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Barnacle   Listen
noun
Barnacle  n.  
1.
pl. (Far.) An instrument for pinching a horse's nose, and thus restraining him. Note: (Formerly used in the sing.) "The barnacles... give pain almost equal to that of the switch."
2.
pl. Spectacles; so called from their resemblance to the barnacles used by farriers. (Cant, Eng.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Barnacle" Quotes from Famous Books



... stooping low, saw beneath the vehicle a parasitic square box like a huge barnacle fixed to the bottom of the van. A box about four feet by two. The door of it was open, and Parker's bedfellows—two iron buckets and a sack ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman

... you stay the great barnacle-goose When its eyes are turned to the sea and its beak to the ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats

... born and brought up; and the whole story is an appeal against the injustice of depriving of personal liberty those who cannot pay their bills, or meet their notes, however small. Its prominent characters are the Clennams, mother and son, the Meagleses, Flintwinch, Sir Decimus Tite Barnacle, Rigaud and Little Cavalletto. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... whether the diablotin (a now almost extinct species of West Indian nocturnal bird) were fish flesh, and might or might not be eaten in Lent, he tells us that he was fairly worsted,—(although he could cite the celebrated myth of the "barnacle-geese" as a "fact" in justification of one's right to ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... lines of heavy infantry in uniforms of green and blue, the sea has for countless ages bombarded Carn Du with stone-shot in the shape of great boulders. These have ground and polished off every scrap of seaweed, every barnacle, limpet, and sea-anemone, leaving the rock all smooth and bare, while the boulders lie piled to the east in a heap, where the waves that try to take the rock in flank leap amongst them, and roll them over higher and higher, to come rumbling down as if they were tiny pebbles ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn

... Tommy, "in a minute or two." He has climbed into Joyce's lap, and is now sitting on her with his arms round her neck. To make love to a young woman and to induce her to marry you with a barnacle of this sort hanging round her suggests difficulties. Mr. Dysart waits. "All things come to those who wait," says a wily old proverb. But Dysart proves this proverb ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

... called a family. More distant resemblances connect the lobster with the prawn and the crab, which are expressed by putting all these into the same order. Again, more remote, but still very definite, resemblances unite the lobster with the woodlouse, the king crab, the water flea, and the barnacle, and separate them from all other animals; whence they collectively constitute the larger group, or class, Crustacea. But the Crustacea exhibit many peculiar features in common with insects, spiders, and centipedes, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... servant woke her master up in a fright and said: "Master of all masters, get out of your barnacle and put on your squibs and crackers. For white-faced simminy has got a spark of hot cockalorum on its tail, and unless you get some pondalorum high topper mountain will be all on hot cockalorum." .... ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)

... tide, on the beach, John Wood was seated in the sand, sheltered from the sun in the boat's shadow, absorbed in the laying on of verdigris. The dull, worn color was rapidly giving place to a brilliant, shining green. Occasionally a scraper, which lay by, was taken up to remove the last trace of a barnacle. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various

... printed enquiries, by conversations with skilful breeders and gardeners, and by extensive reading.' 'When,' he added, 'I see the list of books of all kinds which I read and abstracted, including whole series of Journals and Transactions, I am surprised at my industry[131].' In September 1854 the Barnacle work was finished and 10,000 specimens sent out of the house and distributed, and then he devoted himself to arranging his 'huge pile of notes, to observing and experimenting in relation ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd

... subtlety, expounding the very antithesis of the conceptions I am presenting to-night. Mr. Belloc—who has evidently never read his Malthus—dreams of a beautiful little village community of peasant proprietors, each sticking like a barnacle to his own little bit of property, beautifully healthy and simple and illiterate and Roman Catholic and local, local over the ears. I am afraid the stars in their courses fight against such pink and golden dreams. Every tramway, every ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... that beren a fruyt, that becomen briddes fleeynge: and tho that fellen in the water, lyven; and thei that fallen on the erthe, dyen anon: and thei ben right gode to mannes mete. And here of had thei als gret marvaylle, that summe of hem trowed, it were an impossible thing to be. [Footnote: The Barnacle-bearing trees are said to have grown in Ireland.] In that contree ben longe apples of gode savour; where of ben mo than 100 in a clustre, and als manye in another; and thei han gret longe leves and large, of ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt

... abnormal amount of luggage for such a brief visit. But as I told Henry (who said it looked as though she intended wintering in our abode), I had distinctly stipulated that the invitation was for a week only. I was not at that time aware of the barnacle-like qualities of Gladys. ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick

... in and done for," Madagascar had not come within my purview; its distance had not "lent enchantment to the view." I gave it some thought, but could not perceive that I had been so annoyingly persistent to merit a response from the President, not unlike that given by Mr. Blaine to one Mr. Tite Barnacle, who was willing to compromise on a foreign appointment. "Certainly," was the reply; the "foreigner the better." I concluded, however, that the bard may have been right when he wrote "There is a destiny that shapes our ends," for it often happens that what a man desires is just what he ought ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

... single swan was found upon the island; but several geese were breeding there, and the sooty petrel possessed the grassy parts; the swans of the sailor, in this instance, therefore, turned out to be geese. This bird had been seen before upon Preservation Island, and was either a Brent or a Barnacle goose, or between the two. It had a long and slender neck, with a small short head, and a rounded crown; a short, thick arched bill, partly covered with a pea-green membrane which soon shrivelled up, and came away in the dried specimens. Its plumage was, for the most part, of a dove colour, ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins

... despair, or to what is more unmanning, self-pity. He had failed before, through trying to frame his life to other men's plans. He had failed now, through trying to win success through other men's efforts—a barnacle clinging to the hull of some craft freighted with fortune. Perhaps, too, he fairly and squarely faced the fact that if he was to be one whit different from the beggar for whom he had been mistaken, he must build his own life solely and ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut

... louse—might be distinguished from scurf (although to the naked eye it is very much like it in appearance) by the former fastening firmly on one of the hairs as a barnacle would on a rock, and by it not being readily brushed off as scurf would, which ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse

... is another example of degeneration through quiescence. The barnacles are crustaceans related most nearly to the crabs and shrimps. The young barnacle just from the egg is a six-legged, free-swimming nauplius, very like a young prawn or crab, with a single eye. In its next larval stage it has six pairs of swimming feet, two compound eyes, and two antennae ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... happened yet," the admiral commented. "My guess is that we could sit here for six years and nothing would come of such a barnacle-brained scheme." ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia

... is sailing through the sea, But the Past is heavy and hindereth me, The Past hath crusted cumbrous shells That hold the flesh of cold sea-mells About my soul. The huge waves wash, the high waves roll, Each barnacle clingeth and worketh dole, And hindereth me ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting

... my shoes, and struck into the water. 'Twas of the shallowest, and I had but to wade towards him who struggled. When I came anigh him, he must even catch hold of me, clinging like Grim Death or a Barnacle to the bottom of a Barge, very nearly dragging me down. But I was happily strong; and so, giving him with my disengaged arm a sound Cuff under the ear, the better to Preserve his Life, I seized him by the waist with the other, and so dragged him up high, if not ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... north-west corner of the exterior stands a comparatively modern house, but this incongruous companionship is no strange thing in Normandy, although, as we have seen at Falaise, there are instances in which efforts are being made to scrape off the humble domestic architecture that clings, barnacle-like, upon the walls of so many of the finest churches. On the north side of Notre Dame, there is an admirably designed outside pulpit with a great stone canopy overhead full of elaborate tracery. It overhangs the pavement, and is a noticeable ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home

... This is an old fable not worth confuting. The Barnacle goose or clakis of Willoughby, anas erythropus of Linnaeus, called likewise tree-goose, anciently supposed to be generated from drift wood, or rather from the lepas anatifera or multivalve shell, called barnacle, which is often found on the bottoms of ships.—See Pennant's Brit. Zool. 4to. 1776. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr

... few words, she sailed on. Being much fouled on the bottom by shell-fish, she drew along with her fishes which had been following the Spray, which was less provided with that sort of food. Fishes will always follow a foul ship. A barnacle-grown log adrift has the same attraction for deep-sea fishes. One of this little school of deserters was a dolphin that had followed the Spray about a thousand miles, and had been content to eat scraps ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum

... of passage swept aloft, snipe and teal and barnacle geese, and the rains began; when the green lizard with its turquoise-blue throat vanished; when the Jersey crapaud was heard croaking no longer in the valleys and the ponds; and the cows were well blanketed—then ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... another, it became apparent that the extent of the illuminated beach was widening. Hither and thither over the multitude the intelligence ran, in whispers or by glances. Having showed his neighbor each looked again. Ripple-worn sand, shells, barnacle-covered rocks, slowly came within the pale of the radiance and Moses moved with it. Eight stalwart Hebrews, bearing a funeral ark, shrouded with a purple pall, fringed with gold, emerged from among the people and, taking ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... Nicholas Cockney, and guardian of Priscilla Tomboy of the West Indies. Barnacle is a tradesman of the old school, who thinks the foppery and extravagance of the "Cockney" school inconsistent with prosperous shop-keeping. Though brusque and even ill-mannered, he has good sense and good discernment of character.—The ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... olden times was that of the barnacle-tree, to which Sir John Maundeville also alludes:—"In our country were trees that bear a fruit that becomes flying birds; those that fell in the water lived, and those that fell on the earth died, and these be right good for man's meat." As early as the twelfth century this idea was ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... having a heavy calcareous shell were grouped with the snails and oysters as mollusks. But the barnacle did not fit well with other mollusks. Its shell was entirely different. It had several pairs of legs; and no mollusk has legs. The barnacle is evidently a sessile crab or better crustacean. Its molluscan characteristics were only skin-deep, evidently an adaptation to a mode of life like that ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... as I roared along like a conquering hero, the boat received a frightful smash and came instantly to a dead stop. I was flung forward and into the bottom. As I sprang up I caught a fleeting glimpse of a greenish, barnacle-covered object, and knew it at once for what it was, that terror of navigation, a sunken pile. No man may guard against such a thing. Water-logged and floating just beneath the surface, it was impossible to sight it in the troubled water in ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London

... unsuccessful, but on the second voyage the wreck was found. Divers, armed with modern apparatus, spent several days in the quest, but in vain, until, finally, just as the last diver was about to give the signal to be drawn up, he leaned against what seemed only the barnacle-encrusted end of a beam; but suddenly it gave way, and numbers of golden doubloons rolled out at his feet. Considerable sums rewarded further search in the sand-filled and decaying carcass of the old ship; but exactly how much was realized is known only to the discoverers, who kept the matter ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various

... "barnacle-geese" ought not to be omitted from any sketch of the vicissitudes of this doctrine of Biogenesis. An elaborate illustrated account covering their alleged natural history was printed in one of the early volumes of the Royal Society ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... things to tell you still, my kind foster-child, but little time have I to tell you them, for the barnacle-geese are flying over the house, and when they have all flown by I shall have no more to say. And I have to tell you yet how the King of Ireland's Son won home with Fedelma, the Enchanter's daughter, and how it came to pass that the Seven Wild Geese that were Caintigern's brothers were disenchanted ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum

... straight, some come up to take a sniff of air, and some stay below. It is just the same with people who go to sea. Take half a dozen individuals who are all more or less used to the water, and they will behave in half a dozen different ways. One will become encrusted to the deck like a barnacle, another will sit in the cabin playing cards; a third will spend his time spinning yarns with the ship's company, and a fourth will rush madly up and down the deck from morning till night in the pursuit of an appetite which shall leave no feat of marine digestion untried or unaccomplished. ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford

... Cirrhopode one idea of the author of nature. You may find a very respectable quarto account of the family, tracing them in all their varieties; but a page might inform you of all that is essential about the barnacle, curious as its history has been, and you need not ponder on the quarto unless you have some particular curiosity to gratify. The Types of nature, both in her vegetable and animal departments are, after all, few. Describe each comprehensively, group them all in correct relations to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various

