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Dial   Listen
noun
Dial  n.  
1.
An instrument, formerly much used for showing the time of day from the shadow of a style or gnomon on a graduated arc or surface; esp., a sundial; but there are lunar and astral dials. The style or gnomon is usually parallel to the earth's axis, but the dial plate may be either horizontal or vertical.
2.
The graduated face of a timepiece, on which the time of day is shown by pointers or hands.
3.
A miner's compass.
Dial bird (Zool.), an Indian bird (Copsychus saularius), allied to the European robin. The name is also given to other related species.
Dial lock, a lock provided with one or more plates having numbers or letters upon them. These plates must be adjusted in a certain determined way before the lock can be operated.
Dial plate, the plane or disk of a dial or timepiece on which lines and figures for indicating the time are placed.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Dial" Quotes from Famous Books



... seemed interminable; the quarter passed, then the half, then the three-quarters. Lloyd imagined she began to detect a faint odour of the kitchen in the air. Suddenly the remaining minutes of the hour began to be stricken from the dial of her clock with bewildering rapidity. From the drawing-room immediately below came the sounds of the piano. That was Esther Thielman, no doubt, playing one of her interminable Polish compositions. All at once the piano stopped, ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris

... solemn and striking admonition to youth is that inscribed on the dial at All Souls, Oxford—"Pereunt et imputantur"—the hours perish, and are laid to our charge. Time is the only little fragment of Eternity that belongs to man; and, like life, it can never be recalled. "In the dissipation of worldly treasure," says Jackson ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles

... white marble, rises on the Colonna square. Two clocks are erected on this building; one with our dial, one with the Italian. At night both are illuminated,—a very useful as well as an ornamental arrangement. The ancient column of Antoninus also stands ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer

... the service of their table, should have a DIAL, of about twelve inches diameter, placed over the kitchen fireplace, carefully regulated to keep time exactly with the clock in the hall or dining-parlour; with a frame on one side, containing A TASTE TABLE of the peculiarities of the master's palate, and the particular rules and orders ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner

... we cannot doubt that even normal experience shows breaks, lapses, and complete annihilation of that which a moment before was a real content in our consciousness. We may have looked at our watch and certainly had in glancing at the dial a conscious impression, but in the next moment we no longer know how late it is. The impression did not connect itself with our continuous personal experience, that is, with that chief group of our conscious contents which we associate with the perception of our personality. Under ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg

... of Theophanes (l. iv. p. 122, 123) names the successive stations, the castle of Lulum near Tarsus, Mount Argaeus Isamus, Aegilus, the hill of Mamas, Cyrisus, Mocilus, the hill of Auxentius, the sun-dial of the Pharus of the great palace. He affirms that the news were transmitted in an indivisible moment of time. Miserable amplification, which, by saying too much, says nothing. How much more forcible and instructive would have been the definition of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... clock ticking in leisurely fashion in the corner behind him, solemn and sedate, as it had done since, (as the neat inscription upon the dial testified), it had first been made in the Year of Grace 1732, by one Jabez Havesham, of London;—this ancient time-piece now uttered a sudden wheeze, (which, considering its great age, could scarcely be ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol

... For we pray not that we may change the Divine disposition, but that we may impetrate that which God has disposed to be fulfilled by our prayers, in other words "that by asking, men may deserve to receive what Almighty God from eternity has disposed to give," as Gregory says (Dial. i, 8). ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... working from the beginning, working as well in regard to the long delays as in regard to the swift execution. There is another metaphor, in the Old Testament, that puts the same idea in a very striking form. It speaks about God's 'awakening,' as if His judgment slumbered. All round that dial the hand goes creeping, creeping, creeping slowly, but when it comes to the appointed line, then the bell strikes. And so years and centuries go by, all chance of recovery departs, and then the crash! The ice palace, built upon the frozen blocks, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... way along somewhat narrow paths over the great spaces of the quiet realm of nature. La Beauce, vast enough to present at once every phase of weather, its one landmark the twin spires of Chartres, salient as the finger of a dial, guiding, by their change of perspective, victor or vanquished on his way, offered room enough [20] for the business both of peace and war to those enamoured of either. When Gaston, after a brief absence, was unable to find his child's garden-bed, that was only because in ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... in deeds, not years; in thought, not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives, Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various

