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Toboggan   Listen
noun
Toboggan  n.  (Written also tobogan, and tarbogan)  A kind of sledge made of pliable board, turned up at one or both ends, used for coasting down hills or prepared inclined planes; also, a sleigh or sledge, to be drawn by dogs, or by hand, over soft and deep snow.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Toboggan" Quotes from Famous Books



... considered desirable or aesthetic, and in its place we have prodigious bustles and immense trains, by which an astonishing quantity of material is thrown behind the body, suggesting in some instances a toboggan slide, in others the unseemly hump on the back of a camel. This is the era of the enormous bustle and the train of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various

... much-enduring horse and in charge of a civil young man. We turned out of one of the streets not far from the hotel, and found ourselves facing an ascent which looked like what I should suppose would be a pretty steep toboggan slide. We both drew back. "Facilis ascensus," I said to myself, "sed revocare gradum." It is easy enough to get up if you are dragged up, but how will it be to come down such a declivity? When we reached it on our return, the semi-precipice had lost all its terrors. We had seen and travelled ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... dog shoes?" said Wabigoon. "I've got a dozen shoes on my sledge—enough for three dogs. By George—" He leaped quickly to his toboggan, caught up the dog moccasins, and turned again to the old Indian, alive with new excitement. "We've got just one chance, Muky!" ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood

... Canadians had blunted his London street-bred accent. To be sure he occasionally slipped an "h," or inserted one where it should not be, but he was fast swinging into line with the great young country he now called "home." He could eat Indian corn and maple syrup, he could skate, toboggan, and ply a paddle, he could handle a horse as well as Watkins, the stableman, who was heard on several occasions to remark that he could not get along ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... began. "We really thought it was time to begin work on the land," said the people; but they could put up with the cold—there was still time enough. They proceeded to snowball one another, and set their sledges in order; all through the winter there had been no toboggan-slide. Soon the snow was up to one's ankles, and the slide was made. Now it might as well stop snowing. It might lie a week or two, so that people might enjoy a few proper sleighing-parties. But the snow continued ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... sledge approached slowly. It took form at last in a dim shadow, and MacVeigh saw that it would pass very near to him. He made out, one after another, a human figure, three dogs, and the toboggan. There was something appalling in the quiet of this specter of life looming up out of the night. He could no longer hear the sledge, though it was within fifty paces of him. The figure in advance walked slowly and with bowed head, and the dogs and the sledge followed in a ghostly line. Human ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood

... been hard to picture a prettier sight than the skaters presented that afternoon, the boys in their heavy reefers and woolen watch-caps; the girls in toboggan caps and sweaters. Over in the west the sky was a rich rosy glow, for the sun sinks behind the hills by four-thirty during the short winter afternoons. The Naval Academy band stationed at the edge of the broad expanse of the ice-bound ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... Later, when the trade was outlawed, the slaves were stowed away out of sight on loose shelves over the cargo. "Where the 'tween decks space was two feet high or more, the slaves were stowed sitting up in rows, one crowded into the lap of another, and with legs on legs, like rider on a crowded toboggan." (Spears, p. 71.) There they stayed for the weeks or the months of the voyage. "In storms the sailors had to put on the hatches and seal tight the openings into the infernal cesspool." (Spears, p. 71.) The odor of a slaver was often unmistakable ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing

... dozen more young folks drifted in, includin' a couple of Harvard men that Vee knew, a girl she'd met abroad, and another she'd seen at a house-party. They was all live wires, too, ready for any sort of fun. And we had all kinds. Maybe we didn't keep that toboggan slide warm. Say, ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford

... exists, though it lacks the brains and power that carried it on to success in, its earlier days, this being notably the case in Chicago and New York, where the clubs representing these cities have gone down the toboggan slide with ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson

... smash, with a sudden offstage clatter and thump and cry which reminded me there were more people in the world than Chaddie McKail and her philandering old husband. For during that interregnum of parental preoccupation Dinkie and Poppsy had essayed to toboggan down the lower half of the front-stairs in an empty drawer commandeered from my bedroom dresser. Their descent, apparently, had been about as precipitate as that of their equally adventurous sire down the treads of my respect, for they had landed in a heap on the hardwood floor of ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... gentleness to his wife—perhaps a bunch of violets, bought at the florist's on Maple Street where Lily got her flower pots or her bulbs. He was very lonely, and increasingly bothered about Jacky. ... "Lily will let him go plumb to hell. But I put him on the toboggan! ... I'm responsible for his existence," he used to think. And sometimes he repeated the words he had spoken that night when he had felt the first stir of fatherhood, "My ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

... Her toboggan had been found at the top of the hill where she and Mrs. Gates had spent the morning, and on the hard crust a few dim tracks could be seen leading into the forest, with now and then a dent where, perhaps, the girl's ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... MacLean, composing the expedition that was to recover Hubbard's body, at last left the post, prepared for their difficult journey into the interior. I regretted much that my physical condition made it impossible for me to accompany them. Their provisions were packed on an Indian flat sled or toboggan, and their tent and other camp equipment on a sled with broad flat runners that I had obtained especially for the transportation of the body from some Indians that visited the post. At the rapid they ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace

... would have been breathless with horror at listening to such a recital, but it must be remembered that Arthur and Peggy Saville had never been ordinary in their habits. From earliest youth they had scorned the obvious ways of locomotion, had chosen to descend the staircase on a toboggan improvised out of a kitchen tea-tray rather than to walk from step to step like rational beings, and to ascend on the outside rather than the inside of the banisters, so that their belongings had grown to expect the unexpected, and Major Darcy's ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey

... this account of what was in fact absence without leave, and he then suggested that if I had nothing else on hand I might help him in making a toboggan-slide. Never having heard of such a thing I accepted the invitation. Securing a couple of shovels we cleared a path to the knoll; and, on the way, Mr. Hosmer explained that Angus Cameron, another new pupil, hailing from Canada, had brought ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears

... snow down on this bank," suggested Twaddles, "and we can play it's a toboggan slide. I wish we ...
— Four Little Blossoms and Their Winter Fun • Mabel C. Hawley

... hundred men to cut ice; and all that day the homeless and starving of the city came trudging through the snow from all over its two hundred square miles. That night forty score of them crowded into the station house of the stockyards district—they filled the rooms, sleeping in each other's laps, toboggan fashion, and they piled on top of each other in the corridors, till the police shut the doors and left some to freeze outside. On the morrow, before daybreak, there were three thousand at Durham's, ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... after the next they've hit the toboggan whenever they got to feeling too strong. If you line up against me that time has come again. If I get potted from the brush I've hedged it so that those boys that filed over there won't be left in the lurch. ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts

... slipped in falling, and it was the Indians who found him by chance next day, crushed and half-frozen though the weather was mild. He was in their game preserve, and they might very well have pretended not to see him and have left him to die there; but they put him on their toboggan, brought him to their camp, and looked after him. You knew my father: a rough man who often took a glass, but just in his dealings, and with a good name for doing that sort of thing himself. So when he parted with these Indians he told them to stop and ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon

... person in civilian clothes, with a bored expression, plus a moustache of dreamy proportions with which the owner constantly imitated a gentleman ringing for a drink. Two appertained to a splendid old dotard (a face all ski-jumps and toboggan slides), on whose protruding chest the rosette of the Legion pompously squatted. Numbers five and six had reference to Monsieur, who had seated himself before I had time to focus my slightly ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... called, but it was Neil, snatching off her toboggan cap by its impudent tassel, who had to be caught. It was heavy and breath-taking work on the broad, old-fashioned snowshoes which she managed with clumsy grace. Judith, short-skirted and trim in fleecy white sweater, collar rolled high to the tips of small, pink ears, blond curls blowing in ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton

... you know? Did you never feel, even in winter in Montreal, when you had skating-rinks, toboggan-slides, snow-shoe meets, and sleigh-rides to keep you amused, that it was all growing tiresome and very stale? Haven't you felt that you wanted something—something you hadn't got and couldn't define—though you might recognize ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... her into an upward flight. Upon her feet was a pair of long, Norwegian skees, and upon these she had scudded down the mountain-side; where the bank dropped away she had leaped, and now, like a meteor, she soared into space. This amazing creature was clad in a blue-and-white toboggan suit, short skirt, sweater jacket, and knitted cap. As she hung outlined against the wintry sky Pierce caught a snap-shot glimpse of a fair, flushed, youthful face set in a ludicrous expression of open-mouthed dismay ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach

... right or left as the case might be, throwing a trifle more weight on one knee than the other, and thus causing one part of the skin to press more hardly than another upon the snow, was all that was needed for steering purposes; for the toboggan-like skins swept downward straight as the flight of an arrow, save when some black fang of rock protruded through the snow fair in the track, when a slight slope of the body sufficed to cause a swerve that carried the adventurous riders safely clear of the ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood

... you are coming, so as to get you a room. You will toboggan and skate your head off, and I will talk it off, and briefly if you don't come pretty soon, I will cut you off ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the professor, whose red and white toboggan-cap looked very jaunty, indeed. He told of the girls' arrival to a boy who was toiling up the edge of the packed and icy slide. Walter Mason had been to the bottom of the hill to make sure that no obstacle had fallen upon the track since ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr

... house to find Tom, Bob and Isadore each drawing a long, flat, narrow toboggan. Helen clapped her hands ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson

... to tell. The cards turned on him. He struck the toboggan and he went down with an awful thump. All he had made was wiped out at a single swipe. He followed it up, and in less than a week he was dead broke. Had to give up his rooms at the Imperial. Came down to a cheap ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish

... washing.) In the middle of this quilt he had cut a hole, just large enough to poke his head through and be snug about the neck. When he got that on he pulled on a pair of old slippers that he had tacked tin soles onto. The next and last piece to the harness was his red and blue worsted toboggan cap with a long peak minus the tassel—it was very necessary for the head to get the full benefit or you'd catch cold. This cap he pulled down well over his head and ears, and then he stood on a box and mounted the fiery throne, sitting down mighty easy ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... covered the face of nature. When not engaged in our duties, we boys and girls amused ourselves by tobogganing, the sloping bank of the river affording us a capital place for sliding down. We each of us had manufactured a toboggan, which is a small sleigh composed of a long thin slip of willow wood turned up in front. Several of ours were large enough to carry two, and we each of us were eager to obtain the company of one of the young ladies, I especially ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston

... they whirred, treating that respectable eminence as if it were a snow bump in the path of a flying toboggan. Medenham had roamed the South Downs as a boy, and he was able now to point out Chanctonbury Ring, the Devil's Dyke, Ditchling Beacon, and the rest of the round-shouldered giants that guard the Weald. In the mellow light of ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy

... down in front of us and went corkscrewing in and out around the crags and precipices, down, down, forever down, suggesting nothing so exactly or so uncomfortably as a croaked toboggan slide with no end to it. Mr. Pugh waved his flag and started, like an arrow from a bow, and before I could get out of the car we were gone too. I had previously had but one sensation like the shock of that departure, and that was the gaspy shock that took my ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... which he escapes in the end, sad and wan and bankrupt. Of a truth, many attractions and distractions are here; else he could not forget the peddling-box and the light-heeled, heavy-haunched women of Battery Park. Here are swings for the mind; toboggan-chutes for the soul; merry-go-rounds for the fancy; and many devious and alluring paths where one can lose himself for years. A sanitarium this for the hebephreniac. And like all sanitariums, you go into it with one disease and ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... met them as Eli brought the dogs to a stop. Huddled close and lying by the side of the toboggan, partially covered by drift, were the ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace

... coasting with toboggan sleds and bobsleds are all well known to boys who live where there are snow and hills. A sled can be steered either by dragging the foot or by shifting the sled with the hands. Sleds with flexible runners have recently been introduced ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller

... us most was that excellent sport—now well known to the world, but then practised only in the mountain villages—the species of adventure which has come to be called "tobogganing." I fell heir in a mysterious fashion to a genuine Canadian toboggan, curled and buffalo-robed at the front, flat all the way beneath; and upon this, with Henry on one of the ordinary sleds with runners of steel, we spent many ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett

... Metoosin had brought the dogs up from the pit and they were ready to start. Philip had armed himself with a rifle and his automatic, and Josephine had packed both medicine and food in a large basket. The new snow was soft, and Metoosin had brought a toboggan instead of a sledge with runners. In the traces were Captain and five ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood

... plowed ahead, its twin outboards purring. Its bow, rounded like the front of a toboggan, slapped into a slight swell. Rick passed the range light and headed for the red tower that marked the opening of the Narrows. In a few moments they were in the Narrows, passing lines of docked crab, oyster, ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin

... beavers as a slide. It was worn smooth and hard. Umisk would climb up the bank at a point where it was not so steep. At the top of the slide he would put his tail out flat behind him and give himself a shove, shooting down the toboggan and landing in the water with a big splash. At times there were from six to ten young beavers engaged in this sport, and now and then one of the older beavers would waddle to the top of the slide and take a ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood

... our clothes-boiler, down in the laundry, did not design it as a toy bass-drum for the children to bang on on the morning of the Fourth of July. I would make a solemn affidavit to the fact that the maker of a baby-carriage never dreamed of its possible use as an impromptu toboggan for a couple of small boys to coast downhill on in midsummer. Yet these things have been used for these various purposes in our own household experience. A megaphone can be used as a beehive, and a hammock can be turned into a fly-net for a ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs

... and Germans, and best of all, the unquenchable American, join in the panorama, and the result is something that one does not see anywhere else on the globe. I guess if my dear brethren knew of the theatre parties, dinners and dances I was going to, they would think I was on a toboggan slide for the lower regions! I am mot though. I am simply getting a good swing to the pendulum so that I can go back to "the field," and the baby organs and the hymn-singing with better grace. It is very funny, but do you know ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little

... It seemed to protest at the unbalanced weight of the sky piece. She made the sounds again, and it rose reluctantly, curling up at the front, like a crazy toboggan. It moved slowly, but with increasing speed, sailed out of the office through the window and began gaining altitude. They went soaring over the city at about thirty miles an hour, heading toward what seemed to be barren land beyond. "Sometimes they fail now," she told him. ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey

... be out of doors nine hours a day, and kindly fill in this card for me. You may skate, but not ski or toboggan, nor take more than four hours' active exercise out of the twenty-four. In a month's time I shall be pleased to see you. Remember about the ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome

... second he had calculated rapidly and well. While the cliff at first glance seemed perpendicular, it could not be so. There was a slope coated with two feet of snow, and swinging far back on the heels of his snowshoes, he shot downward like one taking a tremendous slide on a toboggan. Faster and faster he went, but deeper and deeper he dug his shoes into the snow, until he lay back almost flat against its surface. This checked his speed somewhat, but it was still very great, and, preserving his self-control ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler

... disgust, "but the destroyers ought to nail him. Look out, sir—you'll go sliding down that slippery toboggan!" ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... girl, and even her flashy clothes could not altogether disguise her rather handsome foreign type. Today she wore a big black velvet tam jabbed rakishly on her black head, a flame colored coat that buttoned around her tight as a toboggan ulster, and only the deep olive tint of her face in any way withheld the eye from a criticism of "too much color." Today Dol's cheeks were not tinted, and the way her deep set black eyes flashed, further told how angry she ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft

... the answer. "I'm looking to see when it's going to snow. Mother said a snowstorm was coming, and I'm watching for the first flakes. What's the good of a toboggan slide when there ...
— The Curlytops and Their Playmates - or Jolly Times Through the Holidays • Howard R. Garis

... began to look for some new excitement, no matter how foolish. One or other started "turkey trot" and "grizzly bear" and finally Alma, with memories of the winter sports at St. Moritz, proposed that they should toboggan down the ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... that it is like that all over India. Beyond question, the gun-sellers and gun-users have been busy there, as everywhere else. The game of India is on the toboggan slide, and the old days of abundance have ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... she lost every gulden that she possessed. Things were bound to happen so, for persons of her type who have once entered upon that road descend it with ever-increasing rapidity, even as a sledge descends a toboggan-slide. All day until eight o'clock that evening did she play; and, though I personally did not witness her exploits, I learnt ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky



Words linked to "Toboggan" :   toboggan cap, luge, tobogganing, sled, sledge, tobogganist, sport, athletics, sleigh



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