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Whirligig   Listen
noun
Whirligig  n.  
1.
A child's toy, spun or whirled around like a wheel upon an axis, or like a top.
2.
Anything which whirls around, or in which persons or things are whirled about, as a frame with seats or wooden horses. "With a whirligig of jubilant mosquitoes spinning about each head."
3.
A mediaeval instrument for punishing petty offenders, being a kind of wooden cage turning on a pivot, in which the offender was whirled round with great velocity.
4.
(Zool.) Any one of numerous species of beetles belonging to Gyrinus and allied genera. The body is firm, oval or boatlike in form, and usually dark colored with a bronzelike luster. These beetles live mostly on the surface of water, and move about with great celerity in a gyrating, or circular, manner, but they are also able to dive and swim rapidly. The larva is aquatic. Called also weaver, whirlwig, and whirlwig beetle.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Whirligig" Quotes from Famous Books



... you will now see what I mean by Rest. Rest is the loosing of the chains which bind us to the whirligig of the world, it is the passing into the centre of the Cyclone; it is the Stilling of Thought. For (with regard to this last) it is Thought, it is the Attachment of the Mind, which binds us to outer things. The outer things themselves are all right. ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... library, I remarked. There were books all round the room, and one of those whirligig square book-cases. I saw in front a Bible and a Concordance, Shakespeare and Mrs. Cowden Clarke's book, and other classical works and books of grave aspect. I contrived to give it a turn, and on the side next the wall I got a glimpse ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... Mary Philipse married Colonel Roger Morris, in the king's service, and cards were duly sent to Mount Vernon. But the whirligig of time equalizes all things, and, in Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six, General Washington, Commander of the Continental Army, occupied the mansion of Colonel Morris, the Colonel and his lady being fugitive Tories. In his diary, Washington records this significant item: ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... said Winter. "They disagreed, and she divorced him, thinking he would remain poor. The whirligig of time changed their relative positions, and to a jealous-minded woman ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy

... neglect, and a miserable death in an almshouse. 'Soon after, however,' says the record, 'many epitaphs honoured his memory: the greatness of his merit was universally confessed, and his Lusiad was translated into various languages.' 'The whirligig of time brings its revenges,' as your own illustrious Singer saith. How think you myself and my friend VASCO de GAMA here look upon the fallen state of our beloved native land? In vain he ventured for her. In vain I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various

... I can see the whole globe spinning round like a crazy whirligig, whipped on by haughty lords in cunning calculation and by venal ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko

... cold and lifeless. Superficial imitations of Niobe and the Belvedere Apollo have no attraction for a generation educated by the marbles of the Parthenon. Dull reproductions of Raphael's manner at his worst cannot delight men satiated with Raphael's manner at his best. Whether the whirligig of time will bring about a revenge for the Eclectics yet remains to be seen. Taste is so capricious, or rather the conditions which create taste are so complex and inscrutable, that even this, which now seems impossible, may happen ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... Colette had often invited her. Her dread of the effort necessary to interrupt her habits and to tear herself away from her careless tranquillity and the home she loved in order to plunge into the Parisian whirligig that she knew so well, had made her postpone the journey from year to year. This spring she was filled with melancholy, perhaps with a secret disappointment—(how many unspoken romances there are in the heart of a woman, unknown to others, often unconfessed to herself!)—and she longed ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... which she had held up to this time. Being but a child at the time, she perhaps knew or cared little for any difference it may have made in her surroundings. She shared in the flight of the Royal Family to France in 1868, and her education was completed in Paris. When the whirligig of Spanish politics called her brother Alfonso, who at the time was a military student at Sandhurst, to the throne from which his mother had been driven, Princess Isabel returned with him to Madrid, and was once more installed in the Palace, above the Manzanares, ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street

... I remember, after my whirligig flight over the Paris pavement, is a crowd of faces above me and someone pawing at my collar and holding my wrist. This someone, a man, a ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln

... long-run she bores you with her French gayeties and sprightliness: her character for gallantry is too notorious. She quite corrupted Marwitz, in this and a subsequent visit; turned the poor girl's head into a French whirligig, and undermined any little moral principle she had. She was on the road to Berlin,"—of which anon, for it is not quite nothing to us;—"but she was in no hurry, and would right willingly have gone with us." And it required all our female diplomacy to get her under way ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... is it that thunders?" old Strepsiades asks of Socrates in The Clouds of Aristophanes, and the philosopher replies: "Not Zeus, but the clouds." "But," questions Strepsiades, "who but Zeus makes the clouds sweep along?" to which Socrates answers: "Not a bit of it; it is atmospheric whirligig." "Whirligig?" muses Strepsiades; "I never thought of that—that Zeus is gone and that Son Whirligig rules now in his stead." And so the old man goes on personifying and animating the whirlwind, as if the whirlwind were ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... inspired idiot—a madman who happened to be able to write good verses. That belief, made finally impossible by Mr. Swinburne's elaborate Essay, is now, happily, nothing more than a curiosity of literary history; and indeed signs are not wanting that the whirligig of Time, which left Blake for so long in the Paradise of Fools, is now about to place him among the Prophets. Anarchy is the most fashionable of creeds; and Blake's writings, according to Sir Walter ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... was more. A jay with skyblue shaft Set in blunt wing, skimmed screaming on ahead. She followed him. A murrey squirrel eyed Her warily, cocked upon tail-plumed haunch, Then, skipping the whirligig of last-year leaves, Whisked himself out of sight and reappeared Leering about the hole of a young beech; And every time she thought to corner him He scrambled round on little scratchy hands To peek at her about the other side. She lost him, bolting branch to branch, at ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various

... desert the colours on the eve of the decisive fight. Of course I have done no work for I do not know how long; and here you can triumph. I have been reduced to writing verses for amusement. A fact. The whirligig of time brings in its revenges, after all. But I'll have them buried with me, I think, for I have not the heart to burn them while I live. Do write. I shall go to the mountains as soon as the weather clears; on the way thither, I marry myself; then I set up my family altar among the pinewoods, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... interlude; respite. era, epoch; time of life, age, year, date; decade &c. (period) 108; moment, &c. (instant) 113. glass of time, sands of time, march of time, Father Time, ravages of time; arrow of time; river of time, whirligig of time, noiseless foot of time; scythe. V. continue last endure, go on, remain, persist; intervene; elapse &c. 109; hold out. take time, take up time, fill time, occupy time. pass time, pass away time, spend time, while away time, consume time, talk against time; tide over; use time, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... while he is pursued by some one behind. Man, and woman too, are naturally animals of chase; the greatest still finds something to follow, and there is no one too humble not to be an object of prey to another. Thus, confining our view to the village of Hazeldean, we behold in this whirligig Dr. Riccabocca spurring his hobby after Lenny Fairfield; and Miss Jemima, on her decorous side-saddle, whipping after Dr. Riccabocca. Why, with so long and intimate a conviction of the villany of our sex, Miss Jemima should resolve upon giving the male animal one more ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... up next day, and the old omnibus went off to the station with Bacon hanging on behind, the bicycle boy and his iron whirligig atop, and heads popping out of all the windows for last good-byes. Our party and the Hammonds were going by boat, and were all ready to start for the pier when Boo and little Harry were missing. Molly, the maid, ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott

... attired in fragments of ribbons and rags stalked up to me, gravely twisting a child's paper whirligig. Behind him was his servant bending under the load of a crate of mud toys. The two were loading up two camels, and the inhabitants of the Serai watched them with shrieks ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... The whirligig of time has indeed brought its revenge in the matter of the market value of eggs. In Worcestershire we have had to give them away at eighteen or twenty for a shilling; last (1918-1919) winter we sold some at 7s. a dozen, ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... The whirligig of time brings about strange revenges, for a truth. General McClellan was chosen to visit the seat of the Crimean War to study the siege operations about Sebastopol. Returning and seeing no prospects in the air—of his professional line—he became superintendent of the Illinois ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams

... of it, he had not at any period inquired. Whatsoever her point of view might be, he knew it would be unbiassed, clear minded and wholly just. She had asked no question and made no comment. The rapid, whirligig existence of the well-known fashionable groups, including in their circles varieties of the Mrs. Gareth-Lawless type, were to be seen at smart functions and to be read of in newspapers and fashion reports, if ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... of the porters at Calais with Dr. Smollett's baggage, six of them seizing upon one small portmanteau, and bearing it in triumph to his lodgings. You see what it is to laugh at the superstitions of a gentleman-usher, as I think you do somewhere. 'The whirligig of ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various

... children of the same father, each with such different histories—the one reared in luxury and affluence, never having known want; the other dragged up in the gutter, all unsexed and besmirched by the life she had led. "The whirligig of time brings in its revenges," and it was the last thing in the world Mark Frettlby would have thought of seeing: Rosanna Moore's child, whom he fancied dead, under the same ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume

... whirligig-beetles, they are such frisky fellows, always having a good time, frolicking about with dozens of other little whirligigs. They are bluish-black and shiny, and if you look carefully you will see a little bubble at the tip of every tail. This little bubble is held there by tiny hairs, and ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody

... Already South Carolina is discussing a standing army. If history is not a lying gossip, the result of the system of labor will be Jamaica, and that of the system of polity, Mexico. Instead of a stable government, they will have a whirligig of pronunciamientos, or stability will be purchased at a cost that will make it intolerable. They have succeeded in establishing among themselves a fatal unanimity on the question of Slavery,—fatal because it makes the office of spy and informer honorable, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various

... And so the whirligig of time sent him back to his desk at the Custom- House, on a salary so modest that it meant ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... stick in the mud, and the mud will stick to him. You put your heart in your farm, and your son would only put his foot into it. Courage! Don't you see that Time is a whirligig, and all things come round? Every day somebody leaves the land and goes off into trade. By and by he grows rich, and then his great desire is to get back to the land again. He left it the son of a farmer: he returns to it as a squire. Your son, when he gets to be fifty, ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... became the wife, and the whirligig of Time brought in his revenges. The lady now found herself the most important member of her sex, in a dwelling filled with men. She had few women about her person, and the confidant of a great dame in old romance ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France

... halfpenny peepshow, in which all the world was represented by Joseph and his Brethren (with pit and coat), the bombardment of Copenhagen, the Battle of the Nile, Daniel in the Den of Lions, and Mount Etna in eruption. "Aunt Maggy's Whirligig" could be enjoyed on payment of an old pair of boots, a collection of rags, or the like. Besides these and other shows, there were the wandering minstrels, most of whom were "Waterloo veterans" wanting ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie

... rioters. The little sparrow of a seamstress was quite undisturbed by the great events of the French Revolution, except as they had put everything at sixes and sevens and whirled away her own intimates in the mad whirligig. ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... RAYMOND. Illustrated by RUTH ROLLINS. She is called "The Whirligig" because she is so apt to be blown about by her emotions. It is not until she goes to live with an old aunt and uncle and is thrown upon her own resources, that she develops a steadier and stronger character. She is a great comfort ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison

... The whirligig of time has brought in his revenges. The Doctor himself has been dead his century. He died on the 13th of December, 1784. Come, let ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... The men who once exposed wrong-doing by shouting it before the wrong-doer's door, now expose it by representing its various forms. The comic poets denounce not only the thief, the fool, the miser, but the advocates of war, the flatterers of the populace, the sophists who set up Whirligig[42] in the place of Zeus, the thin-blooded tragedian in league with the sophists, who preaches against the flesh. Where facts are insufficient he has recourse to fancy, and exaggerates the wronged truth the more strongly to enforce ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... need a second invitation, for I was curious to witness the wonders which the whirligig of time had ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie

... answered Anderton with a shrug. "I can't enumerate all the charges offhand; but there's enough to kill Mr. Ainley's goose twice over. Lor', what a whirligig life is. I never thought—Hallo! Who's this? Jean Benard, ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns

... on the Turkish history in the reign of Selinus I. Mr. Philips and Mr. Winstanley have ascribed a comedy to this author, called Cupid's Whirligig, tho' Democritus and Heraclitus were not more different in their temper, than his genius was opposite to comedy, besides the true author was one Mr. E. S. who in ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber

... lightning celerity, Leaving a name for the ages to be. "Ha!" chortled Phoebus, "that comes of temerity." See from the sequel the fitness of things: Nearly forgotten this early adventure is; Phoebus is beaten; Time's whirligig brings Still its revenge in the course of the centuries. Over the sky, from the east to the west of it, Man has decidedly now got the best ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 12, 1919 • Various

... philosophy cannot be that which is just now in vogue. But all we have to do, I believe, is to wait. Nominalism, and that "Sensationalism" which has sprung from Nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme effort: after which the whirligig of Time may bring round its revenges: and Realism, and we who hold the Realist creeds, may have our turn. Only wait. When a grave, able, and authoritative philosopher explains a mother's love of her newborn babe, as Professor Bain has done, in a really eloquent ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley

... followers credit him with a masterly performance of the part. One of his earliest acts as President of the Park Commission was to oust Fred. Law Olmstead, and shelve Andrew H. Green, the actual creators of Central Park; but the whirligig of time has now put him into such a position that he cannot get a dollar of public money without the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... thought how Elzevir had gone to shoot her father, and only failed of it by a hair's-breadth, and yet she spoke so well I thought he never really meant to shoot at all, but only to scare the magistrate. And what a whirligig of time was here, that I should have saved Elzevir from having that blot on his conscience, and then that he should save my life, and now that Maskew's daughter should be the one to praise Elzevir when he lay dead! And still I ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner

... Ground in such manner, that I, who sat upon one of the lowest Benches, saw further above her Shoe than I can think fit to acquaint you with. I could no longer endure these Enormities; wherefore just as my Girl was going to be made a Whirligig, I ran in, seized on the Child, and carried ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... conditions on the Western Front have been much changed by the whirligig of aeronautical development. All things considered, the flying officer is now given improved opportunities. Air fighting has grown more intense, but the machines in use are capable of much better performance. The latest word in single-seater scouts, which I am now ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott

... and I swear I am willing. I haven't got another drop of perspiration left in me. I have been spinning around and around the wheel like a squirrel. It is so dark I can't tell which way she is swinging till she is coming around like a whirligig.' ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... the case here, and we do not know why it may not be in heaven, that the ones that are turned over and shook up, and the dust knocked out of them, and their metaphorical coat tail filled with boots, find that the whirligig of time has placed them above the parties who smote them, and we can readily believe that if Donaldson gets a first-class position of power, above the skies, he will make it decidedly warm for his persecutors when they come up to the desk with their grip sacks and register and ask for ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck

... religion, I didn't quite like, and at any other time I would have written you a sermon on the subject. In Calcutta (where I felt so self-righteous) nothing would have prevented me—but now I haven't the spirit. Mark, please, how the whirligig of Time brings its revenges! In Calcutta I thought myself a saint, in Takai I am regarded as a Brand Unplucked. It is rather dispiriting. I am beginning to wonder if I really am as nice ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas

... catch the aura popularis, used to say that he believed that were he to turn baker, it would put bread out of fashion. I have had the better luck to dress my sails to every wind; and so blow on, good wind, and spin round, whirligig. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... should have told you that invitations had been sent out. 15 The carriers were the Hours—twelve as merry little whirligig foot pages as you should desire to see. They went all around, and found out the persons invited well enough, with the exception of Easter Day, Shrove Tuesday, and a few such Movables, who had lately shifted their ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... Jewess stands by, stolid and immovable; the Magyar blood is not in her, hers is the languorous Oriental blood, the supple, sinuous movements of the Levant. She watches this bacchanalian whirligig with a sneer upon her thin, red lips. Beside her Eros Bela too is still, the scowl has darkened on his face, his one eye leers across the group of twirling dancers to that one couple ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy



Words linked to "Whirligig" :   ride, top, spin around, whirligig beetle, plaything, toy, teetotum, whip top, humming top, roundabout



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