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noun
Hack  n.  
1.
A horse, hackneyed or let out for common hire; also, a horse used in all kinds of work, or a saddle horse, as distinguished from hunting and carriage horses.
2.
A coach or carriage let for hire; a hackney coach; formerly, a coach with two seats inside facing each other; now, usually a taxicab. "On horse, on foot, in hacks and gilded chariots."
3.
Hence: The driver of a hack; a taxi driver; a hackman.
4.
A bookmaker who hires himself out for any sort of literary work; an overworked man; a drudge. "Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed, Who long was a bookseller's hack."
5.
A procuress.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hack" Quotes from Famous Books



... unassuming undress of a white jacket; the British naval officers, with their gay uniforms and careless manners, prying, with a sailor's curiosity, into every pretty face; and now and then a saucy mid, mounted on a hack, dashing between the line of carriages at a full gallop, disturbing their propriety, and checking the cavalcade, to the great consternation, real or assumed, of the ladies. All was gaiety and gladness; on every side was to be ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat

... he mount on that hack, Old Pegasus' back, And of Helicon drink till he burst, Yet a curse of those streams, Poetical dreams, They never can ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding

... present walks, and get you intelligence from the aerial lackey, who is in waiting, what are the thoughts and purposes of any whom you inquire for." I accepted his kind offer, and immediately took him with me in a hack to White's. ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken

... House with its hall swarming like a hive of bees, I drove to the dept in a hack with several fellow-passengers, Mr. Amy, who was executing a commission for me in the town, having promised to meet me there, but, he being detained, I arrived alone, and was deposited among piles of ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... sent two horses on in charge of Bat Smithers, and followed on a pony about fourteen hands high, which he had ridden as a cover hack for the last four years. He did not start till near ten, but he was able to catch Bat with his two horses about a mile and a half on that side of Edgehill. "Have you managed to come along pretty clean?" the master asked as he came ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... challenged any true knight to the combat, but you answer not to the description. I proclaim you publicly in this place as a false and felon knight, and declare you utterly unworthy of my sword. Back to your starting-place, and if the heralds do their duty, they will hack off your spurs, and drive you with ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth

... probably no writer with whose works his life and personality are more intimately connected. It is impossible to consider the one separate from the other. Defoe began to write novels as a tradesman, as a literary hack, and as a reformer. Being dependent on his pen for his bread, he wrote what was likely to bring in the most immediate return. He calculated exactly the value and quality of his wares. He gave to his fictions the same moral object which inspired his own life. ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... the Temple Beau was written by that man of many parts, James Ralph, the hack writer, party journalist and historian, who was in after years to collaborate with Fielding, both as a theatrical manager and as a journalist. Ralph's opening lines are of interest as bearing on Fielding's antagonism to the harlequinades and ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... In the "hack" line of motor-cars was one that answered those requirements, and they fell into it as though it were ...
— The Man Who Could Not Lose • Richard Harding Davis

... any of that which is running over your little neighbour there—that is for the pigs, and for us." Is not this amazing folly? Or again, suppose we were to take a race-horse, a dray-horse, a farmer's horse, a broken-down hack, and a Shetland horse—for these more nearly resemble the various classes of convicts—and say to them, "Horses, you have all offended the laws of horsedom, and stand fully convicted of clover stealing. For this most heinous crime you are each condemned ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous

... three days, travelling day and night, we reached Frederick, Maryland. There we were told that we could take rail-cars to Baltimore, and thence to Washington; but there was also a two-horse hack ready to start for Washington direct. Not having full faith in the novel and dangerous railroad, I stuck to the coach, and in the night reached Gadsby's Hotel ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... one floor to the other. The earth closed up again, and Hansi thought it must be all a dream; but in two seconds they were back again with silver hatchets and silver pails. With the hatchets they immediately began to hack away at the tree. They made tremendous efforts, and became quite red in the face. The last moment before it was finally felled, the squirrel bounded off, and tossed a nut to Hansi, who caught it cleverly ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt

... not to wait for any one, else I'd lose my chance of a hack; so I gave my check to a man, and there he is with my trunk;" and Polly walked off after her one modest piece of baggage, followed by Tom, who felt a trifle depressed by his ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various

... bound the serpent with a string and brought it before Gautami. He then said to her,—This wretched serpent has been the cause of thy son's death, O blessed lady. Tell me quickly how this wretch is to be destroyed. Shall I throw it into the fire or shall I hack it into pieces? This infamous destroyer of a child does ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... on. "Joint too big for the dish, as they say. That fellow's more my sort, ain't you, old lad?" He nodded to the next loose-box, where his seventeen-hand hunter, Banjo, stood, blowing at them through the bars. "What Heart of Oak wants is a nice light weight just to hack him about the Downs and ease him ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant

... Lieutenant Fevrier could not but be pleased. Moreover there were better effects to follow. One occurred to him at this very moment, an admirable one. He fumbled in his breast and took out the flag. A minute later he saw the Colonel of the forepost join the group, hack nervously with his naked sword at a burning log, and dispatch a subaltern down the ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason

... owned many handsome carriages, luxurious in their appointments, drawn by fine horses, but as I look back to that day of days, that shabby public hack, with its rough-looking driver, holding the reins over a pair of ill-fed animals, stands in my ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell

... replied the widow, "and my croft would be better tilled, if I could answer your reverence that he is not.—Practised archer!—marry, holy sir, I would he would practise something else—cross-bow and long-bow, hand-gun and hack-but, falconet and saker, he can shoot with them all. And if it would please this right honourable gentleman, our guest, to hold out his hat at the distance of a hundred yards, our Halbert shall send shaft, bolt, or bullet through it, (so that right honourable gentleman swerve not, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... to ride in a hack in Salem, Massachusetts, and upon reaching his destination tendered the driver his usual ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.

... that a man had flown over the North Sea. I think I expressed our mutual sentiment when I observed that Cecil's story of how Frank Carville won his bet, and Mr. Carville's own account of the voyage from the Argentine to Genoa, told us far more about the man than "Vol-Plane's" highly-paid hack-work. ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... powder, the ancient weapon had other effect. It burst in Bashti's hand. While Aora, with a knife produced apparently from nowhere, proceeded to hack off the white master's head, Bashti looked quizzically at his right forefinger dangling by a strip of skin. He seized it with his left hand, with a quick pull and twist wrenched it off, and grinningly tossed it, as a joke, into the pandanus basket which still his wife ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London

... The influence of Marlowe and particularly of Kyd, whose Spanish Tragedy with its crude mechanism of ghosts and madness and revenge caught the popular taste, worked itself out in a score of journeymen dramatists, mere hack writers, who turned their hand to plays as the hacks of to-day turn their hand to novels, and with no more literary merit than that caught as an echo from better men than themselves. One of the worst of these—he is also one of the most typical—was John Marston, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... prevent him from escaping if he tries to; then to fall on him in numbers superior to his own, at a moment when you have led him to think you far away; and so, with a minimum of exposure of your own troops, to hack his force to pieces, and take the remainder prisoners. Just so, in teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James

... the German retainers seized him, and sat him by force on the executioner's most miserable hack; struck him in the face so that the blood streamed down, placed a tarred straw crown on his head, and fastened a paper with derisive words, on the saddle before him. They then let a row of hired beggar-boys and old fish-wives go in couples before, ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen

... Pendennis and Warrington to dinner again. Bacon, when he found that Bungay was about to treat, of course, began to be anxious and curious, and desired to out-bid his rival. Was any thing settled between Mr. Pendennis and the odious house "over the way" about the new book? Mr. Hack, the confidential reader, was told to make inquiries, and see if any thing was to be done, and the result of the inquiries of that diplomatist, was, that one morning, Bacon himself toiled up the staircase of Lamb-court, and to the door on which ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Lopaka. Keawe called to mind a friend of his, a lawyer in the town (I must not tell his name), and inquired of him. They said he was grown suddenly rich, and had a fine new house upon Waikiki shore; and this put a thought in Keawe’s head, and he called a hack and drove to the ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Trappes set out to rejoin his travelling companions, who were some hours in advance of him, when, on reaching Dover he was arrested in his turn and brought hack to prison in London. Interrogated the same day, M. de Trappes frankly related what had passed, appealing to M. de Chateauneuf as to the truth of what ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... political discernment. It was the fashion in England and throughout three-quarters of Ireland to laugh at Belfast. Nobody believed that a community of merchants, manufacturers and artisans actually meant to take up arms, shoot off guns and hack at the bodies of their fellow-men with swords and spears. This thing, at the beginning of the twentieth century, seemed incredible. To politicians it was simply unthinkable. For politics are a game played in strict accordance ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham

... Miss, riding mighty po' ole wore out hosses. All de men wanted wuz sumpin' t'eat and some good hosses. De men poured into de smokehouse and de kitchen (here Fanny had to laugh again) an how dem Yankee mens did cut and hack "Ole Marse's" best hams! After dey et all dey could hol' dey saddled up "ole Marse's" fine hosses ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration

... a rush was made upon us,—"Lynch them! lynch them! the d—n villains!" and other such cries, resounded on all sides. Those who had us in charge were greatly alarmed; and, seeing no other way to keep us from the hands of the mob, they procured a hack, and put Sayres and myself into it. The hack drove to the jail, the mob continuing to follow, repeating their shouts and threats. Several thousand people surrounded the jail, filling up the enclosure ...
— Personal Memoir Of Daniel Drayton - For Four Years And Four Months A Prisoner (For Charity's Sake) In Washington Jail • Daniel Drayton

... meed of appreciation. As a sculptor and architect he frequently held a subordinate position, and it has been assumed that he therefore lacked independence and originality. But the man who was Court architect of the Medici, and director of the Cathedral building staff, was no mere hack; while his sculpture at Milan, Naples, and Montepulciano show that his plastic abilities were far from mean. He was a great man with interludes of smallness. When Donatello required technical help in casting, Michelozzo was called in. Though Donatello had worked for Ghiberti on the bronze gates, ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... cottage at Belton. Society at Belton they had none, and as they said desired none. Between them and Mr Wright there was only a speaking acquaintance. The married curate at Redicote would not let his wife call on Mrs Askerton, and the unmarried curate was a hard-worked, clerical hack, a parochial minister at all times and seasons, who went to no houses except the houses of the poor, and who would hold communion with no man, and certainly with no woman, who would not put up with clerical admonitions for Sunday backslidings. Mr Amedroz himself neither ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope

... was always running on Martin, would come hack to my room, after delivering one of my lying ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... the part of an editorial elder brother: cut out relentlessly a number of long tiresome passages that showed all too plainly the fagged, toiling brain, the heavy sluggish driven pen, and straightened out certain indecisions at the end. Except for that, I have done no more than hack here and there at clumsy phrases and repetitions. The worst thing in the earlier version, and the thing that rankled most in my mind, was the treatment of the relations of Helen Wotton and Graham. Haste in art is almost always vulgarisation, and I slipped into the obvious ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells

... There remain not many controversies worthy a passion, and yet never any dispute without, not only in divinity but inferior arts. What a [Greek omitted] and hot skirmish is betwixt S. and T. in Lucian! How do grammarians hack and slash for the genitive case in Jupiter! How do they break their own pates, to salve that of Priscian! "Si foret in terris, rideret Democritus." Yes, even amongst wiser militants, how many wounds have been given and credits ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne

... Baddun's owner cantered out on his hack to a place inside the circle of the course, where two bricks had been thrown. He faced toward the brick-mounds at the lower end of the course ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... sword, and for leave to go to the war. All the rest laughed when the gaoler told his errand, and begged the King to let him have an old worn-out suit, that they might have the fun of seeing such a wretch in battle. So he got that, and an old broken-down hack besides, which went upon three legs, and dragged ...
— East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Old Tales from the North • Peter Christen Asbjornsen

... miles from the station, but, before the dusty hired hack had rattled along for five minutes, the children began to put their heads out of the carriage window and say, "Aren't we nearly there?" And every time they passed a house, which was not very often, they all said, ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit

... on a stone bench facing a sun-dial, and leaning hack, her hands clasped behind her head, ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... the door on the side from which he had received the signal, yet the cab did not stop. Nick trotted along beside the vehicle for a rod or two, keeping it between him and the side street into which Patsy quickly signed that the hack ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter

... a letter derogatory to a poor motherless working girl's reputation. As my father is a Christian preacher I feel I have a right to protest against his being placed on a clerical parity with bilkers of hack bills and crapulous associates of two-for-a-penny prostitutes. If Harman attempts to defile the Christian pulpit with his presence, I hope to the good Lord that the decent members of that denomination will tie him across a nine-rail fence and enhance the torridity ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... James Ralph a hack author. See 'The Dunciad,' and Franklin's 'Autobiography.' He was hired by Pelham to abuse Sir R. Walpole, whom he had ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... next room made him pause. He had become conscious again that, a few feet off, on the other side of a thin partition, a small keen flame of life was quivering and agitating the air. Sophy's face came hack to him insistently. It was as vivid now as Mrs. Leath's had been a moment earlier. He recalled with a faint smile of retrospective pleasure the girl's enjoyment of her evening, and the innumerable fine feelers of sensation she had thrown ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton

... have not been entrusted with one of those thorough-bred, snorting, champing, foaming sort of intellects, which run away with Common Sense, who is jerked from his saddle at the beginning of its wild career. Mine is a good, steady, useful hack, who trots along the high-road of life, keeping on his own side, and only stumbling a little now and then, when I happen to be careless,—ambitious only to arrive safely at the end of his journey, not to ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat

... Lemuel's hand from the seat to which he had helped him, and the hack drove away. Lemuel looked crazily after it a moment, and then ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... to the building and to render the floor stronger, the joints are supported by several posts, these last being propped by braces set at an angle of about 45. In the case of a house built for defense, the number of supports and crosspieces is such that the enemy would find it impossible to hack it down. ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... Unknown and unguessed at by Rogers, the large body behind was approaching, and the next moment the whole place was echoing with triumphant yells, as the pursuing Rangers were met by a compact force outnumbering them by four to one, who sprang furiously upon them, trying to hack them to pieces. ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green

... was to gain Luke's entire confidence, and remove any suspicion he might possibly entertain. In this respect he was successful. Luke had read about designing strangers, but he certainly could not suspect a man who insisted on paying his hack fare. ...
— Struggling Upward - or Luke Larkin's Luck • Horatio Alger

... movement of impatience, she put her hand upon my arm. "Don't trouble yourself about that hack; let it stand where it is. I wish to speak with you, and do not let us ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton

... give much of his time, however, to hack work. During the summer of 1875 he was engaged in writing a book on Florida for the Lippincotts. It is, as he wrote to Paul Hamilton Hayne, "a sort of spiritualized guide-book" to a section which was then ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... done, and she had the precious papers in her own hands, she would have paid him handsomely and sent him hack to the mountains again. But he threw at her feet the money she offered him, and begged to be allowed to go with her wherever she went—to let him work for her and the "little missee," as he used to in the old days before ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... French, "no subject upon which more misconception exists, even among service men, than as regards the real role of cavalry in warfare. My conception of the duties and functions of the mounted arm is not to cut and to hack and to thrust at your enemy wherever and however he may be found. The real business of cavalry is so to manoeuvre your enemy as to bring him within effective range of the corps artillery of your own side for which a position suitable for battle would previously ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm

... says she is, and that the hack is nothing at all. By the way, Hilda, if your husband won't spare you to go down to the Rectory, why don't you have that child here on a visit? Nothing in the world would do her so much good as a sight ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade

... Lady Sarah; "for all our plays are written by gentlemen. The hack writers of King James's time have been shoved aside. It is the mark of a man of ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... open your eyes to the true misery of our condition: injustice, tyranny and oppression!' said a discontented hack to a weary-looking cob as they stood side by side in ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... other first came within view. Before speaking, the stranger, a man whose head was getting gray, apparently as much with hardship as with time, and one whose great weight would have proved a grievous burthen, in a long ride, to even a better-conditioned beast than the ill-favored provincial hack he had ridden, dismounted, and threw the bridle loose upon the drooping neck of the animal. The latter, without a moment's delay, and with a greediness that denoted long abstinence, profited by its liberty, to crop ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper

... the El Tovar hack which had brought him from the station to that hotel the first person he saw standing upon the porch was Valencia Valdes. He could hardly believe his eyes, for of course she could not be here. He had left her at Corbett's, had taken the stage and the train, ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine

... happened to get word," observed Foy thoughtfully, "we might stand some hack. But they won't. It's good-by, vain world, for ours! Say, in case a miracle happens for you, just make a memo about the sheriff being ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... actual stories told to 'Hugh Littlejohn,' they were encouraged by the fact that there was no popular and readable compendium of Scottish history, they came as easily from his pen as the Napoleon had run with difficulty, and are as far removed from hack-work as that vast and, to his creditors, profitable compilation must be pronounced to be on the whole near to it. The book, of course, is not in the modern sense strictly critical, though it must be remembered that the authorities for at least the earlier history of Scotland are so exceedingly ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury

... by a perversion of their sense and expressions, that their proposition halts between the ridiculous and the dangerous. I am not one of those who start up three at a time, and fall upon and strike at him with so much eagerness, that our daggers hack one another in his sides. My honourable friend has not brought down a spirited imp of chivalry, to win the first achievement and blazon of arms on his milk-white shield in a field listed against him, ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke

... native rock was really metal. At first I thought it was lead, as so long exposed there it looked like old lead pipes. But when I tried to scrape it with my knife I found it was too hard. Then Apetak used his axe, and managed to cut down a little for me, and to scrape or hack it in some other places, and, lo, it was ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young

... lottery-puffs,—(Byron, we know, was accused of writing lottery-puffs,)—but he did not succeed very well in the task. His samples were returned on his hands, as "done in too severe and terse a style." Some Grub-Street hack—a nineteenth-century Tom Brown or Mr. Dash—succeeded in composing these popular and ingenious productions; but the man who wrote the Essays of Elia could not write a successful lottery-puff. At this exult, O mediocrity! and take ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... Lois entered their carriage, a gentleman was helping some one into a hack just behind Mrs. Wentworth's carriage. The light fell on them at the moment that Lois stepped forward, and she recognized Mr. Keith and the dancer, Mile. Terpsichore. He was handing her in with all the deference that he would have shown the ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page

... head and sniffed in the face of the wind. Something came to him with that wind. He muzzled Joan again, hut she did not stir. Then he went forward, and stood in his traces, ready for the pull, and looked hack at her. Still she did not move or speak, and Kazan's whine gave place to ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood

... bending over her with a chloroform-soaked cloth, which he was about to lay over her face. She shrieked and fainted, but not before she saw the man spring to the little bed on the other side of her own, hack furiously at it with a long, murderous knife, then dart to the window and vanish. In the darkness he had not, of course, been able to see that that little bed was empty, for its position kept it in deep shadow, and hearing the household ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew

... there about three weeks, and the doctors urged my return as the only chance of recovery. They considered that very hazardous, on account of exposure to cold; but to stay there was less hopeful. I was taken to the boat, carried on board by two men, then carried off at Jacksonville to a hack, taken to a hotel, thence to the train. I secured a good berth in a sleeper, and got through without the least trouble. I improved, every mile of the way; but as soon as I got home I went down again, and was extremely low ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen

... the starshine and glow of the putrid water he saw a tall man in a white robe, who stood at the extreme edge of the spit and looked at the sharks. Montferrat hid his guards behind the Tower, crossed himself, drew his sword to hack a way through the monstrous flies, and so came swishing forward, like a man who ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett

... wants. It does not seem possible to support his theory that "One Thousand and One Afternoons," springing from a literary passion so authentic and continuing so long with a fervor and variety unmatched in newspaper writing, are hack-work, done for a meal ticket. They must have had the momentum of a strictly artistic inspiration and gained further momentum from the need of expression, from pride in the subtle use of words, from an ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... he would have examined more carefully into the truth of the rumor which accused the sister of the Strozzi of having a liaison with a gondolier; of having fled with him to Padua, and of having been caught and brought hack to Venice, while her patrician lover ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach

... and faint, plodding on in the track, I praise your great patience, poor omnibus hack; In whose sad gentle eyes my spirit can trace The gloom of despair in that passionless face, While way-wearied muscles, strain'd out to the full And cruelly check'd by the pitiless pull, With little for food, but of lashes no lack, Force me to pray ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... Old Tree of the Triple Coign And the trick there's no recalling, They will haggle and hew till they hack you through And at last they lay you sprawling: When 'Hey! for the hour of the race in flower And the long good-bye to sin!' And for the lack the fires of Hell gone out Of the fuel to keep ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley

... tempest of missives. Bang! went the guns; whack! went the broadswords; thump! went the cudgels; crash! went the musket-stocks; blows, kicks, cuffs, scratches, black eyes and bloody noses swelling the horrors of the scene! Thick, thwack, cut and hack, helter-skelter, higgledy-piggledy, hurly-burly, heads-over-heels, rough-and-tumble! Dunder and blixum! swore the Dutchmen; splitter and splutter! cried the Swedes. Storm the works! shouted Hardkoppig Peter. Fire the mine! roared stout Rising—Tantarar-ra-ra! ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher

... and Heninel, and broke a switch-line of the Hindenburg system across the little Cojeul River by Wancourt. There was a fatal attack in the dark on May 3d, when East Kents and Surreys and Londoners saw a gray dawn come, revealing the enemy between them and our main line, and had to hack their way through if they could, There were many who could not, and even divisional generals were embittered by these needless losses and by the hard driving of their men, saying fierce things ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... decided the fate of Captain Paget's daughter. A week after Miss Halliday's visit to Hyde Lodge a hack cab carried Diana and all her earthly possessions to the Lawn, where Charlotte received her with open arms, and where she was inducted into a neatly furnished bedchamber adjoining that of her friend. Mr. Sheldon scrutinised her keenly from under the shadow of his thick ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... a noodle as to build his back-door right down in the water," he said, "unless he meant the place for a bath. No; we shall find that doorway out in the wood somewhere, you mark my words, Scar. I dare say, if we were to take billhooks and cut and hack away the branches, we ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn

... French leave in McMahon's stable. He saddled Click, Mac's favourite hack, mounted him, and started down the dusty Yarraman road at a gallop. To Harry that ride was ever afterwards a complete blank. He started out with his mind full of one thought, an overpowering resolution. He would seek Chris, he would take her in his arms ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson

... half-way down the aisle. Then papa whispered to him and he whispered back. Then, as soon as they came into the vestibule here, papa led him out at that side door, and did not seem to remember me. They almost ran across the street, and took George Gibb's hack. I knew ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale

... Bradfords, including some from Northbridge who belonged to both, filled the little chapel which Horace, Martin, and Evan had trimmed with flowers wholly from our garden. At the last moment, Mrs. Jenks-Smith, whom we thought abroad, dashed up in a depot hack, perspiring and radiant, her smart gown having a most peculiar and unnatural looking promontory on the chest. "No, my dear, I'm not in Carlsbad. Jenks-Smith was called back on business, and I sniffed the wedding in the air and hooked on,—only ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright

... pinweeds, and graceful wild grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently than in summer even, as if their beauty was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass, cat-tails, mulleins, johnswort, hard-hack, meadow-sweet, and other strong-stemmed plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliest birds—decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears. I am particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf-like top of the wool-grass; it brings back the summer to our ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... neighborhood toward which Miss Eustis and her aunt had journeyed. Fortunately for these ladies, Major Haley, the genial tavern-keeper, had a habit of sending a hack to meet every train that stopped at Little Azalia. It was not a profitable habit in the long run; but Major Haley thought little of the profits, so long as he was conscious that the casual traveler had abundant reason to be grateful to him. Major ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris

... and Meekins, who seemed to have been waiting for some signal of the sort, suddenly, with a movement of his knee and right arm, flung Dunster hack upon the bed. The man opened his mouth to shout, but already, with lightning-like dexterity, his assailant had inserted a gag between his teeth. Treating his struggles as the struggles of a baby, Meekins next proceeded to secure his wrists with handcuffs. He then ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... hack with some degree of horror; but that soon left him, and then, after a moment's thought, he sought for some little nook in the wall, in which he might place the candle, and soon finding one that answered the purpose well, he there left it, having all the appearance of ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest

... the legend of "The Flying Dutchman" by the sailors; but long before he was able to write that splendid opera he was compelled to write music for the variety stage in order to feed his wife and himself. He wrote articles for musical periodicals, and did a great deal of what is known as "hack" work before his great genius found opportunity. One manager liked the dramatic idea of "The Flying Dutchman" so well that he was willing to buy it if Wagner would let him get some one who knew how to ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon

... joker. It is interesting to note in passing that the old meaning of the word still lingers in the verb "to humor." A woman still humors her spoiled child and her cantankerous husband when she yields to their capriciousness. By going hack a step further in history, to the late fourteenth century, we met Chaucer's physician who knew "the cause of everye maladye, and where engendered and of what humour" and find that Chaucer is not speaking of a mental state at all, but is referring ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... her sex, even of the human kind, to be. Her proper name was the Fair Maid of Perth; but somehow, from her lively, troublesome, and wanton vagaries, they called her the Sow-Cow. My own riding-horse, a small, sleek, cunning little bay, a fine hack with excellent paces, called W.A., I also had out previously. He would pull on his bridle all day long to eat, he would even pretend to eat spinifex; he was now very bad and footsore. Gibson and I overtook Mr. Tietkens and Jimmy, and we pushed ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... own ass," cried Ellen, the instant she found breath for words; "your own patient, hard working, hack!" ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... to his directions, which she proceeded to do at once; shuddering the while at what she knew her poor patient would have to undergo, when the disciple of Aesculapius came back anon, with his myrmidons and their murderous-looking surgical knives and forceps, to hack and hew away at Fritz in their search for the bullet buried in his chest—he utterly oblivious either of his surroundings or what was in store for him, tossing in the bed under her eyes and rambling in his mind. He fancied himself still on the battlefield in the thick of the fight:— "Vorwarts, ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson

... hypochondriasis—the seventeenth-century medical term for a wide range of nervous diseases—were old when "Sir" John Hill, the eccentric English scientist, physician, apothecary, and hack writer, published his Hypochondriasis in 1766.[1] For at least a century and a half medical writers as well as lay authors had been writing literature of all types (treatises, pamphlets, poems, sermons, epigrams) on this most fashionable of English maladies under the variant names of "melancholy," ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill

... the farm, I found a sparrow's nest in a small bunch of hard-hack, a few rods from the cow-pasture bars, with four eggs, resembling, only a little larger than, speckled garden beans; and I visited it every morning, till the sprawling, skinny little chicks were hatched. But on the third morning the nest was empty; ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... them. "I require of every man of sound mind that he should lay out for himself a plan of action," said the philosopher; and wandered to Breslau, to Amsterdam, to Potsdam, the parasite of protectors, the impecunious hack of publishers, the rebel of manners, the ingenious and honored metaphysician. When Kant declared he was the only one of his critics that understood The Critique of Pure Reason, Maimon returned to Berlin to devote ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... grocers, as he called them. To his and his country's honor, be it here said, that they all alike wished the poor civilians a warm reception, and some serious inconvenience, that they might have a right to interfere, and cut and hack a little on ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... can be made. When you have once laughed at a misfortune, its sting loses its point. We deaden it—we light up the darkness—even though it be with a will 'o the wisp—and if we understand our business, manage to hack the lumpy dough of heavy sorrow into little pieces, which even ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... jury of men during the late war, on very thin patriotic grounds, jailed the author of it) if she favours her lord with viable issue. One result is the notorious villainousness of American cookery—a villainousness so painful to a cultured uvula that a French hack-driver, if his wife set its masterpieces before him, would brain her with his linoleum hat. To encounter a decent meal in an American home of the middle class, simple, sensibly chosen and competently cooked, becomes almost as startling ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... prairie sunset, and as he pranced off down the street he was clearly proud of his job. This pride never left him. He knew all the switchmen in the railroad yards, all the girls in the dry-goods stores, all the boys on the grocers' waggons, all the hack-drivers and ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... amusements at school to organize Homeric combats among the boys, in which the fighting was carried on in the manner of the Greeks and Trojans, and he and his friend Kenyon would arm themselves with swords and shields, and hack at each other lustily, exciting themselves to battle by insulting speeches derived from ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... of Henry's envoy at the Hague, Buzanval, who probably would not have objected to the title himself. "'Twill be a folly," he said, "for him to present himself on the pavement as a prancing steed, and then be treated like a poor hack. He has been too long employed to put himself in such a plight. But there are lunatics ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... swopped with you for that big-boned hack of yours?" said Bryce, quite aware that he should ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot

... snort of recognition, wheels herself around and then falls in alongside the front hack and gets ready to accompany us, all the time poking her snout over at me and uttering plaintive remarks in East Indian to me. Gents,' he says, 'you can see for yourselves, a thing like that, occurring right at the beginning of a ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... and rare as beautiful! But theirs was love in which the mind delights To lose itself, when the old world grows dull. And we are sick of its hack sounds and sights, Intrigues, adventures of the common school, Its petty passions, marriages, and flights, Where Hymen's torch but brands one strumpet more, Whose husband only knows ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... to myself. Will I become a great dramatist, like Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw and all those chaps, or merely turn out hack plays?..." ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... being obviously better acquainted with his lordship's personal doings in Europe than in Asia, the work savours strongly of home-manufacture, and has all the appearance of being the joint composition of a discarded valet and a bookseller's hack." The last hypothesis appears very probable. Internal evidence is greatly in its favour. Can any of your readers tell me who was "Charles Caraccioli, Gent.,"—when the atrocity which bears his name was published,—or any thing about the man or his book? Probably some notice of ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various

... they were Married he came Home at 4 A.M. in a Sea-Going Hack and he was Saturated. Next Morning she had him up on the Carpet and wanted to know ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade

... to look. Along the side, where barrier none arose Around the little vale, a serpent lay, Such haply as gave Eve the bitter food. Between the grass and flowers, the evil snake Came on, reverting oft his lifted head; And, as a beast that smoothes its polish'd coat, Licking his hack. I saw not, nor can tell, How those celestial falcons from their seat Mov'd, but in motion each one well descried, Hearing the air cut by their verdant plumes. The serpent fled; and to their stations back The angels up return'd with equal flight. The Spirit (who ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... example was followed by Feenou; so that we had not a chief of any authority remaining in our neighbourhood. I was very much displeased at this, and reprimanded Omai for having presumed to meddle. This reprimand put him upon his mettle to bring his friend Feenou hack; and he succeeded in the negociation, having this powerful argument to urge, that he might depend upon my using no violent measures to oblige the natives to restore what had been taken from the gentlemen. Feenou, trusting to this declaration, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... he claimed only to bring a better interpretation of the religion of his people. He said that he came not to destroy but to fulfill the law and the prophets. The New Testament religion is a development of the Old Testament religion. It is a wonderful growth. When we go hack to the old monuments and the old documents and trace the progress of religious beliefs and practices from the earliest days to our own, we learn many things which ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden



Words linked to "Hack" :   cut, edit, hack writer, make out, taxi, basketball, unskilled person, taxicab, foul, cope, redact, Equus caballus, literary hack, political leader, program, ward-heeler, make do, plodder, rugger, hack driver, gypsy cab, author, ax, drudge, plug, whoop, saddle horse, programme, pol, politician, slogger, riding horse, machine, auto, cut up, axe, cab, car, mount



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