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Corduroy   Listen
noun
Corduroy  n.  
1.
A sort of cotton velveteen, having the surface raised in ridges.
2.
pl. Trousers or breeches of corduroy.
Corduroy road, a roadway formed of logs laid side by side across it, as in marshy places; so called from its rough or ribbed surface, resembling corduroy. (U.S.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Corduroy" Quotes from Famous Books



... considered full. The horrors of that night's journey I shall not easily forget. The road lay almost the whole way through swamps, and was frequently itself under water. It was made of logs of wood (a corduroy road), and so dreadfully rough and unequal, that the drawing a coach over it at all seemed perfectly miraculous. I expected every moment that we must be overturned into the marsh, through which we splashed, with hardly any intermission, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... toscano cigar from his waistcoat pocket, and began to smoke with great gusto. A man of means, I concluded, to be able to smoke at this hour of an ordinary week-day. He was warmly dressed, with flowing brown tie and opulent vest and corduroy trousers. His feet were encased in rough riding-boots. Some peasant proprietor, very likely, who rode his own horses. Was he going to tell me anything of interest about Artena? Presumably not. He said never another ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... the ground soft in places, so that in creek valleys stretches of corduroy sometimes had to be laid down. The high waters made even the lesser fords difficult and dangerous, and all knew that between them and the Platte ran several strong and capricious rivers, making in general ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough

... first dollar. He wears the same corduroy pants that Uncle Ben gave him on his twenty-first birthday. If we had the time he would tell us his personal experiences with every celebrity in the circus world. We haven't the time, and we've got ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney

... he was asked to go to Ohio and become the president of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, he accepted. Singularly dependent upon his family, Catharine and Harriet must needs go with him to the new home. The journey was a toilsome one, over the corduroy roads and across the mountains by stagecoach. Finally they were settled in a pleasant house on Walnut Hills, one of the suburbs of the city, and the sisters ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton

... of the march will permit, bridges are made over such streams, either by the engineers of the army, or detachments from the various corps which are passing upon the roads. They are simple 'corduroy bridges,' and can be laid very expeditiously. Two or three piers of stones and logs are placed in the stream, string pieces are stretched upon them, and cross pieces of small round logs laid down for the flooring. The most extensive bridges of this kind used by the Army of the Potomac were ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... study appearances one way, and they do another; but it comes to the same thing, so far as I am concerned. One day I hope to be able to give it up and retire; when I do I shall wear corduroy breeches and if I happen to be in the kitchen eating onions when people come to see me, I shall call them in and ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad

... vacantly up the street until the gathering excitement of his neighbours aroused new feelings. Vanity stirred within him, and leaning casually against the door-post he yawned and looked at the chimney-pots opposite. A neighbour in a pair of corduroy trousers, supported by one brace worn diagonally, ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs

... the tenderfoot lady's trunk. In it she found everything needful for complete change, and a variety of garments to boot. Folded in the bottom of the trunk was a gray cloth skirt and a short blue silk kimono. There was a coat and skirt, too, of brown corduroy. But the feminine instinct asserted itself, and she laid out the gray skirt ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... whose truth I needed no further proof of. Its first line apostrophises the 'Gods and little fishes.' My chief need was for the garment which completes the rhyme. Indians, having no use for corduroy small clothes, I speedily donned mine. Next I quietly but quickly snatched up William's rifle, and presented it to Robinson Crusoe, patting him on the back as if with honours of knighthood. The dispossessed was not well pleased, but Sir Robinson was; and, to all appearances, he was a man ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... whose names are known in every civilized nation on the globe, but none shines with the luster which surrounds Miss Anthony." She began by recalling her visit in 1871, when Mrs. Duniway and she made a speaking tour of six weeks in the State; the long stage rides over the corduroy roads, the prejudice encountered but personal friendliness and large audiences everywhere, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... features, a strong mouth, and alert, flashing eyes, that denoted a quick, nervous energy. In repose his face was serious; when he smiled, revealing fine strong teeth, it was prepossessing. He wore his hair rather long, and with his loose corduroy jacket, top boots, and cowboy hat, suggested the Western ranchman. The girls of Bismarck were all in love with him, and his mere presence doubled the business of the store, but the young man resisted all feminine blandishments. He was ambitious, ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow

... the Room was kept by Richard Moxhay, the mason, who was of a generation younger than Mr. Petherbridge, but yet 'getting on in years'. Moxhay, I cannot tell why, was always dressed in white corduroy, on which any stain of Devonshire scarlet mud was painfully conspicuous; when he was smartened up, his appearance suggested that somebody had given him a coating of that rich Western whitewash which ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... prairie land of Manitoba. They were about three months on the way, arriving at Port Garry on the 24th of August. During this time it became necessary for the men to cut trails through brake and bramble, construct corduroy roads, build boats, ascend dangerous rapids, portage stores and supplies over almost insurmountable places, meanwhile fighting mosquitoes and black flies, and encountering countless dangers, all of which they cheerfully performed ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald

