Free TranslationFree Translation
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Riotous   Listen
adjective
Riotous  adj.  
1.
Involving, or engaging in, riot; wanton; unrestrained; luxurious. "The younger son... took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living."
2.
Partaking of the nature of an unlawful assembly or its acts; seditious.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Riotous" Quotes from Famous Books



... to attribute any political meaning to the incident, or to suppose that it had any connivance from the French Government. The inn where Clarendon alighted was attacked by the riotous mob. The local magistrates were incapable of dealing with the riot, and were perplexed as to the limits of their jurisdiction. Clarendon's attendants made what defence they could, and Le Fonde, his former persecutor, and now his courteous escort, received a dangerous wound in his defence. ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik

... exile, if they persist in the same unreason. But this we especially demand of Christians, both those who are really such and those who are called such, that they presume not, by an abuse of religion, to lay hands upon the Jews and pagans who live peaceably and who attempt nothing riotous or contrary to the laws. For if they should do violence to them living securely and take away their goods, let them be compelled to restore not merely what they have taken away but threefold and fourfold. Let the ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... or want to believe that the spring has come, just call Bell Winship in, as she walks with her breezy step down the street. Her very hair seems instinct with life, with its flying tendrils of bronze brightness and the riotous little curls on her brow and temples. Then, too, she has a particularly jaunty way of putting on her jacket, or wearing a flower or a ribbon; and as for her ringing peal of laughter, it is like a ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... into the long, narrow stream of travelers and yanked out his special friend or relative, like a good-natured bird of prey. She saw a tired, worn, patient-looking woman step forward with four noisy little boys, and then stand dully waiting while the Young Electrician gathered his riotous offspring to his breast. She saw the Traveling Salesman grin like a bashful school-boy, just as a red-cloaked girl came running to him and bore him off ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... pines, the sycamore, the foxwood and dogwood, and lime and laurel and poplar and elder and willow, and the cherry and crab apple and others of the fruit-bearing kind, since so developed that they are great factors in man's subsistence now. It was a time of plenty which was riotous. There remained, too, a vestige of the animal as well as of the vegetable life of the remoter ages. There were strange and dangerous creatures which came sometimes up the river from its inlet into the ocean. ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo

... oft a danger forgotten. Men went out to build the homes of which they had dreamed through the long winter. Axes rang amidst the white dogwoods and the crabs and redbuds, and there were riotous log-raisings in the clearings. But I think the building of Tom's house was the most joyous occasion of all, and for none in the settlement would men work more willingly than for him and Polly Ann. The cabin went up as if by magic. It stood on a rise upon ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... from being attached to their masters, and remembering quite as much the good mouthfuls as the kickings they are accustomed to receive; and M. Rudolph had given me better than good mouthfuls, for, do you see, for me M. Rudolph is all in all. From a wicked, brutal, savage, and riotous rascal, he made me a kind of honest man, by saying only two words to me; but those ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue

... against her maiden loss, How might she tongue me? Yet reason dares her—no: For my authority bears a so credent bulk, That no particular scandal once can touch But it confounds the breather. He should have liv'd, Save that his riotous youth, with dangerous sense, Might in the times to come have ta'en revenge, By so receiving a dishonour'd life With ransom of such shame. Would yet he had liv'd! Alack, when once our grace we have forgot, Nothing goes right; we would, and ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... he had long laboured, and died in less than a twelvemonth. The populace of of Paris so detested him, that they carried their hatred even to his grave. As his funeral procession passed to the church of St. Nicholas du Chardonneret, the burying-place of his family, it was beset by a riotous mob, and his two sons, who were following as chief-mourners, were obliged to drive as fast as they were able down a ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... were dangerously unpopular, a crowd of brawny Cape Cod fishermen had made such riotous demonstrations that all the speakers announced, except Stephen Foster and Lucy Stone, had fled from an open-air platform. "You had better run, Stephen," said she; "they are coming." "But who will take care of you?" asked Foster. "This gentleman will ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden

... certain mineral spring, and likewise to 'take shares' in its bottled waters, turned the said spring into a 'paying concern' at once, thereby causing much rejoicing among the Semites. The 'mob' might certainly decline to imitate the Snob-world,— but, considering the recent riotous outbreak, it might be as well that the overbold and unwashen populace should be awed by the panoply and glory of earthly Majesty passing by in ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... according to the decree of the gods, was now irrevocably sealed. While the Trojans indulged in a night of riotous festivity, Simon kindled the fire-signal to the Greeks at Tenedos, loosening the bolts of the wooden horse, from out of which the enclosed heroes descended. The city, assailed both from within and from without, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various

