Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Tense   /tɛns/   Listen
Tense

noun
1.
A grammatical category of verbs used to express distinctions of time.



Related searches:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Tense" Quotes from Famous Books



... of the children Flooded with sweet innocence! God's smile on their foreheads glisten Ere their heart-strings have grown tense. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... training quarters in these last crucial moments. Ernest must not be distraught by a feather's weight of any other interest than the task in hand. The coaches would be delivering their final words of instruction and the old Yale guard could picture to himself the tense absorption of the scene. Like one coming out of a dream, the past was returning to him in vivid, heart-stirring glimpses. Reluctantly he sought his place in the press-box high ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... picked up his hat, and, seating herself, began to smooth the furred nap with her sleeve, watching him intently all the while. That he already had the confidence of a horse that he had never before seen was perfectly apparent. Little by little the sweating, quivering limbs were stilled, the tense muscles in the neck relaxed, the head sank, dusty velvet lips nibbled at his hand, his shoulder; the heaving, sunken flanks filled ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers

... baptize me!" The two fishermen could not hear the Galilean's reply, but they saw him walk down into the water, John the Baptizer leading. The people stood as though fascinated. Recalling the incident later on, Andrew and John realized that their tense concentration on the two men at the river had driven every other ...
— Men Called Him Master • Elwyn Allen Smith

... the single sense of hearing. Sometimes she shut her eyes, straining her ears to listen through space, wishing that she could annihilate everything that lay between her and her lover, and so establish that perfect silence which sounds may traverse from afar. In her tense self-concentration, the ticking of the clock grew hateful to her; she stopped its ill-omened garrulity. The twelve strokes of midnight sounded ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... over the table, his face tense with suppressed emotion. He was a grizzled veteran of the New York police force: a man who sought his quarry with the ferocity of a bull-dog, when the line of search was definitely assured. Lacking imagination and the subtler senses of criminology, Captain Cronin had built up a reputation for ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... that ended as before in the maelstrom of air back of the ship. But the muffled roar was changed, punctured with a machine-gun's familiar rattle, and the stabbing flashes from Blake's ship before he threw it out of the other's path were a song of joy to the tense nerves of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... the tense, waiting silence became almost too much to bear. Hiller knew what the men ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... to-day was in a tense and excitable condition, now heightened to fever by the two cobwebbed mysteries standing against the wall, but the imperative rattle of Joel's cane on the desk quickly induced a specious ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson

... There was a tense silence for a minute. Through all the bewildering and overwhelming thoughts that were crashing through Broussard's brain, but one thing was clear and unshakable, the deathless loyalty that a ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell

... eternal torment while gazing at earthly paradise. Janice became convinced that the powers of darkness no longer had singled her out as their particular prey, and in the peaceful isolation of the winter her woes, when she thought of them, underwent a change of grammatical tense which suggested that they had become things ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... looked at the girl. What queer jargon was this? In the wavering light thrown by the fire Bubbles' face looked tense and rather strained. ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes

... of human maladjustment. It was a busy, toiling, active, subdued place, where the tinkle of the telephone bell, the hum of electric annunciators, as one member of the staff signalled to another, vibrated in the tense atmosphere. Into this hive poured the suffering, mounting from the street, load after load, in the swiftly flying cages; their visit made, their joss-sticks burned, they dropped down once more to the chill world below, where they must carry on the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... playing the slow movement now, the grave, pure passion, pressed out from the solemn bass, throbbed, tense with restraint. ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair

... again David breathed the prayer: "Lord, take us through safe! Lord, take us through safe!" His face was set, but his nerves were iron. Andy and Jamie, tense with the peril and excitement of the adventure, crouched in the bottom of the boat. As they drew near the island, Jamie ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace

... Despite the tense of that last statement, it was the old Raffles who was speaking now, the incisively cynical old Raffles that I still knew the best, the Raffles of the impudent quotations and jaunty jeux d'esprit. This Raffles only meant half he said—but had generally done the other half! I met his mood ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung

... had been strung from one end of the room to the other, and while Bell went to the transmitter, Dom Pedro took up the receiver and placed it to his ear. It was a moment of tense expectancy. No one knew clearly what was about to happen, when the Emperor, with a dramatic gesture, raised his head from the receiver and exclaimed with a look of utter ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson

