from Nero down to Pio Nono,—the days of thine oppression are over. Gone from thy enfranchised ways for ever is the clang of the Praetorian cohorts and the more odious drone of meddling monks!" And yet, as Mackinnon observed, there still stood the dirty friars and the small French soldiers; and there still toiled the slow priests, wending their tedious way up to the church of the Ara Coeli. But that was the mundane view of the matter,—a ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope

... Copyright is defined by Drone in his "Law of Copyright," as "the exclusive right of the owner to multiply and to dispose of copies of an intellectual production." It is also used as a synonym for literary property. Regarding literary property, ...
— International Copyright - Considered in some of its Relations to Ethics and Political Economy • George Haven Putnam

... old place with low rooms and all cosey. Octavia was in there—the dining-room—helping to lay the cloth, as she had been rather clumsy, too, and been sent away, and her young man was as nice as mine; and we four had a superb time, as happy as children, but Tom was nothing but a drone, for he sat with Kitty in a window seat behind some curtains, and did not ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn

... been concocted, and daring robberies committed in the troublous times not long past. To-day it is peaceable enough; so quiet in the summer afternoons, here in the very heart of the busy city, that the drone of the busy humming-birds among the flowers comes soothingly upon the ear of the wakeful dreamer. Quiet now, but awaiting the next upheaval, for such, we are sorry to say, is pretty sure to come, sooner ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou

... we only see her when she's out for play or meals, And distresses the fastidious by her gestures and her squeals, But she is not always idle or a decorative drone, And if she wastes her wages, well, she wastes what ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various

... lazy boy named Sam, The laziest ever known, Who spent his time in idleness, Like any other drone. He loved to lie in bed till noon, With covers closely drawn, And when he managed to get up He'd yawn, and yawn, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole

... a general equilibrium; the tide stands poised; the holiday spirit is unabated. But as the harvest ripens beneath the long, hot days, the melody gradually ceases. The young are out of the nest and must be cared for, and the moulting season is at hand. After the cricket has commenced to drone his monotonous refrain beneath your window, you will not, till another season, hear the wood thrush in all his matchless eloquence. The bobolink has become careworn and fretful, and blurts out snatches of his song ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... ages the name chorus was given to a primitive bagpipe without a drone. The instrument is best known by the Latin description contained in the apocryphal letter of St Jerome, ad Dardanum: "Chorus quoque simplex, pellis cum duabus cicutis aereis, et per primam inspiratur per secundam vocem emittit." Several ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... their slaves carry Plato with them; and whenever the boar is lost, out they take their books and their papyrus, in order not to lose their time too. When the dancing-girls swim before them in all the blandishment of Persian manners, some drone of a freedman, with a face of stone, reads them a section of Cicero "De Officiis". Unskilful pharmacists! pleasure and study are not elements to be thus mixed together, they must be enjoyed separately: the Romans lose both by this pragmatical affectation ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... the layers have been suggested which, while far from absolute, are of some significance and are well worth noting. The hen that sits upon the roost while other hens are out foraging, is probably a drone. The excessively fat or the excessively lean hens are not likely to be layers. It would naturally be supposed that the active laying hen would be the last one to go to roost at night. At the Kansas Experiment Station, the writer made observations ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings

... we caught fine beaver, The beaver is a very instinctive animal. There are several varieties, The Dam Builder, The Bank Beaver, The Bachelor Beaver and the Drone Beaver. The beaver ranges in color from white to black. I never saw a white one, and but one black one except when I looked in the glass. The Beaver weighs from twenty to thirty pounds in the United States, and from forty to fifty in Alaska. His food is bark, young grass and such foods, ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis

... It is all admirable, from that grand sentence, Nec vero terroe ferre omnes omnia possunt—that is to say, that not every soil is suited to every tree, Senor Don Jose—to the exhaustive treatise on bees, in which the poet describes the habits of those wise little animals, defining the drone ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos

... and German—for he found both those languages would be very useful to him in the City; while Agnes was busy over her drawing-board, tracing designs for Christmas and Easter cards. She declared she was not going to be the only drone in the hive, and bade fair to be successful later on, for two of her little cards had already been accepted by a great City publishing firm. When Mr. Murray dropped in of an evening he used to have a long look from one to the other of their cheerful, contented ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... for me with abundant greatcoats in the corner of the room, and my eyes gradually closed in sleep, catching, till they were finally sealed up, every now and then, twinklings of bare legs and well-turned ankles, mingled with the clatter of heavy brogues, and the drone of a bagpipe that had now superseded the squeak of the fife, and ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... eerie suggestion of such a bodiless assemblage as might have come together in the time of the Terror at midnight in the Place du Greve. The single note of strong colour—all the more effective because it was a very trumpet-blast above the drone of bees—was a brilliant splash of red running half-way around the mid-height: the crimson draperies in front of the three tiers set apart for the ministerial party and the Felibres. And for a roof over all was the dark star-set sky: whence the Great Bear gazed wonderingly down ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier

... frequently "catch the birds by their tails as they are going to roost;" and it is no doubt owing to this that they are so 'cute. Talk about "catching a weasel asleep," let me see any of my metropolitan drone friends who can catch a ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... in a whisper, shocked Dane into obeying it. Number One hold ... there were three divisions now and the stowage was—He became aware that for a small space of time he had escaped the net being woven by the beat of the drum, the drone of voices, the nodding of heads. He moistened his lips. So that was how it worked! He had heard Tau speak often enough about self-hypnotism under such conditions, but this was the first time the meaning of ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North

... found in the hither parts of Scotland, men not defective in judgment or general experience, who consider the Tacksman as a useless burden of the ground, as a drone who lives upon the product of an estate, without the right of property, or the merit of labour, and who impoverishes at once the landlord and the tenant. The land, say they, is let to the Tacksman at sixpence an acre, and ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson

... drawer : tirkesto. drawers : kalsono, (chest of -s), komodo. dream : songx'i, -o; (day-), rev'o, -i. dredge : skrapegi. dress : robo; vesti, sin vesti. drill : bori; ekzerco, manovro. drink : trinki, (to excess) drinki. drive : veturi; peli. "—away", forpeli. droll : ridinda, sxerca. drone : abelviro; zumi. drop : gut'o, -i. drown : dron'i, -igi. drug : drogo. drum : tamburo. drunken : ebria. dry : seka. "—land", firmajxo. duck : anasino, anaso. duration : dauxro. duty : devo, (tax) imposto. "be on—", dejxori. dwell : logxi, restadi. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer

... gentleman, and evidently a tobie-man with a wide range of activities. Out of mere vacancy of mind I walked near to read the fly-sheet again, and, by a curious chance, among the drone of words from the other room, the only one my quick ear could pick out ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough

... weight of the dense mass surging along its center. And then to add to the terror of the moment there was heard above the shouts and oaths of the struggling mob a low, foreboding hum, the characteristic drone of Austrian aeroplanes. It is hard to see what could have come of the situation but complete and bloody disaster if it had not been for the decided action of some Italian officers. By main force they thrust ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... pressing business. But in his sudden surprise he had not time to think of assuming either the nasal drone or the scriptural words peculiar to these black-coated gentry. Struck by his tone, the sergeant sprang ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty

... or heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into the land of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may take a thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a strange moment for the cabmen on the stance beside St. Giles's, when they hear the drone of his pipes reascending from the bowels of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and Casey would laugh at him. Aye, Casey would have laughed! .... They are men. There are thousands of them. The U. P. R. goes on. It can't be stopped. It has the momentum of a great nation pushing it on from behind.... And I, who have lost all I cared for, and you, who are a drone among the bees, and Ruby and Stanton with their kind, poor creatures sucked into the vortex; yes, and that mob of leeches, why we all are so stung by that nameless spirit that we are stirred beyond ourselves and dare both height and depth ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey

... thumb tripped the tele-transport control and from the engine rooms came a drone of power. In Ranthoor Prison, great bands of force wrapped themselves around the vault, clutching it, enfolding it within a sphere of power. Back in the Invincible the engines screamed and the vault was ripped out of the solid steel ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak

... stag-beetle that was caught—a great horny-headed and horny-bodied fellow, so strong that he could force his way out of a closed hand by sheer pushing, like his friend the cockchafer, who now began to whirr and drone about under the shady boughs of the trees, but who would not come near enough to be captured, till at last one of them came bump up against Mr Inglis's hat, in its headlong flight, when Fred picked ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn

... most unfortunate that we must lack His eloquence to-day. The people, who Always love high-sounding words more than Wise thoughts, prefer the music of his voice To good old Wilson's drone. Why isn't ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith

... tossed restlessly, listening to the unaccustomed noises from without, and as the hours went by, and at last the sound of talking about the fires died off in a lazy drone, the desire to see what had become of Muata was too strong to resist. Softly he lowered himself to the earth-floor, but, soft as he moved, ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville

... butterflies are left in relative peace while similar palatable butterflies are persecuted. It is also necessary to show that the mimickers do actually consort with the mimicked. Some beetles and moths are curiously wasplike, which may be a great advantage; the common drone-fly is superficially like a small bee; some harmless snakes are very like poisonous species; and Mr. Wallace maintained that the powerful "friar-birds" of the Far East are mimicked by the weak and timid orioles. When the model is unpalatable ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... as we peddle a card of pins the counter will fade away, And again we'll be seeing the sand-bag rims, and the barb-wire's misty grey? As a flat voice asks for a pound of tea, don't you fancy we'll hear instead The night-wind moan and the soothing drone ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service

... Stefan remembered as a whitewashed praying box, resounding to his father's high-pitched voice. It was filled with heat and flies from without in summer, and heat and steam from within in winter. The school, whitewashed again, he recalled as a succession of banging desks, flying paper pellets, and the drone of undigested lessons. Here the water bucket loomed as the alleviation in summer, or the red hot oblong of the open stove in winter time. Through all these scenes, by an egotistical trick of the brain, he saw himself ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations. And, don't you see, the terror of the position was not in being knocked on the head—though I had a very lively sense of that danger too—but in this, that ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... garb, draped with their iridescent feather-wrought mantles, their heads dressed with white plumes, a staff of cane adorned with white feathers in the right hand, a green bough in the left, preceded by those curiously sonorous earthen drums, of which the drone blended with the notes of the religious song, Yo-he-wah-yah! Yo-he-wah-yah! they thrice led the glittering procession of the "holy dance" around ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... the thorium world completely, expecting to have the unknown rocketeer fire at them. Then a fire bomb had been dropped as a further means of getting the asteroid to fire. But no rockets had been fired from the asteroid, so the pilot in control of the drone had sent it at ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage

... favoured him, and was always thrusting him upon me, and sounding his praises in my ears—Mr. Boarham by name, Bore'em, as I prefer spelling it, for a terrible bore he was: I shudder still at the remembrance of his voice—drone, drone, drone, in my ear—while he sat beside me, prosing away by the half-hour together, and beguiling himself with the notion that he was improving my mind by useful information, or impressing his dogmas upon me and reforming ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... laughter, fear that had lost its shame. Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom, Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume. Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung; The world was very old indeed when you and I were young. They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named: Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed. Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus; When that black ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton

... which a whole house seems to have slanted down. In the midst of all this is an orchard. A huge shell has uprooted, but not killed, an apple-tree; another apple-tree stands stone dead on the edge of a crater: most of the trees are dead. British aeroplanes drone over continually. A great gun goes by towards Bapaume, dragged by a slow engine with caterpillar wheels. The gun is all blotched green and yellow. Four or five men are seated on the huge ...
— Unhappy Far-Off Things • Lord Dunsany

