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Fledgling   Listen
adjective
fledgling  adj.  
1.
Having just acquired its flight feathers; of a young bird; as, a fledgling robin. (prenominal)
Synonyms: fledgeling(prenominal).
2.
Young and inexperienced; as, a fledgling enterprise; a fledgling skier.
Synonyms: unfledged.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fledgling" Quotes from Famous Books



... its coffin. Into the closet went the bits of lingerie from the consignment just arrived from Paris, and the other spoils of the day. When everything was buried she shut the door upon it, as in her heart she was shutting the door on her poor little fledgling hopes. Nothing remained to torment her vision, or distract her from what she had to do. The old gray rag and the battered black hat were all she had now to ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... none of his new-found pleasures, rejoiced indeed to see him interested and gay. Yet to watch the new broom, which sweeps so clean, is rarely exhilarating to those that have swept diligently with the old one. The nest had held her precious fledgling so safely till now; and this fluttering of wings, eager for flight, troubled her somewhat. Not only was Dickie's readiness to be away from her a trifle hard to bear; but she knew that disappointment, of a certainty, lay in ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... to Young Practitioners" (1300) are to be found some interesting items regarding contemporary manners. Fledgling doctors are therein advised to make use of long and unintelligible words, and never to visit a patient without doing something new, lest the latter should say, "He can do nothing without his book." In brief, a reputation for ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... civilization in the sands along the Elbe became for a while the religious and theological hub of the world. The students who gathered about Luther knew that they had a real professor in him. The world of his day came to this fledgling doctor with the weightiest questions, and received answers that satisfied. That part of the intelligent world of to-day which has read and studied Luther endorses the verdict of Luther's contemporaries as regards his ample learning ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... sun, blooming and fading hour by hour. They have as it were but a Pisgah view of the promised land, of the spring which they are foremost to proclaim. Next come the clumsy gentians and yellow anemones, covered with soft down like fledgling birds. These are among the earliest and hardiest blossoms that embroider the high meadows with a diaper of blue and gold. About the same time primroses and auriculas begin to tuft the dripping rocks, while frail white fleur-de-lis, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... framed the constitution, the representatives of the people exhibited this conservative feeling in a remarkable degree; and the extreme democratic sentiment, such as afterward sympathized with the radicals of the French revolution, was yet only a fledgling, but destined to grow rapidly, and to fly with swift wing over the land. Yet the spirit was manifest, and its coalescence with the state-rights feeling made circumspection in the arrangement of the ceremonials connected with ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... as keeping Cynthia and his father and mother in ignorance of the fledgling wings he was beginning to flap, G. G. succeeded admirably; but it might have been better to have told them ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... prowling lonely joker; but what will most satisfy his cannibal appetite is the passage of the self-conscious men and women. For here, on a good day, he cannot fail to relish some extreme cases of their whimsical disease: fledgling young men making believe to be haughty to cover their dreadful symptoms, the mask itself thus revealing what it seeks to conceal; timid young ladies, likewise treacherously exposed by their defenses; and very different ladies, but in similar case, being retouched ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington

... illustrated in that wonderfully coiffed hair-like sentence picturing Clara Middleton and "the softly dusky nape of her neck, where this way and that the little lighter-colored irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and the knot-curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps—waved or fell, waved over or up to involutedly, or strayed, loose and downward, in the form of small silken paws, hardly any of them much thicker than a crayon shading, cunninger than long, round locks of ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... the crest of the wave and another bearing him down into the trough of the sea, and he beholding the while the terrors and wonders of the deep, for the space of three days, at the end of which time Fate cast him upon the Mount of the Bereft Mother, where he landed, weak and giddy as a fledgling bird, for hunger and thirst; but, finding there streams running and birds warbling on the branches and fruit-laden trees, growing in clusters and singly, he ate of the fruits and drank of the streams. Then he walked on till he saw some ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous

... princeling of those days in Germany took Louis XIV for his model, so every literary fledgling looked upon Voltaire as a god, and modelled his style upon the stiff and pompous verses of the French ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... holding on to the bannisters at one side and using nurse's shoulder as my other crutch, when I saw the brightest picture I have ever beheld. Baby and Martin were on hands and knees on the rag-work hearthrug, face to face—Martin calling her to come, Isabel lifting up her little head to him, like a fledgling in a nest, and both laughing with that gurgling sound as of water ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... Small and eke Chick Weed, as it were jocularly to express a fledgling) was ever a boy is much doubted in Lincoln's Inn. He is now something under fifteen and an old limb of the law. He is facetiously understood to entertain a passion for a lady at a cigar-shop in the neighbourhood of Chancery Lane and for her sake to have broken off a contract with another lady, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... grocers; and in the trees without youths of simian habit clung to advantageous limbs and strained to get a view of the proceedings. Old Judge Kellog who usually dozed on his twenty-first vertebra through testimony and argument—once a young fledgling of a lawyer, sailing aloft in the empyrean of his eloquence, had been brought tumbling confusedly to earth by the snoring of the bench—attested to the unusualness of the occasion by being upright and awake. And Bud White, the ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott

... unendurable to my father who grew envious of him. Finally, to complete his vexation, he learned that his pupil had been asked to paint a picture for a recently built and wealthy church. This enraged him. 'No, I will not permit that fledgling to triumph!' said he: 'it is early, friend, to think of consigning old men to the gutters. I still have powers, God be praised! We'll soon see which will ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... the song trembled down to my breast,— (It was sweet, so sweet the singing.) As a dove just out of its fledgling nest, And, putting its wings to the first sweet test, ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... Giles Dauvrey was no fledgling whose apprenticeship had begun among the dainty pages of my lady's bower. A Gascon, and lowly born, he was a simple man-at-arms when, in a small affray on the Italian border, he had chanced to ward from Sir Aymer de Lacy's head the battle-axe that, falling on ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott

... attach no importance. Today, in the drama, everything is so much dried leaves, a lot of moonshine, which, they let filter down through the foliage of the trees, a lot of description of dawn and twilight, and a lot of other similar pastry-shop stuff. That's all there is to it! When any fledgling author comes to me with nonsense of that sort, I say to him: 'Get down to the facts! Get down to the facts!' The facts are the drama, which doesn't exist in the great ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various

... Darquelnoy. He led the way into his quarters, motioned Ebor to a perch, and rang for his orderly. "It was just a little remote-controlled apparatus, of course," he said. "The fledgling attempt, you know. But it circled this Moon here, busily taking pictures, and went right back to the planet again, giving us all a terrible fright. There hadn't been the slightest indication they were planning ...
— They Also Serve • Donald E. Westlake

... little shocked to discover that his ideas in respect of the preacher's calling were of a very worldly kind. The notions of this fledgling of dissent differed from those of a clergyman of the same stamp in this:—the latter regards the church as a society with accumulated property for the use of its officers; the former regarded it as a community of communities, each possessing a preaching house which ought to be made commercially successful. ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... crackling noise was heard, first from one, then from the other egg. From each emerged the featherless head of a fowl—the species hitherto unknown to the American continent. The necks pushed forth, then the shoulders, then both shells rolled away in fragments, and the spectators gazed on two fledgling Moas. Te-iki-pa, on inspection, pronounced them to be cock and hen, and in healthy condition. The breed, he said, could ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... Windy whiffs—fledgling stormlets—practised in the branches of the Twynintuft oak. The great tree lunged and croaked at them. Suddenly the lilac-bushes were fanned into fantastic shapes. The sumach perked its red pompon like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various

... all so excited that we get horribly in her way and almost fall into the fire in our anxiety. She stirs and coaxes and coquettes with the lovely foamy mass until it becomes as light as the yellow down on a fledgling's wings. She calls it an omelette, but she is scrambling those eggs! Then when it is almost done she screams at us to take our places. The red-faced boy rings a huge bell, and we all tumble madly up the narrow stairs to the dining-room, where a score of assorted tourists are seated. They get that ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell

... from Oxford or Cambridge or from a country home, swims into society, and finds himself welcomed by people whose names he barely knows. I suppose that in this, as in more important matters, the helpers of the social fledgling are good-natured women. The fledgling probably starts by being related to one or two, and acquainted with three or four more; and each of them says to a friend who entertains—"My cousin, Freddy Du Cane, is a very nice ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... quickly acquired the requisite knowledge. His method was quite simple: it consisted in sitting at every concert next to some good musician, a composer if possible, and getting him to say what he thought of the works performed. At the end of a few months of this apprenticeship, he knew his job: the fledgling could fly. He did not, it is true, soar like an eagle: and God knows what howlers Goujart committed with the greatest show of authority in his paper! He listened and read haphazard, stirred the mixture up well ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... own shoulders, and after one or two efforts, he found that by waving his arms he could winnow the air and cleave it, as a swimmer does the sea. He held himself aloft, wavered this way and that with the wind, and at last, like a great fledgling, he learned ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... clothed with feathers, they had learned to use their wings,—they could fly. Would it not have been passing strange, had they continued as they were, contented to cower and to crawl, when they had acquired the power to soar? And will you be content to remain forever only a fledgling, satisfied with having acquired the power of rising, but never actually using the wings which these years of honorable ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... men were a dozen or more subalterns, fresh from England, undergoing their first rough work in the forests of Virginia. In this fledgling crowd were young Grafton, afterward a general; Mooney, Vedder, Hoicraft and others, whose names, with those of their Virginia ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon

... him, and his memory ceased to picture images of the old time—his heart to beat with ambition; and to keep the weight of his head above the surface was becoming a thing worth the ransom of kings. As he was sinking and turning his eyes upward, he heard a flutter as of fledgling's wings, and the two red ruby eyes of the hawk were visible above him, like steady fires in the gloom. And the hawk perched on him, and buried itself among the wet hairs of his head, and presently taking the Identical in its beak, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... wand, into another realm where birds and fledglings and grass and the light winds of heaven were more important than brick and stone and stocks and bonds. He got up and followed her flowing steps across the grass to where, near a clump of alder bushes, she had seen a mother sparrow enticing a fledgling to take wing. From her room upstairs, she had been watching this bit of outdoor sociology. It suddenly came to Cowperwood, with great force, how comparatively unimportant in the great drift of life were his own affairs when about ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... said with a chuckle. "They never do what they set out to do. Always pecking at new things are the Bandar-log. This time, if I have any eye-sight, they have pecked down trouble for themselves, for Baloo is no fledgling and Bagheera can, as I ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling

... wrong To claim this destined lay; The leaf that asked an idle song Must bear my tears away. Yet, in thy memory shouldst thou keep This else forgotten strain, Till years have taught thine eyes to weep, And flattery's voice is vain; Oh then, thou fledgling of the nest, Like the long-wandering dove, Thy weary heart may faint for rest, As mine, on changeless love; And while these sculptured lines retrace The hours now dancing by, This vision of thy girlish grace May ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... and also in the Episcopal, the novitiate is expected to serve for a time under an older clergyman; but all the other denominations have broken away, and now spring the fledgling on the world ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... clang to his stirrup and would not leave him, looking like a fledgling with his beard all new-sprouted on his jaw, and ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy

... The three fledgling spacemen were silent, watching and listening with awe and envy as the Polaris crew continued their indoctrination. They considered themselves lucky to have been drawn by these famous cadets for ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman

... more than curious to see what particular kind of a fledgling could be born to these two parent birds—one so hard and unsympathetic and the other so kind and simple. Jim, I remembered, had always spoken enthusiastically of Ruby, but then Jim always spilled over the edges whenever ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... face of storing recollection before him. Mr. Lloyd leaned towards Lyman Risley, who sat beside him and whispered and laughed. It was quite evident that he did not consider the flight of this little fledgling in the face of things seriously. But even he, as Ellen's clearly delivered sentiments grew more and more defined—almost anarchistic—became a little grave in spite of the absurd incongruity between them and the girlish lips. ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... her yet, as fair and mild As ever nursling summer day Dreamed on the bosom of the bay: For I was twenty then, and went Alone and long-haired—all content With promises of sounding name And fantasies of future fame, And thoughts that now my mind discards As editor a fledgling bard's. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley



Words linked to "Fledgling" :   initiate, fledged, tiro, freshman, neophyte, unfledged, mature, fledgeling, young bird, novice, newbie, inexperienced, recruit, inexperient



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