... On the way they encounter various characters, some good and honourable, and others very much the reverse. Finally they arrive and set to work seeking for gold. Of course there are more adventures and tense situations, as you ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn

... little, group after group, as they arise, must be controlled, checked, and organized into higher and often more serial compounds. The inhibiting functions are at first hard. In trying to sit still the child sets its teeth, holds the breath, clenches its fists and perhaps makes every muscle tense with a great effort that very soon exhausts. This repressive function is probably not worked from special nervous centers, nor can we speak with confidence of collisions with "sums of arrest" in a sense analogous to that of Herbart, or of stimuli that ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... of M——, AEt. 63. Very painful and general swellings in all his limbs, which had confined him mostly to his bed since the preceding winter; the swellings were uniform, tense, and resisting, but the skin not discoloured. After trying guiacum and Dover's powder without advantage. I directed Infusion of Digitalis. It acted on the kidneys, but did net relieve him. It is not easy to say ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering

... burst soon if that state of matters had continued. Every drop of blood in my body seemed throbbing in my head just back of my ears, and all the rest of me was cold and tense with the strain. It was like waiting on a fearsome black day of thunder for the ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham

... referring to the foolish Persian in the past tense; yet, in view of probable results, and in the stress of such violent circumstance, her anti-mortem sorrow might at ...
— A Night Out • Edward Peple

... the man, ended by a blow on the side of his face by the captain's iron-hard fist. He fell, and lay quiet, while Swarth himself adjusted the noose and bound the hands with his own handkerchief. The men at the wheel strained their necks this way and that, with tense waves of conflicting expressions flitting across their weary faces, and the men forward, aroused by the screams, stood about in anxious expectancy until they heard Swarth's roar: "Lay ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson

... the ship and the gathering of the storm are commented upon by the two lovers in a scene which is charged with an inescapable atmosphere of foreboding; note the incident of the fugitive doves in the scene at Melisande's tower window; or the episodic passage near the end of the third act, during the tense and painful scene of Golaud's espionage: "Do you see those poor people down there trying to kindle a little fire in the forest?—It has rained. And over there, do you see the old gardener trying to lift that tree that the wind has blown down across the road?—He cannot; the tree is too big ... too ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman

... understand," would not say "moi je ne comprends pas," but "mo pas connais"; similarly for "I am going away," he does not say, "je m'en vais," but "ma pe couri"; while for "I have a horse," instead of "j'ai un cheval," he will put the statement, "me ganye choue." It is a dialect lacking mood, tense, and grammar. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street

... planted in the earth, and grow like trees that refuse to die. Through centuries of turbulence and slaughter and racial transplanting, see how some Roman words stay and refuse to go, knowing as little of retreat as a Roman legion! "Chester" and "coin," as good old English terminals, are tense with interest, since they as plainly record history as did minstrels in old castle hall. Chester is the Roman "castra," camp, and where the name occurs across Britain, indicates with undeviating fidelity that there, in remote decades, Roman legions camped ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... at great length of much more than they will ever accomplish; of the slovenly English, who toil hopelessly and cannot understand that inclination does not imply power; of the Americans, whose rasping voices in the hush of a hot afternoon strain tense-drawn nerves to breaking-point, and whose suppers lead to indigestion; of tempestuous Russians, neither to hold nor to bind, who tell the girls ghost-stories till the girls shriek; of stolid Germans, who come ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling

... would not talk like that," thought Green, as he went off, followed by his two men. "Everybody speaks of poor Tom in the past tense, from the colonel to Gubbins. I won't believe that he is dead till I see it; as for the ambulance, they have had plenty of work, and might easily miss him, if he is senseless, and unable to ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough

... he swiftly adjusted a beard that swept its sable flow down his youthful chest. Then he addressed us again, still in tense, hoarse accents. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... Such a difficult result was accomplished primarily by his quickness of eye in selecting the spots on which to place his feet, and also to a great extent by the fact that he held his muscles so pliantly tense that the weight of his body came down not all at once, but in increasing pressure until the whole was supported ready for the next step. ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White

