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Lilliputian   /lˌɪləpjˈuʃən/   Listen
Lilliputian

noun
1.
A very small person (resembling a Lilliputian).
2.
A 6-inch tall inhabitant of Lilliput in a novel by Jonathan Swift.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Lilliputian" Quotes from Famous Books



... enterprise wherever he has had any foothold. We go slowly, cleaving the dull-colored tide, gazing, as we sit enthroned in easy-chairs on the upper deck, out upon the few public institutions of Belgrade—the military college and the handsome road leading to the garden of Topschidere, where the Lilliputian court has its tiny summer residence. Sombre memories overhang this "Cannoneer's Valley," this Topschidere, where Michael, the son and successor of good Milosch as sovereign prince of the nation, perished by assassination ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various

... preparing to pay my promised visit to the Emperor of Blefuscu, when one day a Lilliputian noble called at my house privately, and at night; and without sending in his name, he asked me to allow him to come in ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck

... the street is an entrance to McCreery's, although that establishment faces on Thirty-fourth Street. Above McCreery's, opposite the corner where the New York Club once had its home, and on property part of which was formerly the house of the Engineers Club, is Best's, once Lilliputian in more than one sense, but no more so. Thereafter every block has its imposing monument to commerce. Silverware is represented by Gorham's at Thirty-sixth Street. Furs in magnificent display fill the windows of Gunther's Sons between Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh. At the southeast ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice

... adjectival epithet which is prefixt to all the virtues is invariably the epithet which geographically describes the country that I am in. For instance, not to take any real name, if I am in the kingdom of Lilliput, I hear of the Lilliputian virtues. I hear courage, I hear common sense, and I hear political wisdom called by that name. If I cross to the neighboring Republic Blefusca—for since Swift's time it has become a Republic—I hear all these virtues suddenly ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser

... your bow and arrows, my little man?" said her ladyship to Hal, as she reviewed her Lilliputian regiment. "You can't march, man, without ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... seen some changes since we met; A patient little seamstress yet, With small means striving, Have you a Lilliputian spouse? And do you dwell in some doll's house? ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker

... little knit shirts. As for the rest, every bit was made by her own hands—featherstitched pinning blankets, a crocheted jacket and cap, knitted mittens, embroidered bonnets; slim little princess slips of sensible length; underskirts on absurd Lilliputian yokes; silk-embroidered white flannel petticoats; stockings and crocheted boots, seeming to burgeon before her eyes with wriggly pink toes and plump little calves; and last, but not least, many deliciously soft squares of bird's-eye linen. A little ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... within doors. Their brains are absolutely set madding with Punch and the Puppet-Show, the Flying Horses, Signior Polito, the Fire-Eater, the celebrated Mr. Paap, and the Irish Giant. The children too lavish all their holiday money in toys and gilt gingerbread, and fill the house with the Lilliputian din of drums, ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... in my hand, and perform those other actions which will be recorded forever in the chronicles of that empire, while posterity shall hardly believe them, although attested by millions. I reflected what a mortification it must prove to me to appear as inconsiderable in this nation as one single Lilliputian would be among us. But this I conceived was to be the least of my misfortunes; for, as human creatures are observed to be more savage and cruel in proportion to their bulk, what could I expect but to be a morsel in the mouth of the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... outspread folds would cover His native Hesse-Darmstadt over; Should have withal the hard assurance To hold a Son of Song in durance. Why, as I lately sauntered out To see what Gotham was about, Just below NIBLO'S, west southwest, In a prosaic street at best, I chanced upon a lodge so small, So Lilliputian-like in all, That Argus, hundred-eyed albeit, Might pass a hundred times, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... scornful Lilliputian souls, And are ye still too proud To risk your little aureoles By kneeling with ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger

... against the big Pennsylvania Railroad stone bridge is still burning, and the efforts of the firemen to quench or stay the progress of the flames are as futile as were those of Gulliver's Lilliputian firemen. The mass, which unquestionably forms a funeral pyre for thousands of victims who lie buried beneath it, is likely to burn for weeks to come. The flames are not active, but burn away ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... "Ranger," who soon thereafter hoisted the new flag on board that vessel at Portsmouth. The "Ranger" set out to sea about November 1st, her battery consisting of sixteen six-pounders, throwing only forty-eight pounds of shot from a broadside, an armament which appears grotesquely lilliputian in comparison with the thirteen-inch guns, firing projectiles of over half a ton from our steel-armored battleships of to-day, which cost as much as five million dollars and are of 16,000 tons burden. With this little ship he sailed to Europe, capturing two prizes on the way, and, ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro

... tell you, if you mean to save their precious lives. Miss Ada is upon her last legs, and master Diomede in a galloping consumption—two of our prime geraniums, ma'am!" quoth Dick, with a condescending nod to Miss Wolfe, as that Lilliputian lady looked up at him with a stare of unspeakable mystification; "queerish names, a'tot they? Well, there are the patterns of the sizes, and there's the order; so if your little gentleman will but look the pots ...
— Miss Philly Firkin, The China-Woman • Mary Russell Mitford