... to the last, while the glittering hands of the clock were seen in the firelight, creeping swiftly over the dial, and its solemn tick measured off the awful minute on which Elizabeth had agreed with her own soul to go forth on her terrible errand, the wretched woman was compelled to pause in that dim chamber, worse than dead herself, ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens

... as a cutable height; here a pair of peach trees dared to put out leaves despite any pronouncement of the calendar; and in the Close, even before open cars began their run along the near-by avenue, a swinging-couch with a shady awning was installed at one side; while opposite, beyond the sun-dial, and nearer to the drawing-room, a lawn marquee went up, to which Dora brought both breakfast and ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates

... and songless bright birds." The flowers alone would have induced me to name this Glen Flora; but having found in it also so many of the stately palm trees, I have called it the Glen of Palms. Peculiar indeed, and romantic too, is this new-found watery glen, enclosed by rocky walls, "Where dial-like, to portion time, ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... dived into a long pleached alley, careless of the drip from overhead, and hurrying through it came to a circular patch of thin grass, rounded by a lofty hedge of yew-trees, in the midst of which stood what had once been a sun-dial. It mattered little, however, that only the stump of a gnomon was left, seeing the hedge around it had grown to such a height in relation to the diameter of the circle, that it was only for a very brief hour or so in the middle of a summer's ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... stonework built pyramidically; its base is 267 feet by 87 feet; at the Top it is 250 feet by 8 feet. It is built in the same manner as we do steps leading up to a sun-dial or fountain erected in the middle of a square, where there is a flite of steps on each side. In this building there are 11 of such steps; each step is about 4 feet in height, and the breadth 4 feet 7 inches, but they decreased both in height and breadth from the bottom to the Top. On the middle ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson

... gave the light to Meta and began scratching aside the rubble. A flat metal box with a dial lock built into it, ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison

... paused at twenty; she had not grown. The acute suffering of Youth was still upon her, a woman of forty-five. It was as though a clock had gone on ticking and the hands had never moved; the dial of her being was held at that dread hour, while her ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed

... "when the pin, passing through the hole in the card, drops into the little cup of mercury it closes a current passing through an electro-magnet controlling a counter or a dial corresponding with each possible item of information on the card, and for each contact made to each dial, an added unit is registered. The tabulating process is completed by an automatic recording ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... they can sound such depth, and the popular talk is repetition without corresponding experience. Hope and fear rise alike to sublimity before the boundless scope of our future. Give the hour to folly, and you set back the dial-hand of destiny, you are so much behind your privilege in every following hour. Eternity is displaced by the stumbling present as the earth by a falling pebble, and the act of this low morning is a stone ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... within, and we entered a passage dimly lighted by a painted glass door at the farther end. My companion led the way down this passage, through the door, and into a small garden containing some three or four old trees, a rustic seat, a sun-dial on an antique-looking fragment of a broken column, and a little weed-grown pond about the size of an ordinary drawing-room table, ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

... But at the sun-dial he insisted further, always gentle and apologetic, but always bent on having an answer to ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten

... new world; it lay exactly the same when the Norsemen beat down the coasts of Europe; it would continue as long as Africa, Europe, and the Americas deflected ocean currents to produce its motion. Its vast flaring dial was the clock of the world, marking the passing ages. In all that stretch of time the Sargasso must have received strange prey, triremes, caravels, galleons, schooners, men o' war, derelicts ancient and modern, but certainly never before had the art ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling

... expectation. Perfect stillness reigned for some minutes, only the regular strokes of the pendulum were heard from the clock on the wall; and, as the hands pointed to the expiration of the hour, a cuckoo sprang out of the tree painted over the dial, and eleven times her hoarse, croaking voice ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach

... a favorite seems to us a safe prediction.... There is no part of it which, once begun, is likely to be left unread."—The Dial. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... have rarely met a more interesting man. He was then ninety-two years of age, apparently in perfect health, and as active as if, for his exclusive benefit, the hands had been turned back three decades upon the dial. He had been a delegate from the Territory embracing the present States of Iowa and Wisconsin, in the twenty-fifth Congress, when the sessions of the House were held in the Old Hall. Upon the admission of Iowa as a ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... years like shadows fleet O'er the dial-stone of Time, Thy pulse, O Freedom! still shall beat With the throb of manhood's prime! Still shall the valour, love, and truth, That shone on Scotland's early youth, From Scotland ne'er dissever; The Shamrock, Rose, and Thistle stern Shall wave around her Wallace cairn, And ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... saw you fresh, which yet are green. Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand, Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived; So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand, Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived[11]: For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred; Ere you were born was ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson

... sit hobnobbing with the jolly little deacon on that bright New Year's morning and not be affected by the happiness of his mood, for he was actually bubbling over with fun and as full of frolic as if the finger on the dial had, in truth, gone back forty years and he was only sixteen. "Only sixteen, parson, ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... sublime."—Boston Transcript. "The literary hit of a generation. The best of it is the story deserves all its success. A masterly story."—St. Louis Dispatch. "The story is ingeniously told, and cleverly constructed."—The Dial. ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... what snail-pace the traitor time creeps by When one is out with fortune and undone! how tauntingly upon the dial's plate The shadow's finger points the dismal hour! Thus Wyndham, with hands clasped behind his back, Watching the languid and reluctant sun Fade from the metal disk beside the door. The hours hung heavy up there on the hill, Where life was little various at best And merriment ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... morning, the tender breeze stole in and out of the window, fluttering the muslin curtain and filling the apartment with delicious perfume. In the same parlor a few chosen friends were assembled, to witness the solemn ceremony that was to deprive them of the pride and favorite of the village. As the dial upon the delicate face of the little bronze clock on the mantel marked the hour of eight, the flutter of robes and the rustling of footsteps ushered in the expectant pair, and at once all the ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott

... which is stopt from its usual current in one place, it naturally sought a vent in another. Mrs Tow-wouse is thought to have perceived this abatement, and, probably, it added very little to the natural sweetness of her temper; for though she was as true to her husband as the dial to the sun, she was rather more desirous of being shone on, as being more ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding

... unexpected that the manner of the Sauk betrayed the discovery, the instance being one of those rare ones in which he was caught off his guard. He reproached himself, for the back of his companion was turned toward the other, who was moving as silently as the shadow over the face of a sun-dial. ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... Senor Rodriguez repeated excitedly. "Last night after I locked the safe door I tried it to make certain that it was locked. I happened to notice then that the pointer on the dial had stopped precisely at number forty-five. This morning, when I unlocked the safe—and, of course, I didn't know then that the money had been taken—the pointer was ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle

... mark the Suprema tempestas, which closed the hours of legal business, by means of its shadow projected on the pavement; a primitive mode of reckoning time which existed before the first Punic war, and was afterwards superseded by a sun-dial and a clepsydra or water-clock erected in ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... read the dial for her (there were some miles which stand for records to this day), but the seventy-foot car never changed its long steamer-like roll, moving through the heat with the hum of a giant bee. Yet the speed was not enough for Mrs. ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling

... minutes now. Look here! In this bag are forty five-franc pieces—altogether they weigh exactly a kilogramme; by which I mean that if we were on the earth, and I were to hang the bag on the hook of the steelyard, the indicator on the dial would register one kilogramme. This ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne

... found a watch, with rings and lockets, Which had been left with him t' erect A figure for, and so detect; 1090 A copper-plate, with almanacks Engrav'd upon't; with other knacks, Of BOOKER's LILLY's, SARAH JIMMERS', And blank-schemes to discover nimmers; A moon-dial, with Napier's bones, 1095 And sev'ral constellation stones, Engrav'd in planetary hours, That over mortals had strange powers To make 'em thrive in law or trade, And stab or poison to evade; 1100 In wit or wisdom to improve, And be victorious in love, WHACHUM had neither cross ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... that the events of my past life were rising before me. The hands on the dial of time went back a score of years, and I was a young man of twenty-one, living in chambers off Holborn. One evening there burst over London a fearful thunderstorm, and hearing a knock at my door, I opened it, to find a beautiful ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... interesting passages which commend the author to readers. He is more particularly interesting to Frenchmen because it was from him La Fontaine borrowed his Countrymen of the Danube, attributing it to Marcus Aurelius (which led to much confusion), because the principal personage in The Dial of Princes is one Marcus Aurelius, who is discreetly intended for Charles V. In spite of what Taine wrote, though his criticisms in detail were accurate, La Fontaine followed pretty closely the fine and highly original ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet

... tall letter!" said he. "And you must be spry about it. He'll be glad to hear from his little girl, I reckon. See, the stage 'll be along by four o'clock, and now it's——"—he stepped to the door and looked out on the tall pine-tree across the road,—that was his sun-dial,—"it's just two o'clock now, Jenny. Work away!" So saying, he went off as tired, after the exertion he had made, as if he had shod all the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... flowers which had lived in the garden for years and which it might be confessed seemed rather to wonder how such new people had got there. And the roses—the roses! Rising out of the grass, tangled round the sun-dial, wreathing the tree trunks and hanging from their branches, climbing up the walls and spreading over them with long garlands falling in cascades—they came alive day by day, hour by hour. Fair fresh leaves, and buds—and buds—tiny at first but swelling and ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... motionless under the crimson rays of the setting sun; with the forest-trees lying straight along each side, and their deep-green foliage mirrored to blackness in the burnished surface of the moat below—and the broken sun-dial at the end nearest the hall—and the heron, standing on one leg at the water's edge, lazily looking down for fish—the lonely and desolate house scarce needed the broken windows, the weeds on the door-sill, the broken ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell

... a luxurious smoker go and come at the beck of a Commodore's command? No! when I smoke, be it because of my sovereign good pleasure I choose so to do, though at so unseasonable an hour that I send round the town for a brasier of coals. What! smoke by a sun-dial? Smoke on compulsion? Make a trade, a business, a vile recurring calling of smoking? And, perhaps, when those sedative fumes have steeped you in the grandest of reveries, and, circle over circle, solemnly rises some immeasurable dome in your soul—far away, swelling and heaving into the ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... automatically from a flannel pad. The machine works in this way: The end of the piece to be measured is brought down until it touches the surface of the table, the marker is turned to zero, and also the finger of the dial on the end of the measuring roller. The machine is then started, and the lengths are printed at the required distances until it becomes necessary to cut out the first piecing or joint in the fabric. The dial registers the total ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various

... of the old clock slowly crept along the dial-plate towards four, the hour so relentlessly enforced for interments for half a century by the sexton, who was now about to lay away his own wife in the greedy maw of the grave. The monotonous oscillation of the ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather

... Cuckoo was by means of the apparition which issued hourly from a little German clock, such as are frequently found in country inns. This particular clock had but one dial hand, and the exact time of day could not be determined by it until the appearance of the Cuckoo, who, in a squeaking voice, seemed to announce that it was just one hour later or earlier, as the case might be, than at his last appearance. We were puzzled, ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various

... little confidence. He turned a dial, noted the readings on a few meters, then twisted another dial. ...
— Alarm Clock • Everett B. Cole

... a corresponding position. The point of this gold indicator bends over the edge of the case, round which are set eleven raised points—the stem forms the twelfth. Thus the watch, an ordinary watch with a white dial for the person who sees, becomes for a blind person by this special attachment in effect one with a single raised hour hand and raised figures. Though there is less than half an inch between the points—a space which represents sixty minutes—Miss Keller tells ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... the dial-plate (if we may credit the fable) changed countenance with alarm; the hands made a vain effort to continue their course; the wheels remained motionless with surprise; the weights hung speechless;—each member felt disposed to lay the blame ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker

... institution which dies hard, and some one pays the expense of keeping it alight. A belfry is a very useful adjunct to a town. If the writer ever plans a modern city he will plant a belfry in the very centre, with four clock-faces on it, a sun-dial, a thermometer, and a peal of bells. You find all these things on the belfry of Bethune, and altogether it is the most picturesque, satisfying, and useful belfry the ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... A.D. The official parlor of the President of the British Islands. A board table, long enough for three chairs at each side besides the presidential chair at the head and an ordinary chair at the foot, occupies the breadth of the room. On the table, opposite every chair, a small switchboard with a dial. There is no fireplace. The end wall is a silvery screen nearly as large as a pair of folding doors. The door is on your left as you face the screen; and there is a row of thick pegs, padded and covered with ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... early missioner that his hour of devotion had arrived, and a west door, through which the rays of the declining sun fell across the altar steps, speaking of a day that was closing. A south window was added close to the east end, and it, too, was a sun-dial; it told the hour of angelus, the mid-day, when the bell was rung and a calm reverence fell on all within its hearing. Such churches can still be seen at Aran and Inismurray, on the islands of Lough Derg, Lough Ri, and ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... 24th the pot was again placed on the ground and exposed to a clear sky for between 35 m. and 40 m. By a mistake the thermometer was left on an adjoining sun-dial 3 feet high, instead of being placed on the grass; it recorded 25o to 26o F. (-3.3o to -3.8o C.), but when looked at after 1 h. had fallen to 22o F. (-5.5o C.); so that the pot was perhaps exposed to rather a lower temperature than on the two first ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin

... off. The transmitter screen lit up with a blurred jumble of print, colors, a muttering of voices, music and noises. Gefty twisted a dial. The screen cleared, showed a newscast headline sheet. Gefty blinked at it, ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz

... instead of being the solemn chant of the sixth century to which mountain folk for generations adapted the words of their traditional hymns, is in swift tempo, almost jazz such as can be heard at any point on your radio dial any ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... right down below, and they never saw me. I saw a little tiny luminous disk just for an instant, and then again for an instant a few minutes later. Of course I knew what it was, for I have my own watch-dial daubed with luminous paint; it makes a lantern of sorts when you can get no better. But these fellows were not using theirs as a lantern. They were under the old lady's window. They were watching the time. The whole thing was ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung

... his reign, when a banqueting-house erected by Elizabeth was taken down, and the magnificent fountain constructed by Queen Mary demolished. Two years after wards "a pyramid or lantern," with a clock, hell, and dial, was ordered to be set up in front of the castle, and a balcony was erected before the room where Henry the Sixth ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth

... husband could have thought possible, in her absence. At length his looks began to wander to the clock, and then the minutes were counted, as one rolled by after another and Inez did not appear. The hand had already made half of another circuit, around the face of the dial, when Middleton arose and announced his determination to go and offer himself, as an escort to the absentee. He found the night dark, and the heavens charged with threatening vapour, which in that climate was the infallible forerunner of a gust. Stimulated no less by the unpropitious aspect ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... Now, foiled in their enterprise, the thieves, he understood, were actually daring to say that he had assaulted them. One of them—he nodded at Berry—had certainly been roughly handled, but, Mon Dieu, what did they expect? (Here he took out his watch and frowned at the dial.) And now would the police get to work? His friends at Pau would be wondering what had become ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates

... the dial of his watch which he had taken from his pocket and was regarding judicially. His calmness, his impudence, enraged her. She had sworn, because of his falseness, that she would never see this man again, and here he was calmly proposing a ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs

... a series of levers made of strips of hoop iron. The pressure of the rod against the levers was kept constant by a small counterweight, so that the slightest change in the length of the rod was instantly shown on a dial about three feet wide multiplied about thirty-two thousand times. The zero-point was gained by packing the rod in wet snow. The scale was so large that the big black hand on the white-painted dial could ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir

... have been in the dust so long—even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry—are alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils, and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of heaven! And all this for a bit ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... mirrors—the latter set in dark frames which were carved to resemble scrolls of foliage. Behind each mirror was stuck either a letter or an old pack of cards or a stocking, while on the wall hung a clock with a flowered dial. More, however, Chichikov could not discern, for his eyelids were as heavy as though smeared with treacle. Presently the lady of the house herself entered—an elderly woman in a sort of nightcap (hastily put on) and a flannel neck wrap. She belonged ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... in the reading here. The long hand of the nurse's clock on the window-sill had crawled half around the dial before Varney raised the letter again from ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... evening, which made it very easy to preach. In the course of my sermon, I know not why, I was led to Speak about the endless misery of hell; and some who were present said I asserted, "That there was a great clock in hell, with a large dial, but no hands to mark the progress of time: it had a pendulum which swung sullenly and slowly from side to side, continually saying, 'Ever! never!' 'Ever! ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam

... probably somewhere close. The ellipse moves again. There is no feeling that I control it; it is hunting on its own. To and fro around the giant wheel. Lower. It halts on a small flat box, also bolted to the wall, a little way below. This is it, I can see the dial. ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell

... refuse constructive discipline, and return to a satin-upholstered life—his cigarettes, his wine-dinners, his liquors, and his "rotten feeling" mornings after—then to his morphin and to his certain degradation. And why should this be? Time must turn back the hands on her dial thirty-three years that we ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll

... pressed a small button on the counter and turned the horn toward the mysterious box. Immediately the needle on the dial above the horn jumped from white to pink and finally red, quivering against ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell

... to count "one," then, after a couple of seconds by his watch, "two," and then again, after another couple of seconds, "three." Between "one" and "three" they were to fire. But, damn it all! how could he take aim if he was holding the watch in his hand and counting the seconds on the dial? ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein

... with a scarf over her head and shoulders. She looked like a nymph in Tanagra. And as if she knew where she was going, exactly, she walked gently but unfalteringly between the linked crocus-beacons to where the alley broadened into a bay of cut yews, to where ghostly white seats and a dim sun-dial seemed disposed as for a scene in a comedy. The leaden statue of a skipping faun would have been made out in a recess if you had known it was there. And as she entered the place a figure seated there, with elbows on knees and chin between ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett

... repeat, and subdivisions, but least (which Scaliger objects to Cardan, Exercitat. 501.) [4488]"I confound filthy burning lust with pure and divine love," I will follow that accurate division of Leon Hebreus, dial. 2. betwixt Sophia and Philo, where he speaks of natural, sensible, and rational love, and handleth each apart. Natural love or hatred, is that sympathy or antipathy which is to be seen in animate ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... was putting it on. At the back of the transmitter there was a mechanical device which regulated the intensity of the sound. When she settled the clasp across her head and hung the 'phone over her ear she set it at normal and then advanced the dial until she could hear the faintest noise. The roar of the lobby, drifting in through the transom, became separated into its various sounds. She could hear men talking and outbursts of laughter and the scrape of moving chairs. The murmur of conversation in ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge

... antique primness, which had no taint of cockney stiffness, pervaded the scene. One might have expected to see Sir Thomas More or Lord Bacon emerge from the massive gothic porch, and stroll with slow step and meditative aspect towards the stone sun-dial that stood in the centre of that square rose-garden. The whole place had an air of doublet and hose. It seemed older to Clarissa than when she had seen it last—older and yet newer, like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... the wisteria and the rosy trumpets of the bignonia; great wooden places cool and shady, with vast arched entrances, and scent of hay, and empty casks, and red earthen amphorae, and little mice scudding on the floors, and a sun-dial painted on the wall, and a crucifix set above the weather-cock, and through the huge unglazed windows sight of the green vines with the bullocks in the harvest-carts beneath them, or of some hilly sunlit road with a mule-team coming down ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... of the electric clock that stood on the table by her bedside, and looked up at the monstrous white dial it threw on the ceiling. Half-past one. She rolled over and cried into the pillow, "Richard! Richard!" She had already been three hours in bed. There were six more hours till morning, six more hours in which to remember things, and memory ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... in the battery, according to the registering gauge," murmured the lad. "I can't understand it." He reversed the current, thinking the wires might have become crossed, but the machine would move neither backward nor forward, yet the dial indicated that there was enough power stored away to send it ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton

... prominent feature of the book, and are such as we may see any day in the school or home life of a well-cared-for and good-intentioned little boy. There are several quite pleasing full-page illustrations."—The Dial. ...
— Little Prudy • Sophie May

... could she wait many minutes under the eyes of the guards, who must know better than any one else that no flesh-and-blood girl took any real interest in Egyptian antiquities? The round, unambitious dial at the entrance, like an enlarged kitchen-clock, had pointed to the exact hour set for the meeting. She ought not to expect that Pete, getting away from the office in business hours, could be as punctual as an eager, idle creature ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller

... thoughts wet my een, as the moonshine was beaming On the kirk-tower that rose up sae silent and white; The wan ghastly light on the dial was streaming, But the still finger tauld not the hour of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... who had kicked a foot out of its stirrup, did not dismount. He sat drinking in the dance-measure. Louder and louder she played the air, and, humming it over, he drove his foot home. Shaking up the reins, he cantered his mule round and round the sun-dial in front of the door. Round and round he went, still humming, while those wiry and sun-burnt wrists pounded away at ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... that it was the result of the modification of another watch which kept time but poorly; and that this again had proceeded from a structure which could hardly be called a watch at all—seeing that it had no figures on the dial and the hands were rudimentary; and that going back and back in time we came at last to a revolving barrel as the earliest traceable rudiment of the whole fabric. And imagine that it had been possible to show that all ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... Bowyer lives!" said a voice close by. "He would fain that the dial's hands were Marie bones, the face blancmange, wherein the figures ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge

... could blame the little fellow if his heart throbbed with unwonted vigour all that morning, and that he watched the clock's hands anxiously as they crept slowly, but steadily, round the dial, yellow with age ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley

... still there, crouching between the rocks, for more than two hours before the sound of the machine finally ceased. Another hour passed in absolute silence. She ventured to flash her pocket searchlight upon the dial of her watch and found it was nearly four o'clock. Dawn would come, presently, and then her situation would ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)

... black plastic box about an inch and a half square and maybe three and a half long. On one end was a lensed opening, half an inch in diameter, and on two sides there were flat, silver-colored plates. On the top of it, there was a dial which was, say, an inch in diameter, and it was marked off just ...
— ...Or Your Money Back • Gordon Randall Garrett

... in the grave; He is here beside us, with us, in us, "all the days." John, then, was "a burning and shining torch," lifted for a moment aloft in the murky air; but Jesus was THAT LIGHT. As the star-light, which fails to illumine the page of your book or the dial-plate of your watch, is to the sunlight, as the courier is to the sovereign, as the streamlet is to the ocean—such was John as compared with Him whose shoe-latchet he felt himself unworthy to stoop down and unloose. ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer

... later Creed, bird's-eye spotter and bad man of the worn-out little town of Hilarity, knocked the ashes from his pipe and held a glowing brand to the dial of ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx

... a pocket dial, which supplied the place of a compass; and, to say the truth, was not ill befitting such a vessel and such mariners. By its aid we steered our course by day, while the stars served as a guide by night; and, if ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms

... Second, who was decimated, after the rebellion of 1745, opposite the Horse Guards—his memorable speech to Archbishop Caxon rings in my ears whenever I pass the spot. I reverted my head and affected to look to see what o'clock it was by the dial, on the opposite side of the way. It is quite impossible not to notice the improvements in this part of the town, the beautiful view which one gets of Westminster Hall and its curious roof, after which, as everybody knows, its builder ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various