... towards her bower in haste Ran trembling: spell-bound there, before her bridal-bed She stood, while wan smiles flickered, like the northern dawn, Across her worn cheeks' ice-field; keenest memories then Rushed with strong shudderings through her—as the winged shaft Springs from the tense nerve, so her passion hurled her forth Sweeping, like fierce ghost, on through hall and corridor, Tearless, with wide eyes staring, while a ghastly wind Moaned on through roof and rafter, and the empty helms ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley

... so tense a voice that Ruth was fairly staggered. The girl of the Red Mill gazed upon the other's flaming face for a full minute without making any ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson

... dragons, horses, monsters of various kinds, the symbol of the sun, or huge Chinese characters. Among the faces most frequently seen on these kites are those of the national heroes or heroines. Some of the kites are six feet square. Many of them have a thin tense ribbon of whalebone at the top of the kite which vibrates in the wind, making a loud humming noise. The boys frequently name their kites Genji or Heiki, and each contestant endeavors to destroy that of his rival. For this purpose ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton

... she was conscious of a curious trepidation that was not entirely solicitude, and did not amount to dread; her tense state of incertitude bordered both on disappointment and on relief. She had lived six or seven weeks with an imperfectly educated yet handsome husband whom now she had not seen for seventeen months, and who was so changed physically by an accident that she was assured ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy

... half an eye cocked on the stairway, nobody appeared. The wind was still, the sea like glass; not a sound anywhere. Struck by something of strangeness in the uncanny silence, Jim sat up and called "Ahoy, Chamberlain!" There was no answer. But in the tense stillness there was a sound, and it came from below—the sound of a ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger

... second outline, not the other and larger outline, that held the breathless attention of the men. Nervously Felipe struck a match. As it flared up he stepped close, followed by the other, and there was a moment of tense silence. Then the match went ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton

... to him it was an open book. He would stand, acknowledged scholar, at the street corner and read out from the soiled copy retrieved by Chunky, the newsboy, the enthralling story of the football day, never stumbling over a syllable, athrill with the joy of being the umbilicus of a tense world, and, when the recital was over, he would have the mortification of seeing the throng pass away from him with the remorselessness of a cloud scudding from the moon. And he would hear Billy Goodge ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... take me away!" cried the prisoner in a tense voice. "Paul, Paul, my own little Paul!" The woman's breath came and went in gusts, and her child cried from the convulsive pressure ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... close by my side had clasped his hand. I tried to order her away, but my tongue could not form the words. I could only look at her mutely, and there must have been an effective appeal in my eyes, for she got up, nodding an acquiescence, and stood silent and tense a yard from Alresca's feet. With a violent effort I nerved myself to perform my work. The voice of Nolan, speaking to the audience, and then a few sympathetic cheers, came vaguely from the other side of the big curtain, and then the orchestra began to play the ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett

... of naked men fighting a series of savage duels in a wood, might be chosen as emphatic illustrations of his favourite motives. The fiercest emotions of the Renaissance find expression in the clenched teeth, strained muscles, knotted brows, and tense nerves, depicted by Pollajuolo with eccentric energy. We seem to be assisting at some of those combats a steccato chiuso wherein Sixtus IV. delighted, or to have before our eyes a fray between Crocensi and Vallensi ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... attraction in a rousing trio of space operas, The Legion of Space, The Cometeers and One Against the Legion. When grim realism was the order of the day, he produced Crucible of Power and when they wanted extrapolated theory in present tense, he assumed the disguise of Will Stewart and popularized the concept of contra terrene matter in science fiction with Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock. Finally, when only psychological studies of the future would do, he produced ...
— The Cosmic Express • John Stewart Williamson

... constantly on the increase. Still, it is true, she wrote to disciples near and far long, tender letters of spiritual counsel—analyses of the religious life tranquilly penetrating as those of an earlier time. But her political correspondence grew in bulk. It is tense, nervous, virile. It breathes a vibrating passion, a solemn force, that are the index of a breaking heart. Not for one moment did Catherine relax her energies. From 1376, when she went to Avignon, she led, with one or two brief intermissions ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa

... ago we walked in the jangling city Together . . . . forgetful. One by one we crossed the avenues, Rivers of light, roaring in tumult, And came to the narrow, knotted streets. Thru the tense crowd We went aloof, ecstatic, walking in wonder, Unconscious of our motion. Forever the foreign people with dark, deep-seeing eyes Passed us and passed. Lights and foreign words and foreign faces, I forgot them all; I only felt alive, defiant of all ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale

... to see the change which had come over the looks and actions of the company at the mention and appearance of the violin. The faces that had shown indifference and the look of languid weariness freshened and became tense in all their lines; and on their heads again animation sat crowned. Those who were seated jumped to their feet. The conversationalists broke their circle and swung suddenly into line. Eyes sparkled. Little happy screams and miniature war-whoops from the boisterous youngsters ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... developing towards the right. Cords were formed in the shape of a figure eight, closed at the top, and opened at the point nearest the body. Thus, as the globe develops in one direction, the cords seem to become more tense, and pull in the opposite direction. The separation becomes more and more complete, until finally, three and a half hours after death, a well-formed globe rested above the body, apparently held together by the encircling, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... the daughter, who sat beside her, Everything had turned out so much better than she could have hoped for, both easier and more friendly. Eight years it lasted, then the husband died, and she mourned him with a sincere heart. She had learned to love his fine, thin-blooded nature which with a tense, egotistic, almost morbid love loved whatever belonged to it by ties of relationship or family, and cared nought for anything in all the great world outside, except for what they thought, what their opinion was—nothing else. After her husband's death she had lived chiefly ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen

... tense, himself. Serene, he was thinking with gratitude. Back to some of civilization. Back to freedom—if there wasn't too much trouble on account of all that had happened. Speeding along, they passed the first scattered domes, a hydroponic ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun

... significantly at the young librarian, who was leaning upon the counter in a tense, keyhole position, with his private ear turned somewhat ostentatiously towards the ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... in the past tense, because the column, as will be seen in the sequel, was so much injured in 1840 as to require ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper

... present tense, lends in the conditional mood, keeps you in the subjective, and ruins you ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher

... It was this same quiet, this same unending mystery of voiceless desolation that had won him to the North. Until to-night he had loved it. But now there was something oppressive about it, something that made him strain his eyes to see beyond the rock and the fire, and set his ears in tense listening for sounds which did not exist. He knew that in this hour he was longing for companionship—not that of Breed, nor of men with whom he hunted men, but of men and women whom he had once known and in whose lives he had played a part—ages ago, it ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood

... that follow are those of a young painter who was at the front from September [1914] till the beginning of April [1915]; at the latter date he was missing in one of the battles of the Argonne. Are we to speak of him in the present tense or in the past? We know not: since the day when the last mud-stained paper reached them, announcing the attack in which he was to vanish, what a close weight of silence for those who during eight months lived upon these almost daily letters! But for how many women, how many ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous

... with a real crisis, a definite transaction, a point of time as clear as the morning dawn. It is not an everlasting dying and an eternal struggle to live. But it is all expressed in a tense that denotes definiteness, fixedness and finished action. We actually died at a certain point and as actually began ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson

... half-drowsy ears, was amused by the colloquy that ensued, in the course of which Andy completely floored the Canadian by a glowing description of Dunore, delivered in the present tense, but referring, alas! to a period of sixteen or twenty years previously. But the smart black-eyed backwoodsman wound up ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... however, James Houghton felt himself at liberty to plunge into an orgy of new stock. He flitted, with a tense look on his face, to Manchester. After which huge bundles, bales and boxes arrived in Woodhouse, and were dumped on the pavement of the shop. Friday evening came, and with it a revelation in Houghton's window: the first piques, the first strangely-woven and honey-combed ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... her feminineness made a delicious spectacle on the spotless deck. She nearly laughed with delight as she acknowledged Mr. Prohack's grave salute and shook hands with him, but when Charlie said: "Anything urgent?" she grew grave and tense, becoming the faithful, urgent, ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett

... tension, and the need of relieving the tension through pinches, blows, tight lacing, and so forth. If the girl remains innocent of sex satisfaction, there takes place during sleep, at regular intervals of about three days, more or less the relief and emission of the tense glands, not corresponding to the menstrual period, but to intercourse, and serving better than sexual instruction to represent to her the phenomena of intercourse. If at this period actual intercourse takes place, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... of Chinese and Japanese who do the work not of carriage horses, but of draft horses. From the time you land in Yokahoma your heart is made sick by the sight of half-naked human-beings harnessed like oxen to heavily laden carts and drays. Bent, tense, and perspiring like slaves at the oar, they draw their heavy burdens through the streets. One or two men wearily pull an immense telegraph pole balanced on a two-wheeled truck. Eight or ten men are harnessed together dragging some merchant's heavy ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... themselves lightly aboard the vessels, and went swiftly and silently to work. Up from the hold came case after case of tea, which were seized and broken open by the hatchets, the sound of their breaking being clearly audible in the tense stillness; and the black contents were showered into the waters. Minute after minute, hour after hour went by, and still the wild figures worked, and still the multitude looked on, forgetful of the cold, their hearts beating ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... that a blunder would have unpleasant results, for Clavering, with switch raised, had tightened his left hand on the bridle Grant had loosed again, while a wicked smile crept into his eyes, and the lad stood tense and still, with hands clenched in front of him, and a weal on his young face. Grant, however, stepped in ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss

... Conrad's prime distinctions is his power to visualize scenes. The terror, beauty, caprice, and mercilessness of the sea; the silence and strangeness of the impenetrable tropical forest; atmospheres tense with storm or brilliant with sunshine,—these he records with strong effect. But though he has gained his fame largely as a chronicler of remote seas and shores, his handling of the human element is ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... With a feeble dash of spirit, Jenny had attempted tactical flight. The sense of it made her feel as she had done, as a little girl, in playing touch; when, with a swerve, she had striven to elude the pursuer. So tense were her nerves on such occasions that she turned what is called "goosey" with the feel of the ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton

... his feet and looked behind him. He had been sitting on the very ash which Deerfoot had named as the guide that would direct them in finding the craft. Otto threw back his head and laughed, overcome by the reaction from the tense strain to which his nerves ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis

... that he knew should come from the flash sent across the garden by his companion. Much time had been spent in the planning and the making of both sets of instruments, and this was the first test; silent he waited, his nerves tense, impatient, eager. Suddenly the Morse sounder began to tick and burr-r-r; the boy's eyes flashed, and his heart gave an exultant bound—the first wireless message had been sent and received, and a new marvel had been added to the list of world's wonders. The quiet farm was the scene ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday

... Laramie, more cool-headed than his friends, drawn-faced and tense about him, cooler far than his maudlin words implied, and still fighting for a forlorn chance, "why didn't Harry Van Horn tell me to turn in with a friend—why didn't he tell me to turn in with you, Tom Stone—with a man I rode and bunked with? Why did they make you their scapegoat, ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman

... one. "He made a great get-away but he was trying too hard. He was too tense when he was hit and the ball was snapped out of his arms. If he'd have relaxed, he'd have held onto it. Shouldn't I know? I played ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman

... counsels of friends of Jamadagni's son, of the celestial rishi Narada, and of island-born Krishna, while they offered me counsel. In the midst of the assembly, Krishna told me what was for my good, saying, "A truce (tense) to hostilities, O king! Let thy son take the whole kingdom! Give but five villages to the Pandavas!" Fool that I was, for not following that advice, I am now obliged to repent so poignantly! I did not listen to the righteous counsels of Bhishma. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... dim, empty spaces of the splendid apartment, followed by the doctor; a ghostly little procession it seemed. The door was closed behind them. For a few moments a curious silence ensued. Gerald remained tense and apparently suffering from some sort of suppressed emotion. Esther for the first time moved in her place. She leaned towards Hamel. Her lips were slowly parted, her eyes sought the door as though in terror. Her voice, although save for themselves ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... of the Micmac numerals is most noteworthy. The numerals are real verbs, instead of adjectives, or, as is sometimes the case, nouns. They are conjugated through all the variations of mood, tense, person, and number. The forms given above are not those that would be used in counting, but are for specific use, being varied according to the thought it was intended to express. For example, naiooktaich there ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant

... etymology: thou antipode of grammar: thou executioner of construction: thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded: thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax: thou scavenger of mood and tense: thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance: thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense: thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom: thou persecutor of syllabication: thou baleful meteor, foretelling ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... have been close pursued, And yet my spirit quailed not, and by boldness I have escaped captivity. But what Is this which now constricts my breath? What means This overpowering tremor, or this quivering Of tense desire? No, this is fear. All day I have waited for this secret meeting, pondered On all that I should say to her, how best I might enmesh Marina's haughty mind, Calling her queen of Moscow. But the hour Has come—and I ...
— Boris Godunov - A Drama in Verse • Alexander Pushkin

... We all got up. The air became tense, and in the silence there seemed no motion of ship or wave. I said ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... marshal his flock and drive it homeward to the milking-yard. Here he was met by the fair young Katrina Buttersprecht, the daughter of his employer, who relieved the tense udders of their daily secretion. One evening after the milking, Deidrick, who had for years been nourishing a secret passion for Katrina, was smitten with an idea. Why should she not be his wife? He ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... individual life— sometimes, as in "The Glass Door" and in "Elizabeth and Davie," in two lives; but it leads not to or away from fortune—it simply discloses character; also, in situations like those so vividly depicted in "Keepers of a Charge" and "A Yearly Tribute," the tense strain of modern circumstance. In all these real instances there are luminous points of idealism—of an idealism implicit ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various

... on the evening we came to the story of Kusha and Lava, and those two valiant lads were threatening to humble to the dust the renown of their father and uncles, how the tense silence of that dimly lighted room was bursting with eager anticipation. It was getting late, our prescribed period of wakefulness was drawing to a close, and yet the denouement was ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore

... beside him; he went suddenly from drowsiness to slumber, and the woman spurned his bullet-head away from her shoulder, letting him fall like a log among the cushions. The stout second man looked frightened and sat nursing helpless hands. But the third man sat forward, and tense silence fell on the assembly as the eyes of ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy

... to their feet and stood, switching their tails, and all facing the same way, namely, toward the spot where I had observed the suspicious motion of the grass. But the motion had ceased now, and for nearly a quarter of an hour we all stood there tense, waiting and watching. ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood

... spectacular which more readily appeals to the Mexican. The bull-fight, with its accompaniments of showy dress, tense excitement, and elements of danger and bloodshed, is his favourite amusement. Military parades and political functions enter largely into the distractions of polite life, as indeed is the case throughout Spanish-America generally. Military ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... slender hand up to his lips, his head turned toward the door, an expression of tense expectancy in every ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... hung rakishly above one ear. Her hair loosened and fell in straggling wisps of gray to her shoulders. Her eyeglasses dropped from her nose and swayed dizzily on their slender chain. Her gloves split across the back and showed the white, tense knuckles. Her breath came in gasps, and only a moaning "whoa—whoa" fell in jerky rhythm from her white lips. Ashamed, frightened, and dismayed, Miss Prue clung to the reins and kept her straining ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter

... of explaining that he had made the implication by his use of the past tense, but gave up the idea as involving a waste of energy. "How old is this chap, Banks; ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford

... left the door ajar which gave on the boudoir. The staircase was on the other side of that fateful room, and the door leading to that was closed. A few minutes of tense expectancy went by. Then through the silence there came the sound of furtive foot-steps on the stairs, the creaking of a loose board and finally the ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... Betty, a little tense figure in the bottom of the boat, uttered a gasp of dismay, as Allen began carefully to lower himself into the ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope

... see very little, so carefully do animals conceal themselves. In the night they emerge, and in the morning and evening there is a deafening din of insect life. But at noonday there is a soft and solemn hush, and we are tense with curiosity to know all that is going on in those mysterious forest depths and up among the tree-tops, so close ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband

... moment the men looked into each other's eyes. It was a tense moment of sudden crisis ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... equally affected, yet occasionally the swelling is more marked on one side or the other. The characteristic changes begin in the feet. The skin covering the back of the foot becomes tense and has a waxen appearance; it is easily indented, bearing for a moment the imprint of anything that is pressed against it. Often the swelling extends no higher than the ankles, but it may involve ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons

... face level with his, revealing it bravely, perhaps defiantly. Its tense expression, with a few misery-laden lines, answered back to the inquiry of the nonchalant outsiders: 'Yes, I am his wife, his wife, the wife of the object over there, brought here to the hospital, shot in a saloon brawl.' And the surgeon's face, alive with a new preoccupation, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... was calm and unperturbed; inwardly, tense and unstrung. She wondered if, at last, the sorrow had been healed enough for speech. Upstairs there was a room that was always locked. No one but Aunt Francesca ever entered it, and she but rarely. Once or twice, Rose had chanced to see her coming ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed

... the past called attention, with no other object in view than to make my readers unwilling to retire for the night, to destroy the peace of mind of those who are good enough to purchase my literary wares, or to titillate till tense the nerve tissue of the timid who come to smile and who depart unstrung, then should I deserve the severest condemnation; but these things I do not do. I have a mission in life which I hold as sacred as my good friend Mr. Howells holds his. ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs

... snatched the paper and read the announcement to a group on which sudden, tense silence had fallen. Under a sensational headline, "The Last Trump will sound at Two O'clock To-morrow," was a paragraph to the effect that the leader of a certain noted sect in the United States had predicted that August twelfth would be the Judgment Day, ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... meaning of the divine manhood of the Redeemer virtually amounts to divine teaching. In de resurr. 63 Christ is called "fidelissimus sequester dei et hominum, qui et homini deum et hominem deo reddet." Note the future tense. It is the same with Hippolytus who in Philos. X. 34 represents the deification of men as the aim of redemption, but at the same time merely requires Christ as the lawgiver and teacher: "[Greek: Kai tauta men ekpheuxe Theon ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... The sympathy, the suffering, the wilderness, the Cross, the Resurrection, all the experiences He went through, these give to this victory-word, Jesus, a meaning unknown before. They put the name Jesus actually above every name in the experiences of tense conflict and sweeping victory it stands for. This threefold chording makes music never to be ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon

... very limited in this respect. Her eyes, the index of her attention, wander easily from one external object to another, and consequently our work must be very gradual, for, if we attempt to hold the attention one moment longer than the mind has strength for, the tense bow snaps, and the overstrained activity lapses into inanity. We must ask her attention for very short intervals at first, and during many years; for every time that we attempt to convey information for so long that the ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... His jaw very tense, his back painfully stiff, Link strode heavily down the lane and out into the highroad. Chum, always eager for a walk with his god, ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune

... incomplete. The question does not seem to be of great philosophical significance. For to explain how mankind first learned to promise, we must go to metaphysics, and find out how it ever came to frame a future tense. The nature of the particular promise which was first enforced in a given system can hardly lead to any truth of general importance. But the history of the action of debt is instructive, although in a humbler way. It is necessary to know something about ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... a tense, strained way, as if trying to preserve her calm. She sat down at their little dressing-table and ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells

... sudden string Rang, and sprang inward, and the waterish air Hissed, and the moist plumes of the songless reeds Moved as a wave which the wind moves no more. But the boar heaved half out of ooze and slime, His tense flank trembling round the barbed wound, Hateful; and fiery with invasive eyes And bristling with intolerable hair Plunged, and the hounds clung, and green flowers and white Reddened and broke all round them where they came. And charging with sheer tusk he drove, and smote Hyleus; ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... that," he answered. "It has been a great deal to me, but isn't it wiser to make all in the past tense now? What have we ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo

... ones had been kissed and sent off to bed, with mamma going with them to hear their prayers, Jock, on being called for, repeated a Greek declension with two mistakes in it, Bobus showed a long sum in decimals, Janet, brought a neat parallelism of the present tense of the verb "to be" in five languages-Greek, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... instant on his new-bought bicycle to the bungalow. He would undress quickly, and without waiting to cool, still bathed in sweat, would fling himself into the clear, cold, sweet-smelling sea. His whole body was enervated and tense, thrilled by the thought. Impatiently moving the papers before him, he ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... said, that [Greek: en] is in the former part of the sentence, and therefore might have been repeated in the latter part, which is the converse of it, though it might not be exactly the proper tense. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various