... of these books did much for Darwin. His narrative of the voyage gained the good will of cultured England in general. The book on coral reefs won the geologists. His "Manual of the Cirrhipedia" (as the barnacle book was called) secured the attention of systematic zooelogists. The time was not far distant when he would need every aid possible toward gaining and keeping the regard of men; for he was to promulgate ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... in external appearance. It was not till Vaughan Thompson demonstrated, in 1830, their development from a free-swimming and typically Crustacean larva that it came to be recognized that, in Huxley's graphic phrase, "a barnacle may be said to be a Crustacean fixed by its head and kicking the food into its mouth with its legs." For a systematic account of the barnacles and their ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... the matter to him I did not get much sympathy. He was a practical young man, without a stitch of romance in his whole make-up, and he only laughed at my suggestion and said that anybody who tried to push into that mess just for the sake of seeing some barnacle-covered logs, or perhaps a rotting hulk or two, would be a good deal of a fool. And so I did not press my fancy on him, and our talks went ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier

... himself much, I suppose," she commented. "He always stuck to this place in summer like a barnacle. Was crazy about it." ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne

... the eatables, as well as cook them. By the law of many Indian tribes property and the control of the family go with the mother. The husband never belongs to the same family connection, rarely to the same community or town even, and often not even to the tribe. He is a sort of barnacle, taken in on his wife's account. To the adventurer, like a trader, this adoption gave a sort of legal status or protection. Gist either understood this before he started on his enterprise, or learned it very speedily after. Of the Cherokee tongue he knew positively nothing. He had a smattering ...
— Se-Quo-Yah; from Harper's New Monthly, V. 41, 1870 • Unknown

... Islands hatches, along with the eiders, the long-necked prutgaessen, barnacle goose (Anser bernicla, L.) marked on the upper part of the body in black and brownish grey. It lays four to five white eggs in an artless nest without down, scattered here and there among the eiders' nests rich in down. ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... show their contempt for the young lout that they invented names for him—weakly, perhaps, but very boylike—and for a time he was James the Second, but the lad seemed rather to approve of that; and it was soon changed for Barnacle, which had the opposite effect, and two fights down in a sandy cave resulted, at intervals of a week, one with each of his enemies, after which the Barnacle lay down as usual, and cried into the sand, which acted, Vince said, ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn

... is found adhering to the kelp, and forms the chief food of several kinds of seabirds, among others the "steamer-duck." Shells and shell-fish play a large part in Fuegian domestic (!) economy. A large kind of barnacle (Concholepas Peruviana) furnishes their drinking-cups, while an edible mollusc (Mactra edulis) and several species of limpet (Patellae) help out their ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid

... had her guessin' some at that; for she wa'n't dead sure whether he was a real native or not until the boss of the island shows up. He's a hump shouldered, leather faced, bushy browed old barnacle, with a Down East dialect that it was a dream to listen to, and it was only when Mildred heard Hermes call him Uncle Jerry that she could believe the two was any relation. Uncle Jerry didn't interfere, though He ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford

... of liver dressed with rice and herbs in the manner of the Turk, for liver, though contained in flesh, was not reckoned as flesh by liberal churchmen. There was a roast goose from the shore marshes, that barnacle bird which pious epicures classed as shell-fish and thought fit for fast days. A silver basket held a store of thin toasted rye-cakes, and by the monk's hand stood a flagon of that drink most dear to holy ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... niece, the Barnacle, has got My piercing eyes of black; The Elephant has got my nose, I ...
— Greybeards at Play • G. K. Chesterton

... the secret boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing something. But way I figure it out——You see, I'm not interested in these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in this barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water. And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that built it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... Richard. "There are folk who can take as many forms as a barnacle goose. Keep thou a sharp eye as the fellows pass out, and pull me by the cloak if thou ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... cupboard before which those who love them spread themselves like door-mats; who rule with a rod pickled in their apparent helplessness, which is stronger than a whip of steel, and who are quite closely related to the barnacle and mollusc to which the tide regularly brings tit-bits out of the ocean, whilst the more mercurial eel has to go out and thresh about in the mud for what it requires to keep it going in ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest



Words linked to "Barnacle" :   Lepas fascicularis, Branta leucopsis, cirripede, rock barnacle, acorn barnacle, gooseneck barnacle, subclass Cirripedia, genus Branta, goose barnacle, cirriped, crustacean, Branta, barnacle goose, goose, Balanus balanoides, Cirripedia



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