... long-case clock, and inserted into its dial was a ruddy, round, slant-eyed, joyous-painted face, that wagged over with the most ridiculous ogle when the clock ticked, and back again with the same absurd glad-eye at the next tick. All the time the absurd smooth, brown-ruddy face gave her an obtrusive 'glad-eye.' She stood for minutes, watching ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... beating on that side. It is made to look blacker and bigger by being surrounded with light and low buildings. With its carved stonework, its rusty tone, its blue and lustrous roof, its colossal tower where the golden disk and the golden needles of its dial glitter in the stone discoloured by the vapours from the Scheldt and by the winters, it assumes monstrous proportions. When the sky is troubled, as it is to-day, it adds all its own strange caprices to the grandeur of the lines. Imagine then the ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton

... of June, to the joy of the beautiful months; for events in which bees take part happen only when skies are pure, at the winsome hours of the year when flowers keep holiday. They are the soul of the summer, the clock whose dial records the moments of plenty; they are the untiring wing on which delicate perfumes float; the guide of the quivering light-ray, the song of the slumberous, languid air; and their flight is the token, the sure and melodious note, of all the myriad ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck

... yawning blackness. But she clung to them, and the steady hand at the throttle opened it wider, and still a little wider, until the handle had passed any limit that even the old engineman had ever seen. Still the young fireman, with set teeth and nerves like steel, watched the dial on the steam-gauge, and flung coal to the raging ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe

... Government management mentioned above there are nine private Arts Colleges aided by Government grants and affiliated to the University. Four of these are in Lahore, two, the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic and the Dial Singh Colleges, are Hindu institutions, one, the Islamia College, is Muhammadan, the fourth is the popular and efficient Forman Christian College. Four out of five art students read in Lahore. Of the Arts colleges outside Lahore the most important is the St Stephen's College ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie

... the worse for wear, were scattered about beside spavined easels. Near the couch the candlestick used on the previous night stood on the floor, which looked as if it had not been swept for fully a month. There was only the cuckoo clock, a huge one, with a dial illuminated with crimson flowers, that looked clean and bright, ticking sonorously all the while. But what especially frightened her were some sketches in oils that hung frameless from the walls, a ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola

... son, in Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, Mrs. Browning's health seemed to have fully returned. She used to ride horseback up and down the mountain passes, and wrote home to Miss Mitford that love had turned the dial backward and the joyousness of girlhood had come ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... the tower—in which the big dial of the clock appeared high in the moonlight like a pallid face without eyes—and getting out carefully, fell down at once by the wheel. He picked himself up and climbed one by one the few steps to the iron gate of the churchyard. He put ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad

... some in Spanish coin, but mostly in English. The pistols were English weapons, but the knife was such as could be bought at any frontier town in the colonies. The watch was a large, open-faced affair, and on the dial was marked, ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer

... his oxygen intake, at the same time glancing at the clock dial in his helmet. He smiled. Nineteen days and seven hours. He had calculated it almost precisely. He wasn't more than an hour off, which was pretty ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett

... Greece. From this last source, the Chinese learnt many things which are now often regarded as of purely native growth. They imported the grape, and made from it a wine which was in use for many centuries, disappearing only about two or three hundred years ago. Formerly dependent on the sun-dial alone, the Chinese now found themselves in possession of the water-clock, specimens of which are still to be seen in full working order, whereby the division of the day into twelve two-hour periods was accurately determined. The calendar was regulated anew, and the science of music was reconstructed; ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles

... they began to make themselves uneasy about her movement of revolution round the earth, and twenty scientific reviews quickly gave them the information they wanted. They then learnt that the firmament, with its infinite stars, may be looked upon as a vast dial upon which the moon moves, indicating the time to all the inhabitants of the earth; that it is in this movement that the Queen of Night shows herself in her different phases, that she is full when she is in opposition with the sun—that ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne



Words linked to "Dial" :   selector, choose, timekeeper, telephony, take, selector switch, telephone, controller, control, operate, select, pick out, telephone dial, clock dial, dial phone, horologe, indicator, face



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