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Lilliputian   Listen
noun
Lilliputian  n.  
1.
One belonging to a very diminutive race described in Swift's "Voyage to Lilliput" or "Gulliver's Travels".
2.
Hence: A person or thing of very small size.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Lilliputian" Quotes from Famous Books



... the crow and the raven tarry with us. Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest —most unadulterated, and compromising sand—in which infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, "sage-brush," ventures to grow. If you will take a Lilliputian cedar tree for a model, and build a dozen imitations of it with the stiffest article of telegraph wire—set them one foot apart and then try to walk through them, you'll understand (provided the floor is covered 12 inches deep with sand,) what it is to wander through a sage-brush desert. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... 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? —Is ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker

... the table; scissors creaked; upstairs a baby cried fretfully. There leapt into Jane's mind a memory picture of Nannie Slade Hunter before the joyfully hailed arrival of the Teddybear,—the tiny, white, enameled chiffonier with its little bunches of painted flowers spilling over with offerings—Lilliputian garments as 'fine as a fairy's first tooth'—the chortling pride of Edward R.—the beaming, nervous mother and mother-in-law—the endless flowers and books; Nannie herself, cunningly draped and swathed in Batik crepe, prettier than ever ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... 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 long, but ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times

... invariably feel tempted to stop when passing a depot for literature, especially in a strange place; but on the present occasion a Brobdignagian notice caught my eye, and gave me a queer sensation inside my waistcoat—"Awful smash among the Banks!" Below, in more Lilliputian characters, followed a list of names. I had just obtained notes of different banks for my travelling expenses, and I knew not how many thereof might belong to the bankrupt list before me; a short examination sufficed, and with ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

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

... diving, feeding, coquetting, quarreling swimmers, relieving the colorless ice with groups of jetty velvet and scoter ducks, gray and white-winged coots, crested mergansers in their gorgeous spring plumage, and fat, lazy black ducks, with Lilliputian blue and green winged teal, filling the air with the whirr of swift pinions, and the ceaseless murmur of the mating myriads, rested from their long northward journey, a host such as mortal eye hath seldom beheld, and which it hath fallen to the lot of few sportsmen ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall

... with no ordinary emotion that Katherine Grandison heard that this perfect cousin Ferdinand had at length arrived. She had seen little of him even in his boyish days, and even then he was rather a hero in their Lilliputian circle. ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli

... subsistence from ministering to the wants of these primitive traders, the articles exposed for sale, and the places where they were sold, bore strong outward marks of being expressly adapted to their tastes and wishes. The tailor displayed in his window a Lilliputian pair of leather gaiters, and a diminutive round frock, while each doorpost was appropriately garnished with a model of a coal-sack. The two eating-house keepers exhibited joints of a magnitude, and puddings of a solidity, which coalheavers alone ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... 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

... and took our way towards Paris, by a broad paved avenue, that was bordered with trees. The road now began to show an approach to a capital, being crowded with all sorts of uncouth-looking vehicles, used as public conveyances. Still it was on a Lilliputian scale as compared to London, and semi-barbarous even as compared to one of our towns. Marly-la-Machine was passed; an hydraulic invention to force water up the mountains to supply the different princely dwellings of the neighbourhood. Then came a house ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... appearance as "singularly elegant when viewed at a proper distance; and with the Needle Rocks, constituting a whole that is scarcely to be equalled:"—another declares that "the most lofty and magnificent fabrics of Art, compared with these stupendous works of Nature, sink in idea to Lilliputian size:"—and a third, that "the towering precipices of Scratchell's Bay are of the most elegant forms;" and "the pearly hue of the chalk is beyond description by words, probably out of the power even ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon

... 'wicked Child' wrought unconscionable havoc. Again, Celia wishes to have a "Lilliputian to play with," so she is promptly told that her lover would doff five feet of his tall stature, to ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... full and clear, though terrific view of him, with his ancient, swarthy, and grim complexion. I screamed out exceedingly; my sister also and our companions set up a roar, and the former dragged me with violence over the stile on which, at the instant I was disengaged from it, this warlike Lilliputian leaned and stretched himself after me, but came not over. With palpitating hearts and loud cries we ran towards the house, alarmed the family, and told them our trouble. The men instantly left their dinner, with whom still trembling we went to the place, and made the most solicitous ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen

... refuge beneath the 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

... 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 interesting "Life of John Newbery, a last century bookseller." The ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson

... 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, trumpets, and ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... of different 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various

... a 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 with ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey



Words linked to "Lilliputian" :   fictional character, colloquialism, petite, little, small, flyspeck, petty, unimportant, diminutive, Lilliput, small person, tiny, bantam, footling, niggling, picayune, piffling, trivial, midget



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