... my instruments under a tree; Mr. Barnes, ever active and ready, floored the tent with logs of wood, and I laid a "corduroy road" of the same ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... that 'that would do,' and 'it was all right.' Certainly the hardest creditor would not have been disposed (even if he had been legally entitled) to avail himself of my poor white hat, little jacket, or corduroy trowsers. But I had a fat old silver watch in my pocket, which had been given me by my grandmother before the blacking-days, and I had entertained my doubts as I went along whether that valuable possession might not bring me over the twenty ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... and shoulders I wore a garment familiarly known as a "cord jacket"—a roundabout of corduroy cloth, such as boys in the humbler ranks of life use to wear, or did when I was a boy. It was my everyday suit, and after my poor mother's death it had come to be my Sunday wear as well. Let us say nothing to disparage ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid

... visiting doodle into a skeleton, the "Lune Rousse," with its mean Marie Lloyd species of lyrical concupiscence, the "Quat'-z-Arts," with its charge of two francs the glass of beer and its concourse of loafers dressed up like Harry B. Smith "poets," in black velvet, corduroy grimpants and wiggy hirsutal cascades to impress "atmosphere" on the minds of the attendant citizenry of Louisville. And gone, too, with the song of Clichy, is the song from the heart of St. Michel, the song from the heart of St. Germain. ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright

... said, looking after the pursy figure of the miller in his floury canvas round-about and corduroy trowsers, trotting up and ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various

... forthcoming the two mounted police rode into camp. They were bronzed, burly men, arrayed in a corduroy uniform, with a wide felt hat bearing a large Imperial crown in gilt as a badge, and were fully armed with Mauser rifles, ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell

... an empty tobacco sack, worn like an amulet around her fat neck and resting on her bosom, Carolina carried some twenty-eight dollars earned as a laundress to Kay and her mother; while in the pocket of Pablo's new corduroy breeches reposed the two hundred-dollar bills; given him by the altogether inexplicable Senor Parker. Knowing Brother Anthony to be absolutely penniless (for he had taken the vow of poverty) Pablo suffered keenly in the realization ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... Sir Harry, came hitching and limping along, all strings, and tapes, and ends, as usual, followed by Mr. Sponge in the strict and severe order of sporting costume; double-stitched, back-stitched, sleeve-strapped, pull-devil, pull-baker coat, broad corduroy vest with fox-teeth buttons, still broader corded breeches, and the redoubtable vinegar tops. "Now we're all ready!" exclaimed Bob, working his arms as if anxious to be off, and giving a shrill shilling-gallery whistle with his fingers, causing the ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... evidently thought it manly and high-spirited to swear at their servants, and who were incapable of appreciating any anecdote which was not profane or coarse; and I have met, as all who go amongst the poor have met, men who well deserved that noble epithet in cottages and corduroy. Who has not seen illustrious snobs in satin, and sweet, modest gentlewomen in homely print and serge? A gentleman! There's no title shouted at a reception so grand in my idea as this; and yet, methinks, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... Grummit sat in the kitchen with his corduroy-clad legs stretched on the fender. His wife's half-eaten dinner was getting cold on the table; Mr. Grummit, who was badly in need of cheering up, emptied her half-empty glass of beer and wiped his lips with the ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs

... sitting around kind of humble and sheepish. He wore his Prince Albert coat and his silk hat. He didn't want to—he thought it wasn't the thing for a picnic, but I held him up to it, for I didn't want the people to see him in his corduroy hunting suit. I know how impressed they would be with the fine clothes, and I was determined they should ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung

... round and beheld a boy of about his own age and size in a pair of worn corduroy knickerbockers and a guernsey, who was regarding him from fierce blue eyes under a shock of curly ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... vermouth,' cries a man in velveteen, adding in a tone of apologetic afterthought, 'un double, s'il vous plait.' 'Where are you working?' asks one in pure white linen from top to toe. 'At the Carrefour de l'Epine,' returns the other in corduroy (they are all gaitered, by the way). 'I couldn't do a thing to it. I ran out of white. Where were you?' 'I wasn't working. I was looking for motives.' Here is an outbreak of jubilation, and a lot of men clustering together about some new- comer with outstretched hands; perhaps the 'correspondence' ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... foreman, an' one day he was on his way to the office to make a report to Dick when this imitation dog came sailin' around the corner an' took a grab at his leg. He had a brand-new pair of pants on, an' they was outside his boots. You know how corduroy tears when the dye has been a bit too progressive. Well, the pup loosened up a piece like a section of pie. Bill Andrews lost his Christian fortitude, give that toy muff a kick that landed him fifteen feet—an' Barbie came around the corner, an' Dick came out of the office ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason

... stood on the steps awaiting my approach. One orderly led his horse away as I rode up, but the exclamation of disgust for the mud that rose to my lips never passed them. As I glanced up at this "farmer" in corduroy small-clothes, red plush waistcoat, rough riding-boots splashed with mud, he had ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon

... buckskin, moccasins of moose-hide, and blue cloth leggings. A fur cap was on my head, and a strip of Scotch plaid about my neck. Baptiste was dressed like all the company's voyageurs and hunters, in a blue capote, red flannel shirt, beaded corduroy trousers and fringed leggings, and a cap decked out with feathers. We each carried a musket and a hunting knife, a powder horn, and ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon

... sickening sense of insecurity, and found herself hanging, bruised and breathless, across the back of the driving-seat. The automobile was bucking and bumping, as if the pavement had been turned into a corduroy road; then it came to a pause, half in the ditch. Merkle was jammed into an awkward coil on the floor of the tonneau, but raised himself, swearing softly. The other car held to its course, and whizzed onward, leaving in its wake a drunken ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach

... desk Gaston was sitting on the evening that Jude and Joyce were clinging to each other in the house under the maples. His hands were plunged deep in the pockets of his corduroy trousers, his long legs extended, and his head thrown back; he was smoking one of his memory-filled pipes, and his eyes were fixed upon the rafters of ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock

... his place of hiding, Johnny recovered his blouse, and having secured from it certain papers, which were of the utmost importance to him, he pinned them in a pocket of his shirt. He next selected a pair of wolf skin trousers, a pair of corduroy trousers, one pair of deer skin boots and two ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell

... the costume of the trainer, I recommend a close cap, a stout pair of boots, short trousers or breeches of stout tweed or corduroy, a short jacket with pockets outside, one to hold the straps and gloves, the other a few pieces of carrot to reward the pupil. A pocket-handkerchief should be handy to wipe your perspiring brow. A trainer ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey

... of one of our four-sided razor-strops. The flat surfaces of the implement are marked with shallow parallel indentations, varying in depth on the different sides, so as to be adapted to the several stages of the operation. These marks produce the corduroy sort of stripes discernible in the tappa in its finished state. After being beaten in the manner I have described, the material soon becomes blended in one mass, which, moistened occasionally with water, is at intervals hammered out, ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... fortifications and earth-works for Gen. Grant in front of Vicksburg. The works in and about Nashville were cast up by the strong arm and willing hand of the loyal Blacks. Dutch Gap was dug by Negroes, and miles of earthworks, fortifications, and corduroy-roads were made by Negroes. They did fatigue duty in every department of the Union army. Wherever a Negro appeared with a shovel in his hand, a white soldier took his gun and returned to the ranks. There were 200,000 Negroes in the camps and employ of the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams

... upon the words that Maria Angelina was beginning to frame and left her looking helplessly at a pair of corduroy knickerbockers, a blue flannel shirt, a strange undergarment, plaid golf stockings and a ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley

... a kind of cotton stuff, including corduroy, velveteen, etc. 2. Re-solved', made clear, disentangled. 4. De-form'i-ties, misshapen persons. Stunt'ed, checked in growth. Mea'ger, thin, lean. 5. Gro-tesque' (pro. gro-tesk'), fanciful, absurd. Ad-min'is-tered, gave, dispensed. In-stall'ment (literally, part of a debt), ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... side, and between them they speedily formed a regular corduroy road out to where Ralph stood, watching ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes

... came suddenly into full view of the pass. It lay there just below her; there could be no mistake. A stony road wound along the stream, flanked by forest-clad heights; she recognized the timber bridge over the ravine, which had been described to her, the corduroy way across the swamp, the single, squat cabin crowning a half-cleared hillock. She realized at a glance the awful trap that this silent, deadly place could be turned into; for one rushing moment her widening eyes could almost see blue masses of men in disorder, crushed into ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers

... were placed side by side, so as to form a sort of bridge or causeway, so rough as to test and not unfrequently to destroy the wheels of the rude vehicles of the country. These obtained and to this day receive the sobriquet of Georgia railroads or corduroy turnpikes. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... rapidly. They crossed the road at Hyde Park Corner, and entered the Park, in which were a number of people going home from work; men in corduroy trousers, caked with dried mud, and carrying tin cans slung over their shoulders, and flat panniers, in which lay their tools. Some of the younger ones talked loudly or whistled shrilly as ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... needs support, and this revetting may be done with any of the following materials: Sod; corduroy of logs laid lengthwise; sand bags (size 20 in. x 10 in. x 5 in.); galvanized iron; chicken wire and cloth made in a frame about six feet long; hurdles, wicker mats made by driving three-inch stakes into the ground, leaving uprights ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker

... twenty-four shillings, flour, thirty-six shillings a barrel, bacon sixpence and fresh pork and buffalo beef threepence a pound. Boone procured for his customers or for himself such articles as linen, cloth, flannel, corduroy, chintz, calico, broadcloth, and velvet at prices varying according to the quality, from three to thirty shillings a yard; and there was also evidently a ready market for "tea ware," knives and forks, scissors, buttons, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt

... the men was a fat farmer in a long blouse, with a jovial, red face, framed in white whiskers. The other was younger, was dressed in corduroy and had lean, yellow, cross-grained features. Each of them carried a gun slung over his shoulder. Between them was a short, slender young woman, in a brown cloak and a fur cap, whose rather thin and extremely pale face ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc

... revealed a cushion which just fitted the window-seat, not surprising in view of the fact that the window-seats throughout the dormitories were fairly uniform in size. The cushion cost them two dollars. It was covered with faded green corduroy and in places was pretty well flattened out by much service. But it answered their purpose and really looked quite fine when in place. Tom cast doubts on the positive assertion of the seller that it was filled with genuine hair, but Steve said that didn't matter as long as ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour

... French-embroidered in little scallops, with fresh white ribbons run in, was laid out on the bed in neat piles. There was also a gray corduroy dressing-gown, ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey

... thoroughfare, avenue, highroad, highway, street, lane, passage, artery, roadstead, boulevard, esplanade, turnpike, tramroad, causeway, corduroy ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... military step; gay, baggy gentlemen from St Cyr, looking like newly-painted wooden soldiers; students from the Ecole Polytechnique; students from the Lycee St Louis in blue and red; students from Julien's and the Beaux Arts with a plentiful sprinkling of berets and corduroy jackets; and group after group of jingling artillery officers in scarlet and black, or hussars and chasseurs in pale turquoise, strolled and idled up and down the terrace, or watched the toy yachts braving the furies of ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers

... another and yet another—eight or ten dogs to each long, low toboggan that slid along loaded and heaped with peltry. Beside each sleigh emerged out of the haze the form of the driver—a swarthy fellow, on snow-shoes, with hair bound back by a red scarf, and corduroy trousers belted in by another red scarf, and fur gauntlets to his elbows—flourishing his whip and yelling, in a high, snarling falsetto, 'marche! marche!'—the rallying-cry of the French wood-runner since first he set out from Quebec in the sixteen-hundreds ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut

... with a very old and battered Panama hat, through several broad holes in which his red hair bristled out in a most comic fashion, and over his blue flannel shirt a large red beard flowed almost to his waist. Terence was walking by the side of the second cart in corduroy breeches and gaiters and blue coat, with a high black hat, battered and bruised out of all shape, on his head. In his hand he held a favourite shillelah, which he had brought with him from his native land, and with the end of which he occasionally ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty

... schoolmaster was not to be discovered. Hans Van Ripper, as executor of his estate, examined the bundle which contained all his worldly effects. They consisted of two shirts and a half; two stocks for the neck; a pair or two of worsted stockings; an old pair of corduroy small-clothes; a rusty razor; a book of psalm tunes full of dog's-ears; and a broken pitch-pipe. As to the books and furniture of the schoolhouse, they belonged to the community, excepting Cotton Mather's History ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... pomatum-pots, spencers, white satin shoes, false fronts, the old flaccid boneless stays tied up in faded riband, the dusky fans, the old forty-years-old baby linen, the letters of Sir George when he was young, the doll of poor Maria who died in 1803, Frederick's first corduroy breeches, and the newspaper which contains the account of his distinguishing himself at the siege of Seringapatam. All these lie somewhere, damp and squeezed down into glum old presses and wardrobes. At that glass the wife has sat many times these fifty years; in that old ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray

... come on the black-gowned floor clerk, deep in murmured conversation with the valet, and she had seemed not to see Sophy at all as she groped subconsciously for the key along the rows of keyboxes. She had seen the workmen in their absurdly baggy corduroy trousers and grimy shirts strolling along arm in arm with the women of their class—those untidy women with the tidy hair. Bareheaded and happy, they strolled along, a strange contrast to the glitter of the fashionable boulevard, stopping now and ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber

... bacon-devouring ruffian of a miller is actually causing this garment to be carried through the village and cried by the town-crier. And we blush to be obliged to say that the demoralized miller never offered to return the banknotes, although he was so mighty scrupulous in endeavoring to find an owner for the corduroy portfolio in which he ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray

... tea-kettle groom!" and at night some mischievous boy chalked on the black door of the stable a large white tea-kettle, and next morning a drunken, idle fellow, with a clay pipe in his mouth, and a dirty pair of corduroy trousers, no coat, but a shirt very open at the chest, showing inflamed skin, the effect of drink, inspected that work of art with blinking eyes and vacillating toes, and said, "This comes of a chap doing too much. ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade

... treacherous things, for their sides were steep and hard to climb. The darkness made it doubly hard, and sometimes we were pretty well frightened as we let ourselves down a greasy clay bank into the muddy water. Later on we found some corduroy bridges that the hay-makers had put over ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung

... Union, and here and there from the out-going stream, a man or woman of middle-age turned aside to enter the gate of the big brick building, in whose side-garden men were working, dressed in the bottle-green corduroy of the institution. ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone

... the usher, and those of Jack's family who, as we have seen already, had made up their minds to give the usher possession, to enter. But having entered, the confusion and bedevilment was ten times worse than even in the churchyard itself. The benches were lined with a pack of overgrown rascals in corduroy vestments, and with leather at the knees, from all the neighbouring villages; in a gallery at one end sat a Scotch bagpiper, flanked by a blind fiddler, and an itinerant performer on the hurdygurdy, accompanied by his monkey—who in the course of his circuit through the village, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various

... the Lachine in 1821-25, the Welland around Niagara Falls in 1824-29, and the Rideau, as a military undertaking, in 1826-32, all in response to the stimulus given by De Witt Clinton, who had begun the "Erie Ditch" in 1817. On land, road making made slower progress. The blazed trail gave way to the corduroy road, and the pack horse to the oxcart or the stage. Upper Canada had the honor of inventing, in 1835, the plank road, which for some years thereafter became the fashion through the forested States to the south. But at best neither roads nor vehicles were ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton

... brown flannel shirt he wore fitted easily over well knit muscles and exactly matched the brown of the abundant wavy hair in which the morning sun was setting glints of gold as he knelt before the fire and deftly completed his cookery. His soft wide-brimmed felt hat pushed far back on the head, the corduroy trousers, leather chaps and belt with brace of pistols all fitted into the picture and made the girl feel that she had suddenly left the earth where she had heretofore lived and been dropped into an unknown land with a strong kind angel to ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill

... crab-apples and persimmons at the hoosier and the preacher; the young lady dropped the green curtain of her bonnet over her pretty face, and leaned back in her seat to nod and dream over japonicas and jumbles, pantalets and poetry; the old gentleman, proprietor of the Bardolph nose, looked out at the corduroy and swashes; the gambler fell off into a doze, and the circus convoy followed suit, leaving the preacher and me vis-a-vis and saying nothing to nobody. 'Indiany,' he stuck his mug out of the window and criticized the cattle we now and then passed. I was wishing somebody would give the conversation ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various

... intermediate were such as the macadamized and locomotive imagination of the present day cannot encompass. A backwoodsman, laden with his axe, wading here, ploutering there, stumbling over rotted trees, protruding stumps, a bit of half-submerged corduroy road for one short space, then an adhesive clay bank, then a mile or two or more of black muck swamp, may, possibly,—clay-clogged and footsore, and with much pain in the small of his back,—find himself ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon

... and then, as he paused to wipe the sweat from his eyes, Denver saw that his activities were being noted. Drusilla was looking on from the trail below, and apparently with the greatest interest. She was dressed in a corduroy suit, with a broad sombrero against the sun; and as she came up the slope she leapt from rock to rock in a heavy pair of boys' high boots. There was nothing of the singer about her now, nor of the filmy-clad barefooted dancer; the jagged edge of old Pinal would ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge

... of that glass that I could see how the boy fastened up his trousers with one strap and a piece of string, for he had no braces, and there were no brace buttons. Those corduroy trousers had been made for somebody else, I should say for a man, and pieces of the legs had been cut off, and the upper part came well over his back and chest. He had no waistcoat, but he wore a jacket that must have belonged to a man. It was a jacket that was fustian behind, ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn

... the threshold he turned abruptly and looked back. His forehead was furrowed like a corduroy road and the one rampant question in his mind at the moment seemed to be mired hopelessly between his ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... bull-necked, thickset, broad-shouldered man, with coarse black hair and heavy, matted beard. His nose was flat on his face, his chin was square, and he looked exactly like a prize-fighter. He had a red shirt, with a yellow spotted handkerchief flung about his neck, and his corduroy trowsers were tucked into a ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille

... was all their actions connotated. His hat was a light fawn, stiff-rimmed John B. Stetson, circled by a band of Mexican stamped leather. Over a blue flannel shirt, set off by a drooping Windsor tie, was a rough-and-ready coat of large-ribbed corduroy. Pants of the same material were thrust into high-laced shoes of the sort worn by surveyors, explorers, ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London

... Donald washed, and then strolled over to the hotel to meet his father. Old Hector grinned as Donald, in woolen shirt, mackinaw, corduroy trousers, and half-boots came into the little lobby, for in his son he saw a replica of himself ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... able to deny, and one less like a thief would have been hard to find. His hands were very rough and ingrained with black; his fingers were long, but chopped off square at the points, and had no resemblance to the long, tapering fingers of an artist or pickpocket. His clothes were of corduroy, not very grimy, because of the huge apron of thick leather he wore at his work, but they looked none the better that he had topped them with his tall Sunday hat. His complexion was a mixture of brown and browner; ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... that of a little man, very much under-sized, with a hunch back and a large, dark, melancholy face covered profusely with black hair. He wore corduroy trousers and clumsy boots—his feet and hands were enormous—together with a green coat and a red handkerchief which was carelessly twisted round his hairy throat. On his tangled locks—distressingly shaggy ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume

... corduroy breeches, a blue velvet waistcoat, and a light boating-jacket of yellow flannel, your reporter left the Battery at 6 hrs. 22 m, and 5 secs, on Friday morning, and steamed slowly down the bay in the editorial row-boat Punchinelletto, which was manned ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2., No. 32, November 5, 1870 • Various

... gold into his corduroy pocket; "and who do you think brought me these shiners? Why, who but old Peggy, the 'oman wot you put ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the Mulberry Street Bend the sunlight slanted into the heart of New York's Italy. It shone upon bandannas and yellow neckerchiefs; upon swarthy faces and corduroy breeches; upon black-haired girls—mothers at thirteen; upon hosts of bow-legged children rolling in the dirt; upon pedlers' carts and rag-pickers staggering under burdens that threatened to crush them ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... glazed white tile, a yellow-brown coat with three capes, cut pen-wiper fashion, and a pair of corduroy trousers whose fulness concealed in part the ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... one branch of the apple-tree passed; behind his knees another. Between them hung his heavy seat. Whitely a square of it peered downwards; melancholy upon the sward lay the lid of corduroy that should have warmed the space. For ten paces outwards from the tree-trunk there stretched a pitted path. Abiram, as George came, turned at this path's extremity; set his sloe eye upon the dull white patch in Mr. Fletcher's stern; hurled forward up the track; sprang ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson

... changed at the kennels. The same feeder in corduroy and fustian came out of the cooking-house when Vixen opened the five-barred gate. The same groom was lounging in front of the stables, where the horses were kept for the huntsman and his underlings. ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon

... had been forgotten, for they did not give many feasts, and this was one of gratitude. Peter was late, because he had gathered his whole establishment to dress him, including the old groom, who wished him to go in corduroy breeches and top boots, and Speug was polished to the extent of shining. He was also so modest that he would not speak, nor even look, and when Nestie began to discourse on his goodness he cast glances at the door and ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren

... the Orphanage in an antique, preposterous suit—snuff-coloured coat with lappels, canary waistcoat, and corduroy small-clothes. And they gave him his meals regularly. There were ninety-nine other boys who all throve on the food: but Kit pined. And the ninety-nine, being full of food, made a racket at times; but Kit found it quiet—deathly quiet; and his eyes ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... down the corduroy that crosses the lower end of the Limberlost. At a glance he might have been mistaken for a tramp, but he was truly seeking work. He was intensely eager to belong somewhere and to be attached to almost any enterprise that would ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter

... to Toby's place, the main trail through the swamp going right by the hummock on which the old man's farm was situated. She knew there was a corduroy road most of the way—that is, a road built of logs laid side by side directly over the miry ground. Save in very wet weather this road ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr

... intelligence and likewise of wildness in the countenance of the elder female, whose complexion and hair were rather dark. The man was about the same age as the elder woman; he had rather a sharp look, and was dressed in hat, white frock-coat, corduroy breeches, long stockings and shoes. I gave them the seal ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... magic. He was still stiff, indeed, and remained lame in one leg for ten days or more, but, with the exception of an aching of the throat where Xavier had gripped him, no other ill effects were left. Among the booty of the slave camp was a good supply of clothing, flannel shirts, corduroy suits, and hats. Casting aside the rags of the Portuguese uniform in which he had disguised himself, Leonard put on some of these articles and reappeared in the camp dressed like an ordinary English colonist, roughly ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard

... its back, was ticking on the dresser. The convict slipped it into his pocket, and looked round for more, opening drawers, looking under dish-covers. Finding nothing, he sat again on the table, with his hands in the pockets of his velveteen corduroy coat. His face-twist grew more marked as he wrinkled the setting of a calculating eye. "I should have to square it with Miss Juliar," said he, in soliloquy. He was evidently clear about ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... begin Western life, Bob quickly took off his new suit and put on a pair of the corduroy trousers and one of the blue flannel shirts Mr. Nichols had bought him and then proudly placed on his head ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster

... mother, the precise beautiful broidery ... so like herself, minute, mathematical, not significant.... And in the kitchen was the red turf, and the flitches of bacon in the eaves, and the thick servant girls hustling impatiently, and the servant boys in their corduroy trousers bound with rushes at the knee ... their heavy brogues, their honest jests of Rabelais ... and in the fold the silent sheep, and great solemn cows warm ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... all this economy there is an air of comfort, a complete absence of squalor. In cold weather the school-girls wear snug hoods, or little fur turbans; and boys have the picturesque and almost indestructible berets of cloth or corduroy. Cloth boots that will conveniently slip inside sabots for outdoor use are greatly in vogue, and the comfortable Capuchin cloaks—whose peaked hood can be drawn over the head, thus obviating the use of umbrellas—are favoured by both ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd

... landscape whirled by; we went through a hundred tunnels (more or less); the little engine gave a shrill little squeak now and then; at old, old railway stations, that remind one agreeably of jails, rough-looking men in black shirt sleeves and corduroy waistcoats ran out to the train to open the carriage doors, and I forgot the gentleman altogether. Till at length we came ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday

... admired contrast to this bewildered drove of half-starved Paddies stood the two immense, broad-shouldered, high-fed Yorkshiremen, dressed in long-tailed coats, corduroy breeches, and yellow-topped boots, each accompanied by a chest of clothes not much less than a pianoforte, and a huge pile of spades, pick-axes, and other implements of husbandry. They possessed money also, and letters of credit, and described themselves as being persons ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall

... General (Grant) who has any luck. The list of discredited commanders good and bad increases. I am weary beyond measure of the kind of life I lead. I learn to-day, May 18th, of the progress of the investment of Vicksburg, and of John as busy at last with his proper work of bridges, corduroy roads and the ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... Everybody, he assured her, was well off in Lowick: not a cottager in those double cottages at a low rent but kept a pig, and the strips of garden at the back were well tended. The small boys wore excellent corduroy, the girls went out as tidy servants, or did a little straw-plaiting at home: no looms here, no Dissent; and though the public disposition was rather towards laying by money than towards spirituality, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... and out-at-elbows jacket was the badge and advertisement of my class, which was their class. It made me of like kind, and in place of the fawning and too respectful attention I had hitherto received, I now shared with them a comradeship. The man in corduroy and dirty neckerchief no longer addressed me as "sir" or "governor." It was "mate" now—and a fine and hearty word, with a tingle to it, and a warmth and gladness, which the other term does not possess. ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... the North of England, women and children are employed in the mines, and there is constant evasion of the laws regulating hours, with a wage as inadequate as the work is heavy. Heavy woollens and corduroy employ a small proportion in their manufacture, wage and hours being the same as ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... at Sir William's new summer-house that he's just built. I don't know just where it is, but it's fourteen miles from the Hall, up somewhere on the Sacondaga Vlaie, where two creeks join. He's made a corduroy road out to it, and he's painted it white and green, and he's been having a sort of fandango out there—a house-warming, I take it. Marinus Folts says he never saw so much drinking in his born days. He'd had his full share himself, I should judge. ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic

... a streamlet trickled from the peat bog above. The house had stood in the same place for two hundred years, and Jos Hughes looked as if he too had lived there for the same length of time. His quaintly cut blue cloth coat adorned with large brass buttons, his knee breeches of corduroy, and grey blue stockings, looking well in keeping with his dwelling, but very out of place behind a counter. His brown wrinkled face and ruddy cheeks were like a shrivelled apple, his shrewd inquisitive eyes peered out through a pair of large brass-rimmed spectacles, and, ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine

... body of the schoolmaster was not to be discovered. Hans Van Ripper, as executor of his estate, examined the bundle which contained all his worldly effects. They consisted of two shirts and a half, two stocks for the neck, a pair or two of worsted stockings, an old pair of corduroy small-clothes, a rusty razor, a book of psalm tunes full of dog's ears, and a broken pitch-pipe. As to the books and furniture of the school-house, they belonged to the community, excepting Cotton Mather's History of Witchcraft, a New England Almanac, and a book of dreams and fortune-telling; ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... receive them. Mr. Petulengro was dressed in Roman fashion, with a somewhat smartly-cut sporting-coat, the buttons of which were half-crowns—and a waistcoat, scarlet and black, the buttons of which were spaded half-guineas; his breeches were of a stuff half velveteen, half corduroy, the cords exceedingly broad. He had leggings of buff cloth, furred at the bottom: and upon his feet were highlows. Under his left arm was a long black whalebone riding-whip, with a red lash, and an immense silver knob. Upon ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow

... seventy-five dollars for a little silk suit. Both were dirt cheap, Florrie agreed. She looked four times at a dear of a hat going begging for seventy dollars, but with only three hundred you have to draw the line somewhere, so Cally simply purchased a plain gray motor-coat lined with gray corduroy, which she really needed, at sixty dollars. She also sought a gift for papa, in recognition of his liberality, and finally selected a silver penknife as just the thing. The knife, luckily enough, could be ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... having dispatched his proclamation to the frontiers, he put on his cocked hat and corduroy small clothes, and, mounting a tall, raw-boned charger, trotted out to his rural retreat of Dog's Misery. Here, like the good Numa, he reposed from the toils of state, taking lessons in government, not from the nymph Egeria, but from the honored ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... a blue cotton shirt and a pair of scanty corduroy knickerbockers, but he wore it with such an unconscious air of purple and fine linen that Miss Trevor was tricked into believing him much better ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... the same year, while driving on a corduroy road in Michigan, I espied a Luna moth on the trunk of a walnut tree close the road. The cold damp location must account for this late emergence; for subsequent events proved that others of the family were as slow in appearing. A storm of protest arose, when I stopped the carriage ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter

... Under the skilful hands of the Russians the rebuilt trenches had taken on a neat and orderly appearance. The earthen walls had been revetted with wire chicken-netting, and instead of tramping through ankle-deep mud, we had beneath our feet neat walks of corduroy. We tramped for what seemed interminable miles in the darkness, always zig-zagging. Now and then we would come upon little fires, discreetly screened, built at the entrances to dugouts burrowed from the trench-walls. Over these fires soldiers in flat caps and belted greatcoats ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell

... there the man caught me up again, and he also came to a stop, between myself and the waggons. He was quite young, probably not more than one or two and twenty, tall and well-built, although he walked with a slouching gait. He wore corduroy trousers fastened round the waist by a narrow strap, and a blue shirt, with an unbuttoned jacket of fustian. On his head was a limp-brimmed, dirty, drab felt hat, and in his left hand he carried a red handkerchief, which apparently contained all his possessions, ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... disclosed some wieners, you concluded he was of the German nation, a short dudeen in an upper vest pocket would seem to indicate that he was an Irishman. His coat was of black cheviot, new, and of the current cut. His vest was of corduroy, of the kind in vogue in the past decade, while his pantaloons, black, with a faint green line in them, were a compromise, being of a non-commital cut that would never be badly out of style in any ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis

... exclaimed Geppetto, all at once rising to his feet, and putting on his old corduroy coat, all patched and darned, he ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi

... a woolen blouse with a scarf round her neck, a short corduroy divided skirt, and boots; and while she talked she energetically heaped up the burning wood in the fireplace, and laid Madeline's clothes at the foot of the bed, and heated a rug and put that on the floor by the bedside. And lastly, with a ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey

... at the tall, dark stranger in the road. She noticed, as if for the first time, his high laced boots, his corduroy trousers fastened in them, his flannel shirt and felt hat. All was fine and different, oh! so different from the ragged ugliness of the hills. That a stranger should be so clad did not interest her, but that her childhood's friend and slave should wear this livery of position shattered the beautiful ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock

... while it swung wide and the candle flame flickered and sputtered in the night air. Roy Glenister stood there, grim and determined, his soft, white Stetson pulled low, his trousers tucked into tan half-boots, in his hand a Winchester rifle. Beneath his corduroy coat she saw a loose cartridge-belt, yellow with shells, and the nickelled flash of a revolver. Without invitation he strode across the threshold, closing the door ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach

... estimation of Mrs. Thomas Savine. Bicycles were not so common a woman's possession in Canada, or elsewhere, then. In fact, there were few roads in British Columbia fit to propel one on. An American friend had sent Miss Savine a wheel which, after a few journeys over a corduroy road, groaned most distressfully whenever she mounted it. Helen desired to ride in to the railroad, but the gaudy machine complained even more than usual, and when at last one of its wheels declined to revolve, Julius ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss

... I arrayed myself in my best attire; which attire, as I well recollect, consisted of a white corduroy jacket, knee-breeches of the same colour and material, and a bright-red waistcoat. A "neat Barcelona," tied carelessly round my neck, and a pair of flaming-red garters, at least two inches broad, wound round my legs just below the knee, and ending in a knot with two dependent ends ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various

... had spoken, a grizzled, weather-beaten little fellow in a corduroy suit and white, broad-brimmed felt hat, turned his steady blue eyes on his questioner a ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine

... gaiters and bright tweeds, like an English tourist, and his face might have belonged to Dagon, idol of the Philistines. A silver snaffle on a heavy leather watch guard which connected the pockets of his corduroy waistcoat, together with a huge gold stirrup in his Ascot tie, sufficiently proclaimed his tastes. But I found myself continually returning to the countenance, and I still think I could have modelled a better face out of putty. The mouth was rather small, thick-tipped, and put in at an odd angle; ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the room—but no tablecloth—at the bottom of which sat a large, bloated, brandy, or rather whisky—faced savage, dressed in a shabby great—coat of the hodden grey worn by the Irish peasantry, dirty swan down vest, and greasy corduroy breeches, worsted stockings, and well—patched shoes; he was smoking a long pipe. Around the table sat about a dozen seamen, from whose wet jackets and trowsers the heat of the blazing fire, that roared up the chimney, sent up a smoky ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... trap. Across his brow ran a white scar that he had got in a fight on the brig. In Cardiff he had felt the need of new clothes and a weapon, and had, by means that would have shocked him a year ago, secured a flannel shirt, a corduroy suit, and a revolver and fifty cartridges from an abandoned pawnbroker's. He also got some soap and had his first real wash for thirteen months in a stream outside the town. The Vigilance bands that had at first shot plunderers very freely ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... new-womanly. Yesterday's pictures are the laughing-stock of the up-to- date artist of to-day, and to-day's art will be sneered at to-morrow. Now it is fashionable to be democratic, to pretend that no virtue or wisdom can exist outside corduroy, and to abuse the middle classes. One season we go slumming, and the next we are all socialists. We think we are thinking; we are simply dressing ourselves up in words we do not understand for the gods ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome

... cold. I was, therefore, prepared to find the men standing in water to the knees, shivering, wretched, sick, and unhappy. I found just the contrary—the trenches were clean, large, and sanitary, although, of course, mud is mud. I found the bottoms of the trenches in every instance corduroy-lined with modern drains, which allowed the feet to keep perfectly dry, and also the large dugouts where the men, except those doing sentry duty, sleep comfortably on dry straw. There are special dugouts for ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... corner next to the river, to receive supplies from the boats. Remnants of the old landing were still to be seen in 1914. Logs and brush were now employed to level down the great horse weeds that filled the lowlands, and corduroy roads made for the passage of the wagons to the uplands at the west. Major General Samuel Wells, Colonel Abraham Owen and Captain Frederick Geiger had now arrived with some of the Kentucky volunteers, and the army, after leaving a guard of eight ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce

... know not why, less glad to see this Professor Willows than Miss Appleby seemed. His long black coat and black tie were fairly proper for a man of erudition; but his hat was soft and broad of brim, and his trousers were of brown corduroy, drawn over high boots. ...
— How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee • Owen Wister

... corduroy breeches, a large hat, a cartridge belt, and is armed with a Winchester rifle. He is a crack shot and has taken charge of the deputies in the wrecked portion of the city. Yesterday afternoon he discovered two men and a woman cutting the finger from a dead woman to get her ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... know well what the men mean when they offend in this manner. And when I think on the subject with deliberation at my own desk, I can not only excuse, but almost approve them. But when one personally encounters this corduroy braggadocio; when the man to whose services one is entitled answers one with determined insolence; when one is bidden to follow "that young lady," meaning the chambermaid, or desired, with a toss of the head, to wait for the "gentleman ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... where there were severe hills we indulged in four horses. The varieties of the jackets of our post-boys, blue or yellow, as supposed to indicate the politics of their inns, were interesting to us, as everything was interesting then. Otherwise their equipment was exactly alike— neat drab corduroy breeches and top-boots, and hats usually white, and they were all boys, though the red faces and grizzled hair of some looked as if they had faced the weather for at ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge

... mysterious personage was still beside the door, leaning against the wall. He was a short, thick-set man of fifty, with red hair, round gray eyes, a broad pug nose, and projecting mouth. He wore a heavy gray coat, despite the heat, and a waistcoat with many brass buttons; also corduroy breeches and riding boots. When they appeared, he started forward with open mouth and eyes, and stared wildly in their faces. They gathered around the poplar-trunks, and waited with some uneasiness to see ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor



Words linked to "Corduroy" :   make, material, wide wale, Bedford cord, construct, route, road, textile, fabric, narrow wale



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