... believe possible. It's like almost solid paint, and the least rain makes the sides of the trenches slimy, and the bottom a perfect sea of mud—pulls the heels off your boots almost. One feels like Gulliver walking along a Lilliputian town all the time. The front line of trenches—the firing line—have scientific loopholes and lookout places in them for seeing and firing from, and a dropping fire goes on from both sides all day ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times

... colony with less than half a million of people should want nine Governments in addition to its central authority. The procedure of the Provincial Councils, where Mr. Speaker took the chair daily and a mace was gravely laid on the table by the clerk, seemed a Lilliputian burlesque of the great Mother ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... tongues, with an avowed contempt for that of their neighbor; yet our emperor, standing upon the advantage he had got by the seizure of their fleet, obliged them to deliver their credentials and make their speech in the Lilliputian tongue. And it must be confessed that, from the great intercourse of trade and commerce between both realms, from the continual reception of exiles, which is mutual among them, and from the custom in each empire to ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten

... emerged surely and safely from the perilous quicksands which have sucked down whole Lilliputian worlds of ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst

... purposes, a congeries of sovereign states, generally centring round the urban metropolis of a rural district smaller than that of an average English county. The material upon which Greek political thought worked was, therefore, from our modern point of view not only small-scale but almost Lilliputian. This can best be appreciated when we consider how many gradations of scale are interposed in the modern world between the government of a town or district of the size of fifth-century Athens and the government of our own sovereign state, the British Commonwealth. Athens was far smaller than ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... However, all the Lilliputian craft of our brooks are not galleys; there are submarines, which, in excellence of action and control, put to shame all human efforts along the same line. These are the water boatmen, stout boat-shaped insects whose hind legs are long, projecting outward like the oars of a ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... elder woman moved about the shop, setting it in order for the night. It was a labor of love to put the dolls to bed, to lock the glass doors safely on the puffy rabbits and woolly dogs and round-eyed cats, to close the drawers on the tea-sets and Lilliputian kitchens, to shut into boxes the tin soldiers that their queer old customer ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey

... lifted by a tiny hand, from beneath, and a small human face, no bigger than a thumb-nail, with nicely proportioned features, peep from beneath it. In this Lilliputian countenance was such a ghastly consternation as horrified my uncle unspeakably. Out came a little foot then and there, and a pair of wee legs, in short silk stockings and buckled shoes, then the rest of the figure; and, with the arms holding about the socket, the ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu

... table. With equally dauntless spirit, she pushed aside the herculean morio who had been childishly standing over the pot, licking his fingers in eager anticipation; whereupon the imbecile set up a sharp cry that blended with the deeper roar of the lilliputian. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... preserve the liberty we have obtained, only by unremitting labors and perils. But we shall preserve it; and our mass of weight and wealth on the good side is so great, as to leave no danger that force will ever be attempted against us. We have only to awake and snap the Lilliputian cords with which they have been entangling us during the first sleep which succeeded ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... only where the path lay much upon the slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of the wood at some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to be walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance, miniature fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would appear for a moment in the aperture, and grow larger and smaller, and change and melt one into another, as I continued to go forward, and so ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... rush of sound burst joyously on the silence—the slumbering trees awoke, their leaves moved, their dark branches quivered, and the grasses lifted up their green lilliputian sword-blades. Bells!—and SUCH bells!—tongues of melody that stormed the air with sweetest eloquence—round, rainbow bubbles of music that burst upon the wind, and dispersed in ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli

... in front of and below all this almost fantastic landscape, is a miniature garden where two beautiful white cats are taking the air, amusing themselves by pursuing each other through the paths of a Lilliputian labyrinth, shaking from their paws the sand, which is still wet. The garden is as conventional as possible: not a flower, but little rocks, little lakes, dwarf trees cut in a grotesque fashion; all this is not natural, but it is most ingeniously arranged, so green, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti

... his headset followed, after which Mac oozed into the Lilliputian air lock at the bottom, now rear, wall of the cabin. He nodded to Ruiz, who secured the air lock, then adjusted his suit control to force a little pressure into his suit. Gradually the suit became livable. Then he cracked the other air-lock valve and allowed pressure ...
— Tight Squeeze • Dean Charles Ing