... began whispering unintelligible warnings in a voice so low that it sounded like the drone of insects. Fred thrust the rifle forward inch by inch and, taking his time about it, settled himself comfortably for the shot. It was no easy shot in that uncertain light at a downward angle. The glare of the sun on the lake had troubled his eyes during ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy

... linen from the rag-bag for bed-clothes; how they had hummed and whistled to themselves as they worked (she could hear them now!); and how the aromatic woodsy smell of the unfinished old room and the drone of the rain on the roof had been a part ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... fresh German attack, preceded by five minutes' intense artillery fire, concentrated on the half-wrecked trench. The inferno of noise, the rush and roar of the approaching shells, the crash and earth-shaking thunder of their explosions, the ear-splitting cracks overhead of high-explosive shrapnel, the drone and whirr and thump of their flying fragments—the whole racking, roaring, deafening, sense-destroying tempest of noise was too much for Bunthrop's nerve. He flung down and flattened himself to the trench bottom again, squeezing ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)

... his prologue; Moliere contributed fifty fresh verses, with which his visit to Percerin had inspired him; Loret, an article on the marvelous fetes he predicted; and Aramis, laden with his booty like the king of the bees, that great black drone, decked with purple and gold, re-entered his apartment, silent and busy. But before departing, "Remember, gentlemen," said he, "we ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... streamlet rings and reverberates from side to side with a profusion of clear notes. And this rarity of birds is not to be regretted on its own account only. For the insects prosper in their absence, and become as one of the plagues of Egypt. Ants swarm in the hot sand; mosquitoes drone their nasal drone; wherever the sun finds a hole in the roof of the forest, you see a myriad transparent creatures coming and going in the shaft of light; and even between-whiles, even where there is no incursion of sun-rays into the dark arcade of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... words I can answer you," said the book-hawker. "I was once a monk, a lazy drone. Our convent was rich, and we had nothing to do except to appear for so many hours every day in church, and repeat or chant words, of the sense of which we did not for a moment trouble ourselves. Copies of the blessed gospel, however, ...
— The Woodcutter of Gutech • W.H.G. Kingston

... Lottery, In Cupid's court went merrily, And Cupid played A Jewish trade In this his scheming Lottery; For hearts, we're told, In shares he sold To many a fond believing drone, And cut the hearts In sixteen parts So well, each thought the whole his own. Chor.—A ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... Diadem; To Absalons side does his old Covenant bring, With State raz'd out, and interlin'd with KING. But Nadabs Zeal has too severe a Doom; Whilst serving an ungrateful Absalom, His strength all spent his Greatness to create, He's now laid by a cast-out Drone of State. He rowz'd that Game by which he is undone, By fleeter Coursers now so far outrun, That fiercer Mightier Nimrod in the Chace, Till quite thrown out, and lost ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.

... little cottage which was to be their future home. The pipers stood at the threshold of Jack Dwyer, and his daughter departed from under the "roof-tree" to the tune of "Joy be with you"; and then the lilters, heading the body-guard of the bride, plied drone and chanter right merrily until she had entered her new home, thanked her old friends (who did all the established civilities, and cracked all the usual jokes attendant on the occasion); and Andy bolted the door of the snug cottage of which he had so suddenly become master, ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover

... sweate and labour hauing most chiefe comfort, On the holy day assoone as morne is past, When all men resteth while all the day doth last, They drinke, they banket, they reuell and they iest They leape, they daunce, despising ease and rest. If they once heare a bagpipe or a drone, Anone to the elme or oke they be gone. There vse they to daunce, to gambolde and to rage Such is the custome and vse of the village. When the ground resteth from rake, plough and wheles, Then moste they it trouble ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt



Words linked to "Drone" :   intonation, plodder, strayer, trailer, potterer, modulation, idler, pipe, pitch contour, sound, mouth, stick-in-the-mud, speak, verbalize, loiterer, heavier-than-air craft, bagpipe, layabout, slowpoke, utter, loafer, go, dawdler, lingerer, talk, bee, bum, straggler, putterer, slowcoach, do-nothing, verbalise



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com