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






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fledgling" Quotes from Famous Books



... become so deep they could no longer see over them, ministers awakening to the fact that they had given all their store and must get a new supply, business men aware of a call to another field of action— working with a consistent earnestness the average fledgling freshman cannot imagine—he is not old enough; yet generally the tendency is to exclude such students, unless they will go back and do the arduous, and often for them useless, work of preparing to pass the examinations for entrance to the freshman class. That, too, ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs

... having annually frosted his feet for some odd centuries—boy and man—we can fancy with what quiet delight he was wont to practise his prognosticating facilities on "the boys," forecasting the coming of the then fledgling cyclone and the gosling blizzard, and doubtless even telling the day of the month by the way his heels itched. And with what wonderment and awe must old chronic maladies have regarded him—tackling him singly or in solid ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley

... sleep and recent bath enhancing the childish purity of her skin, and with her blue eyes full of content, Cherry was a picture of exquisite youth and grace and charm. It was not the less winning because she seemed genuinely unconscious of it to-day; perhaps before the girls and Anne's precise little fledgling lawyer no self-conscious thought of conquest ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris

... moment that she knew he was coming a strange stillness seemed to fall upon the child. She had grown long-legged and was at the fledgling stage when even a pretty girl sometimes looks plain, and she, who had as yet no claim to beauty, was at her worst. She was quite aware of it, with her intense soul-worship of all beautiful things. Some unreasoned impulse ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn

... however, could look in the refined face of Walter Colman and imagine him cherishing sordid views of life. Asked what of all things he most admired, he might truly answer, "The imaginative intellect." He was a fledgling poet. He worshiped what he called thoughts, would rave about a thought in the abstract, apostrophize an uncaught idea. When a concrete thinkable one fell to him, he was jubilant over the isolate thing, and with his joy value had ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... And while the fledgling officers are going on with their billeting, we hear the t-r-r-t of a machine-gun at a machine-gun school about a mile distant, where picked men also from the trenches receive instruction in the use of an arm new to them. There are other schools within sound of the ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

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

... April, when they forcibly ejected the young doves. He said that in spring he always picked up a good many young doves, often unfledged, thrown down by the dawn. I did not doubt his story. I had just found a young bird myself—a little blue-skinned, yellow-mouthed fledgling which had fallen sixty or seventy feet on to the gravel below. But in June, he said, when the daws brought off their young, the doves entered into possession once more, and were then permitted to rear their ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... seemed to express all the joy of spring mornings and clear sunshine and bursting blossoms, blended with all that I guessed of the songs of angels, and with all that I had heard and believed, in my fledgling soul, of the glorious One who was born in a manger and died on a cross, that He might reign in human hearts as a king. I wondered why the people did not sing "Hallelujah" more. It seemed like a word sent straight down to ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom

... priori probability in their favour. Dismiss your idols. Give every opinion its fair chance of success—especially when it seems to you both wicked and ridiculous, recollecting that it is better to let five hundred crude guesses run loose about the world unclad, than to crush one fledgling truth in its callow condition. To the Greeks, foolishness: to the Jews, a stumbling-block. If you can't be one of the prophets yourself, you can at least abstain from helping ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... that unworldly fledgling know what Skippy suffered? The forty-eight hours of the Thanksgiving vacation had been like a narcotic dream. He had been under the same roof with her, sat by her side in the darkened theatre and thrilled at the low sobby ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... native freedom of the skies, like the spotted-breasted, circle-carolling lark, the thicket-haunting blackbird, and the sweet-throated thrush.—It would have afforded her no pleasure to prison up one of these in a cage. But, a little fledgling that had never known what it was to roam at its own sweet will, and who, when offered the liberty of the air, would hardly care to "take advantage of the situation;" that would be the bird which she would like to ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson

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

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

... no proof that Luke Mellows would have amounted to much. Perhaps, if he had ventured over the nest's edge, he would have perished on the ground, trampled into dust by the fameward mob, or devoured by the critics that pounce upon every fledgling and suck the heart out of all that ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... you vanitatious creature? Against babes of your tender age, I long ago became hurt-proof"—he gaily lied to her. "What do you take me for?—A fledgling like the Ditton boy, or poor Harry Ellice, with whose adolescent affections you so heartlessly played chuck-farthing at our incomparable Henrietta's party to-night?—No, no—but joking apart, what exactly is it you want me to do for you? Take you to Marseilles for the day, perhaps, to meet this ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... kingbird. I saw them assail not only the big but the small hawks with fearlessness, driving them in headlong flight. They not only capture insects, but pounce on mice, small frogs, lizards, and little snakes, rob birds' nests of the fledgling young, and catch tadpoles ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

