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Hall-mark   Listen
noun
Hall-mark  n.  
1.
The official stamp of the Goldsmiths' Company and other assay offices, in the United Kingdom, on gold and silver articles, attesting their purity.
2.
Hence, (figuratively): A distinguishing characteristic or characteristics; as, a word or phrase lacks the hall-mark of the best writers.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hall-mark" Quotes from Famous Books



... himself with his pupils with that thoroughness which is the hall-mark of the first-class boxing instructor, looked so pained at his sudden loss of form, that Sheen could not resist the temptation to confide in him. After all, he ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse

... Halloran, 'it is a sort of hall-mark of respectability among people like Maguire's to have a girl in a good convent. A little lower down in the social scale, in the class I come from, the boys are made priests. A doctor is a more expensive article to manufacture, so Maguire's father selected that line of life for him. Not ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham

... among their customers the manager declared that they received orders from all parts of the world—India, Canada, Australia, and South Africa, to say nothing of American gentlemen who liked their hosiery to have the London hall-mark. Their orders from the Colonies came from gentlemen who found that these things in the Colonies were not what they had been used to, and so they sent their orders to ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson

... and it may be added that from first to last Ethelberta never discovered from the Belmaines whether her proposal had been an infliction or a charm, so perfectly were they practised in sustaining that complete divorce between thinking and saying which is the hall-mark of ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... hitched everywhere and the big canvas-covered wagons, many of the people were visitors. A crowd surrounded the hall—a dusty, booted, spurred, shirt-sleeved and sombreroed assemblage that did not wear the hall-mark Shefford had come to associate with Mormons. They were riders, cowboys, horse-wranglers, and some of them Shefford had seen in Durango. Navajos and Piutes were present, also, but they ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey

... are almost as red as those of the manufacturing districts of Saxony. But Socialists though they be, they are just as anti-British as the rest of Germany, and they like to send out their products with the familiar hall-mark of "Gott strafe England," or "Best wishes for King George." It is the kind of Socialism that wants more money, more votes, less work, but has no objection to plenty of war. It is a common-sense ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... worldly concerns of law and government and in all subsidiary branches of mentality, cannot bring ourselves to reason dispassionately on non-practical subjects. "L'esprit aussi a sa pudeur," says Remy de Gourmont. Well, this pudeur de l'esprit, discouraged among the highest classes in England, is the hall-mark of respectability hereabouts. A very real difference, at this ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... the West has changed so often that whatever one may say about it must immediately be qualified. But, on the whole, Eastern and Western life are organized around utterly different centers. The West in its present phase is predominantly scientific. Our laboratories are perhaps the distinguishing hall-mark of our civilization. We are always asking questions of the outside world; we are hungry for facts; we are always seeking to discover the law and direction of physical force; we have taken small ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... Courtier, which can even defy the camera. Let us inhale the gratifying odour, suggestive of truffles frying in oil, which is the hall-mark of your true cafe, and is as ambergris in the nostrils of the gourmand. ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer

... as Queen and Autocrat of "Almack's" that Lady Jersey won her chief fame—Almack's, that most exclusive and aristocratic club in Berkeley Street, Piccadilly, the membership of which was the supreme hall-mark of the world of fashion. No rank, however exalted, no riches, however great, were a passport to this innermost social circle, over which Lady Jersey reigned ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall

... high-pitched voice that she regarded as the hall-mark of good breeding, and, in that silent rush downhill, Medenham could not avoid hearing each syllable. It was eminently pleasing to listen to Cynthia's praise of his car, and he was wroth with the other woman for wrenching the girl's thoughts away so promptly ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy

... later that, his ambition newly fired by reading of Andree's plans for reaching the Pole in a balloon, Santos-Dumont took up anew his ambition to become an aviator. His own account of his first ascent does not bear precisely the hall-mark of the enthusiast too rapt in ecstasy to think of common things. "I had brought up," he notes gravely, "a substantial lunch of hard-boiled eggs, cold roast beef and chicken, cheese, ice cream, fruits and ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... the contemplation of the dreary, half-empty auditorium with a faint shudder. The theatre was an ancient and unpopular one. The hall-mark of failure and poverty was set alike upon the tawdry and faded hangings, the dust-eaten decorations and the rows of bare seats. It was a relief when the feeble overture came to an end, and the curtain was rung up. He settled himself down at once to a careful ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... castello in that the most ancient part of the city around Piazza Sarzano and S. Maria di Castello. This castello, destroyed in the quarrels of Guelph and Ghibelline, as some have thought, may be found in the hall-mark of the silver vessels made here under the Republic. Very few are the remnants that have come down to us from the time of the Bishops. An inscription, however, on a house in Via S. Luca close to S. Siro remains, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton

... obviously stamped with the hall-mark of genius, at any rate it was remarkable for its choice of an unusual and unvarying theme. His pictures always represented some well-known street or public place in London, fallen into decay and denuded of its human population, in the place of which there roamed a wild fauna, which, ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki

... Certainly Americans often show a saving consciousness of their faults, and lash themselves with biting satire. There are even Americans whose very attitude is an apology—wholly unnecessary—for the Great Republic, and who seem to despise any native product until it has received the hall-mark of London or of Paris. In the new world that has produced the new book, of the exquisite delicacy and insight of which Mr. Henry James and Mr. Howells may be taken as typical exponents, it seems to me that there are more than the usual proportion of critics who prefer ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... with it a dozen times or so, but finally he had to take steps. So he wrote a little note on a Buff slip and addressed it, very rightly of course, to the Top-man but one; and the Top-man but one read it and passed it very carefully to the Top-man but two; and so, with that inevitability which is the hall-mark of the system, it was passed and passed and passed until it came (in less than a week) to the office of the ancient Lieutenant on the opposite side of the street. And it ran: "Lieutenant So-and-So should be notified that it is neither necessary ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various

... knowledge of the spirit and literature of foreign peoples. It was in his library at Salamanca that he once explained to an Englishman the meaning of a particular Scotticism in Robert Burns; and it was there that he congratulated another Englishman on his having read Rural Rides, "the hall-mark," he said, "of the man of letters who is no mere man of letters, but also a man." From that corner of Castile, he has poured out his spirit in essays, poetry, criticism, novels, philosophy, lectures, and public meetings, and that daily toil of press article writing which is ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... the hall-mark of genius itself. The plot is masterly conception, the descriptions are all vivid flashes from a brilliant pen. It is impossible to read and not marvel at the skilled workmanship and the constant dramatic intensity of the incident, situations and climax."—The ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... she always came in late, with much rustle of silk and rattle of bangles; her hair was "touched up" and her face rouged. The well-bred and refined members condemned her on these grounds. Nevertheless, where a stranger comes who bears the hall-mark of culture and refinement, the church connection is often an aid to social habilitation, though it should ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter



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