shuttlecock
Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary
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[edit] English
[edit] Pronunciation
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Audio (US) (file)
[edit] Etymology
shuttle (from the back-and-forth sense of the word originating with loom weaving) + cock (from resemblance to a male bird's plume of tail feathers). Attested from 1522.
[edit] Noun
shuttlecock (plural shuttlecocks)
- (badminton) A lightweight object that is conical in shape with a cork or rubber-covered nose, used in badminton as a ball is used in other racquet games.
- 1859, Ebenezer Landells, The boy's own toy-maker, page 122,
- The practice of the game in this country is to keep the shuttlecock in the air by striking it from one person to another.
- 1696, Pierre Nicole, Moral Essayes, Contain'd in Several Treatises on Many Important Duties, page 237,
- It is a Veſſel which muſt be filled with Sand to ballance it, otherwiſe it will overturn, and become the Shuttlecock of all ſort of Winds.
- 1851 — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ch 123
- In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round.
- 1862 - General Halleck to General Burnside, Official Records, s.1, vol.21, page 891
- They [i.e. the Confederates] are trying to make you play the game of shuttlecock, by sending troops backward and forward to Harper's Ferry.
- 1897 — Henry James, What Maisie Knew, Ch. 2
- Crudely as they had calculated they were at first justified by the event: she was the little feathered shuttlecock they could fiercely keep flying between them.
- 1906 — Edith Nesbit, The Railway Children, ch 11
- Bobbie burned the feathers of the shuttlecock one by one under his nose,
- 1997, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (trans.), Marcel Proust (auth.), Swann's Way, page 460,
- ... in front of which a little girl with reddish hair was playing with a shuttlecock;
- 1859, Ebenezer Landells, The boy's own toy-maker, page 122,
[edit] Synonyms
- (lightweight object used in badminton): birdie
[edit] Translations
a lightweight object used in badminton
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[edit] Related terms
[edit] Verb
shuttlecock (third-person singular simple present shuttlecocks, present participle shuttlecocking, simple past and past participle shuttlecocked)
- to move or be moved rapidly back-and-forth
[edit] Translations
to move rapidly back and forth
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