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

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

... not come to us in visible form to tell us in an audible voice that to cry out to him in sore pain and distress is unlawful. How, then, do we know this thing? For a child cries to its mother, and a fledgling in the nest to its parent bird; and he is infinitely more to us than parent to child—infinitely stronger to help, and knows our griefs as no fellow-mortal can know them. May we not, then, believe, without hurt to our souls, that the cry of one of his children in affliction ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson

... questions. 'This bottle's corked,' says Snobling; and Mr. Sly, the butler, taking it away, returns presently with the same wine in another jug, which the young amateur pronounces excellent. 'Hang champagne!' says Fledgling, 'it's only fit for gals and children. Give me pale sherry at dinner, and my twenty-three claret afterwards.' 'What's port now?' says Gosling; 'disgusting thick sweet stuff—where's the old dry wine one USED to get?' Until the last twelvemonth, Fledgling drank small-beer ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray

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

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

... arrogance about you, Marius," she told him, quietly. "You, a fledgling, would teach me, a woman, the ways of a woman's heart! It is a thing you may ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini

... no parallel. Pardieu, her eyes were amethysts, her lips were red as the berries of a holly tree. Her hair blazed in the light, bright as the sunflower glows; her skin was whiter than milk; the down of a fledgling bird was not more grateful to the touch than were her hands. There was never any person more delightful to gaze upon, and whosoever beheld her forthwith desired to render love ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al

... [Sun] /adj./ Concentrating, usually so heavily and for so long that everything outside the focus area is missed. See also {hack mode} and {larval stage}, although this mode is hardly confined to fledgling hackers. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... Master. In fact, to give all the odd and whimsical names invented by Dickens would be to publish a book, for he compiled an indexed volume of names from which he drew at will. He used, however, but a fraction of his list. The rest are wisely kept from the public, else, forsooth, the fledgling writers of penny-shockers would seize ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... His soreness had passed from the green and superficially painful stage to the deeper ache of bruised bones. He walked with a limp, stiff and stoved in his joints as a foundered horse. But his hands and arms had recovered their suppleness, and, like an overgrown fledgling at the edge of the nest, he was ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden

... not understand why she was not engaged to one or other of the whilom visitors at the cottage, but comforted herself with the reflection that there were doubtless many rich husbands in England. Bluebell, like her father, seemed of a roving disposition, and she must let her fledgling try ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... what makes me fear most are the field-mice and the snakes. They make great havoc in our nests when they discover them. Many a tiny fledgling has been swallowed by a great creeping, crawling snake. Many a beautiful egg has been eaten by the hungry ...
— Stories of Birds • Lenore Elizabeth Mulets

... circumstances, either for the better or for the worse; and oftentimes by sorrows. The straw is pulled out of the nest, and it is not so comfortable to lie in; or a bit of it develops a sharp point that runs into the half-feathered skin, and makes the fledgling glad to come forth into the air. We all shrink from change. What should we do if we had it not? We should stiffen into habits that would dwarf and weaken us. We all recoil from storms. What should we do if we had them not? Sea and air would stagnate, and become heavy and putrid and pestilential, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... which was not only impossible but utterly unheroic. And the minutes were flying. He would remind her that time does not wait even for Kings, nor would the Orient Express delay its departure by a single second to oblige such a fledgling ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy

... The fledgling baronet, except for his too favourable opinion of himself, in which he was unlike only a very few, and an amount of assumption not small toward his supposed inferiors, was not a disagreeable human, ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... In spite of his fledgling twenty-two years, Seth was an experienced Indian fighter, and Dan Somers knew it; no one better. Seth's father and mother had paid the life penalty seventeen years ago at the hands of the Cheyennes. It was jokingly ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum

... terrorize all intruders. The scientific mind that is unwilling to dismiss any detail of Nature's work as merely arbitrary and haphazard, is greatly exercised over the reason for the existence of crests on birds. But, surely, may not the sight of snake-skins that first greet the eyes of the fledgling flycatchers as they emerge from the shell be a good and sufficient reason why the feathers on their little heads should stand on end? "In the absence of a snake-skin, I have found an onion skin and shad scales in ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan

... Bantams, that were allowed the range of a yard where a fierce bull-terrier was kennelled. The hen had chicks; and, when about three weeks old, one of them strayed into the dog-kennel. The grim beast within took no notice of the tiny fledgling; but, when the anxious mother ventured in to fetch out the truant, with a growl the dog woke, and nearly snapped her asunder in his great jaws. The cock bird saw the tragic fate of its partner; but, nothing daunted, flew at the ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton



Words linked to "Fledgling" :   tyro, newbie, tiro, novice, entrant, newcomer, fledged, fledgeling, mature, unfledged, enlistee, beginner, initiate, freshman, callow, inexperient, neophyte, starter, recruit, inexperienced, young bird



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