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Hourglass   Listen
noun
Hourglass  n.  An instrument for measuring time, especially the interval of an hour. It consists of a glass vessel having two compartments, from the uppermost of which a quantity of sand, water, or mercury occupies an hour in running through a small aperture unto the lower. Note: A similar instrument measuring any other interval of time takes its name from the interval measured; as, a half-hour glass, a half-minute glass. A three-minute glass is sometimes called an egg-glass, from being used to time the boiling of eggs.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hourglass" Quotes from Famous Books



... one of Albrecht Duerer's most celebrated engravings, called Ritter, Tod, and Teufel (the Knight, Death, and the Devil), where the knight rides quietly and unmoved through a gloomy mountain glen, smiling at Death, who holds up an hourglass before him, and taking no notice at all of the droll Devil, who tries to grasp him from behind. The knight is evidently an embodiment of the freer spirit which began to reign then in Germany. The engraving is of the ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel

... turn slowly on their hinges. The sounds of the earth are heard like a distant music. A red and green light penetrates into the hall; TIME, a tall old man with a streaming beard, armed with his scythe and hourglass, appears upon the threshold; and the spectator perceives the extremity of the white and gold sails of a galley moored to a sort of quay, formed by the rosy ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck

... We cannot really conceive of an existence stretching over even one thousand years, such as that which Oro claimed and the Bible accords to a certain early race of men, omitting of course his two thousand five hundred centuries of sleep. And yet what is this but one grain in the hourglass of time, one day in the lost record of our earth, of its sisters the planets and its father the sun, to say nothing of the ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard

... water shot up in the form of a gigantic hourglass, and the "Albatross" was enveloped in the eddy of an enormous waterspout, while twenty others, black as ink, raged around her. Fortunately the gyratory movement of the water was opposite to that of the suspensory screws, otherwise the aeronef would have been hurled into the sea. But she ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne

... mystic prism shadows forth Hath menace which auxiliar from the North May scarce avert. The scales of Justice tilt Something askew. The curse of high-placed guilt Is on you, if the warning tocsin's knell, Clanging forth fiercely, hath not force to tell The hearer that Fate's hourglass fast runs out. That spectral Comet flames, beset about With miasmatic mist, and lurid fume, Conquering Corruption threatens hideous doom. Yet, yet the Bow of Promise gleams above, Herald of Hope to her whom all men ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various



Words linked to "Hourglass" :   sandglass



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