... by a terrible night Mare, A monstrous burthen on the corporation!— Look at the Bill of Fare for one day's share, Sea-turtles by the score—Oxen by droves, Geese, turkeys, by the flock—fishes and loaves Countless, as when the Lilliputian nation Was making up ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... ingenuity, with very little poetical imagination—of gigantic strength, with a propensity to incessant trifling—of passionate purpose, with the clearest and coldest expression, as though a furnace were fuelled with snow. A Brobdignagian by size, he was for ever toying with Lilliputian slings and small craft. One of the most violent of party men, and often fierce as a demoniac in temper, his favourite motto was Vive la bagatelle. The creator of entire new worlds, we doubt if his works contain more than two or three lines of genuine ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... work everywhere, Lilliputian against the bulk of the hull they were contriving. Davidge escorted Marie Louise with caution across tremulous planks, through dark caverns into ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... certain, and always do business like women; men mechanically put a date and address to their communications. And these five-franc pieces?"—(I hauled them forth from my purse)—"if she had offered me them herself instead of tying them up with a thread of green silk in a kind of Lilliputian packet, I could have thrust them back into her little hand, and shut up the small, taper fingers over them—so—and compelled her shame, her pride, her shyness, all to yield to a little bit of determined Will—now where is she? How ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell

... forecastle, and enjoin on the sentinels, who I feared might see and hail the stranger, the strictest silence. Then desiring Sambo to prepare the light boat which, I dare say, most of you have remarked to form a part of my Lilliputian command, I proceeded to arm myself with cutlass and pistols. Thus equipped I sprang lightly in, and having again caught sight of the chase, on which I had moreover directed one of the sentinels to keep a steady eye as long as she was ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson

... yez, will ye be asy, you Lilliputian Boeotians—by my hem—upon my credit, if I go down to that corner, I'll castigate yez in dozens: I can't spake to this dacent ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton

... since which there has been added to it a Standard edition of Goldsmith's Works, edited by Mr. Gibbs. I had the pleasure of making many researches respecting the old London publisher (Goldsmith's friend), John Newbery, respecting his Lilliputian Classics, and I have been enabled to introduce several of the Quarto early editions to the firm, and have had great pleasure in writing and placing on record numerous facts and data, since utilized in the very ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson

... powerful speech in relation to the arrest of General Stone. It was powerful, patriotic, and rises to the skies over the Lilliputian oratory of the thus-called scholars, etc. Wade is a monolith,—he is cut ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski

... faded, the blues to grey, the whites to russet, the greens to black, and time had darkened the shadows to a burnt-onion hue. Along the edges of the picture, almost against the black oak frame, a continuous narrative unfolded in unintelligible episodes, intruding one upon the other, portraying Lilliputian figures, in houses of dwarfs. Here the Saint, whose name Durtal had sought in vain, crossed a curly, wooden sea in a sailboat; there he marched through a village as big as a fingernail; then he disappeared ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... window. On your tip-toes to see. It's that fascinating Lilliputian with a beard and electric bowels who stands in drug store windows and administers corn cure to his own toes ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey

... exile never fails to rage and curse. Is it fair to call the famous Drapier's Letters patriotism? They are masterpieces of dreadful humour and invective: they are reasoned logically enough too, but the proposition is as monstrous and fabulous as the Lilliputian island. It is not that the grievance is so great, but there is his enemy—the assault is wonderful for its activity and terrible rage. It is Samson, with a bone in his hand, rushing on his enemies and felling them: one admires not the cause so much as the strength, the anger, the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... bulk but built upon exactly the same plan and proportions, say a Brobdingnagian and a Lilliputian, and let both show their powers in the arena. Suppose the first to weigh a million times more than the second. If the giant could raise to his shoulder, some thirty-five feet from the ground, a weight twenty thousand pounds, the dwarf can raise to his shoulder, not, as might be thought, a fiftieth ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various

... and a half feet; while its thigh-bone was twenty times the size of that of the modern iguana. Vast as was the inhabitant of the ancient world, it was herbivorous, like that of the comparatively Lilliputian creature ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... great stream of concourse flowed in the direction of the Giardini Pubblici, which are a nook of one of the more southerly islands on which the city stands, fitted up as a miniature landscape, its lilliputian hills and vales being the only ones the Venetians ever see. The intercourse betwixt Venice and the Continent has no doubt become more frequent since the opening of the railway; but formerly it was not uncommon to find persons who ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... first trip was but a very small one: three men in all, with but thirteen horses. It reads lilliputian compared with the princely cavalcade that later on set out with Burke to travel over comparatively well-known country, involving only a short excursion through a land without natural difficulties or obstacles; and yet it actually achieved the greatest ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc

... Gulliver, only visit the inferior planets, such as Mercury, Venus, or Mars, whose density is a little less than that of the earth; but do not venture into the great planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune; for there the order will be changed, and you will become Lilliputian." ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... on with his hearty laudation of this lilliputian luminary of the fields, and hesitates not to describe it as "of all floures the floure." The famous Scottish Peasant loved it just as truly, and did it equal honor. Who that has once read, can ever forget his harmonious and pathetic address to a mountain daisy on turning ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson



Words linked to "Lilliputian" :   unimportant, Lilliput, colloquialism, character, small person, fictitious character, fictional character, small



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