... taking me down with him to the House, and begging a seat for me in Mrs. Brand's gallery. The figure of Parnell; the speech, nonchalant, terse, defiant, without a single grace of any kind, his hands in the pockets of his coat; and the tense silence of the crowded House, remain vividly with me. Afterward my uncle came up-stairs for me, and we descended toward Palace Yard through various side- passages. Suddenly a door communicating with the House itself opened in front ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the past tense, not because he has fallen, my young friend, but Elihu was unfortunate enough to receive a severe wound in the leg some months after Ticonderoga, and he is now recuperating at his own home here near the Common. 'Tis not dangerous. He will not lose the leg, ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler

... ex-convicts (John Gabriel Borkman), people with ideas in advance of their time (Ghosts), and a host of other characters that are usually considered dangerous to society. In order that the dramatic struggle might be tense, the dramatists have been forced to strengthen the cases of their characters so as to suggest that, perhaps, in the special situations cited, the outcasts were right and society was wrong. Of course ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... has placed this famous Religious-Historical Romance on a height of pre-eminence which no other novel of its time has reached. The clashing of rivalry and the deepest human passions, the perfect reproduction of brilliant Roman life, and the tense, fierce atmosphere of the arena have kept their deep fascination. ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.

... by Harriet Prescott Spofford, is a work of unique quality, being really a poem in the guise of a prose novel. The thought is tense and sublimated, and the style glowing, musical and polished. There is abundant invention in the story, and nothing of common-place and indolent imitation which in the case of ordinary raconteurs contributes so largely to swell the bulk of results. The narrative ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... Logansport (Ind.) Journal: "A tense story, founded on PORTER EMERSON BROWNE'S play, is full of tremendous situations, and preaches a great sermon." 12mo, cloth bound, with six illustrations from scenes ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart

... the dancers, or at least the parts that we could see, became tense and rigid. A soft hiss went round the circle, and once again the wriggling movement started. But this time the six went forward instead of backward. They broke out of the circular formation, and in a long glistening ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer

... the blue wreaths that ascended from the sanctuary in a fragrant cloud, lingering over the congregation. The celebrant offered the bread and wine to Our Father in Heaven. And all this took time; the children were tired by their tense concentration; their prayers had all been said two and three times over; and they were now vacantly waiting and longing, looking at their clothes, at the stained-glass windows in the choir or St. Anne in her crimson cloak, or counting the stars that were painted ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels

... furniture and the boards creaked and sprung between the yawling of the wind among the chimneys, the rattle of the thunder and the pelting of the rain. It was a time to quicken the steadiest pulse, and when the crucial moment came, when a pebble suddenly rang against the pane with a sound that the tense waiting magnified into a shivering crash, Hollyer leapt from the bed ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah

... from his seat, and for the briefest possible space the three men stood thus, facing each other, as if uncertain how to act. Then the tense silence of the dining-room was broken by the loud ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees

... Amalek. Yet strove the sun-like king, nor rested hand Till yellow evening filled the level land. Then Judah reeled before a biting hail Of sudden arrows shot from Achor's vale, Where Libnah, lapped in blood from thigh to heel, Drew the tense string, and pierced the quivering steel. There fell the sons of Saul, and, man by man, The chiefs of Israel, up to Jonathan; And while swift Achish stooped and caught the spoil, Ten chosen archers, red with sanguine toil, Sped after Saul, who, faint and sick, ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall

... A. F——'was' also very handsome. It is melancholy to talk of women in the past tense. What a pity, that of all flowers, none fade so soon as beauty! Poor Lady A. F—has not got married. Do you know, I once had some thoughts of her as a wife; not that I was in love, as people call it, but I had argued myself into a belief that I ought to marry, and, meeting her very ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron



Words linked to "Tense" :   affect, suspenseful, itchy, phonetics, pumped-up, aroused, pumped, syntactic category, perfective, change state, unrelaxed, edgy, tensor, tighten, antsy, isotonic, tension, past, lax, imperfect, perfect, relaxed, cliff-hanging, extend, electric, tight, strained, change, unstrain, present, modify, highly strung, constricted, fidgety, wound up, nervous, future, overstrung, nervy, suspensive, uneasy, turn, alter, stretch, tensity, aorist, grammatical category, wired, agitated, relax, pumped up, progressive, nail-biting, jittery, restive, taut, high-strung, jumpy, fretful, uptight



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com