... the Heath, we come to Jack Straw's Castle, though there is no evidence to show that the riotous ringleader of 1381 had ever any connection with the hostelry named after him, but it is quite possible that the Heath formed a rendezvous for the malcontents of his time. In early times an earthwork stood on the site, which gave rise to the name "castle." ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... most advanced opinions in politics, distributed several riotous and patronizing handshakes among these future statesmen as he entered the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... A riotous and extravagant hour in a seed and bulb store resulted in my getting all the flower favorites I had loved in my childhood. I also bought the seeds of all vegetables which Dicky and I liked, and a few more, and put them in ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison

... gigantic sirloins, plump fowls, pheasants stuffed with pate de foie gras, gorgeous Madeiras, ancient Ports. Wine had a double advantage: it made you drunk; it also made you sober: it was its own cure. On one occasion, when Sheridan, after days of riotous living, showed signs of exhaustion, Mr. and Mrs. Creevey pressed upon him 'five or six glasses of light French wine' with excellent effect. Then, at midnight, when the talk began to flag and the ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... off again on their wild and venturous pursuit. Now Martin Super, like all the rest, must have his fun when he comes back, and being a very wild fellow, he is often in scrapes when he has drunk too much, so that he is occasionally put into prison for being riotous; but I know him well, he has been with me surveying for months, and when he is on service, a more steady, active, and brave man ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat

... The riotous and frivolous splendor of the Regency had suffered eclipse; before their time, in all their vigor, through disgrace or by death, Law, Dubois, and the Regent, had suddenly disappeared from the stage of the world. To these men, a striking group for different reasons, notwithstanding ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... A companion of riotous persons shameth his father; {69f} For he, poor man, had both grief and shame, to see how his son (now at his own hand) behaved himself in the enjoyment of those good things, in and under the lawfull use of which he might ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan

... complex, mobile, changeful as the sea, in riotous enjoyment of her new-found liberties, casts off a form of government as she would an ill-fitting garment. She knows the value of tranquillity—she had it for one thousand years! The people, who have only breathed the upper air for a century—the people, who were ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele

... of whom Mr. Razumov had thought was the rich and festive student known as madcap Kostia. Feather-headed, loquacious, excitable, one could make certain of his utter and complete indiscretion. But that riotous youth, when reminded by Razumov of his offers of service some time ago, passed from his usual elation into ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... she stood beside him watching the mystical gray of the dawn lift to the riotous rose of the sunrise. She wondered at the quick throb of her pulse. It was very different from its wonted soft beat. Then she threw herself on her blanket ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow

... assumed spencer, you would scarcely have thought, after a glance at the contours of the man's bony frame, that this was an artist—that conventional type which is privileged, in something of the same way as a Paris gamin, to represent riotous living to the bourgeois and philistine mind, the most mirific joviality, in short (to use the old Rabelaisian word newly taken into use). Yet this elderly person had once taken the medal and the traveling scholarship; ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... animals. I saw what taught my brain a new lesson, and filled my breast with fresh feelings. I have no intention to profess more softness or sentiment than I have hitherto professed; mutiny and ambition I regard as I have always regarded them. I should resist a riotous mob just as heretofore; I should open on the scent of a runaway ringleader as eagerly as ever, and run him down as relentlessly, and follow him up to condign punishment as rigorously; but I should do it now chiefly for the sake and the security of those he misled. Something there ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... Kate Found in the Garden." "That fragrant summer morning brought gracious tasks to all. The bees were at the honeysuckle blossoms on the porch. Kate, singing a little song, was training the riotous branches of her favorite woodbine. The ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry

... reply—if he intended to—the hermit reached the road. He was an old but very vigorous-looking man, burly and stout, with a great mat of riotous gray hair under his fur cap, and a beard of the same color that reached his breast. He seemed to have very good eyes ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson

... an impressive fact in the Gospel story of the Prodigal Son. The statement "he wasted his substance in riotous living" means more than that he wasted his funds. It implies that he wasted himself. And the most serious phase of all waste is not the waste of substance but the waste of self, of one's energy, capital, the lowering of morals, the undermining ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... increased more and more, till at last a body of infantry and a squadron of hussars advanced; the commandant ordered the municipal guard and the troops to clear the footpaths and street of the curious and riotous mob and to arrest the ringleaders. (This is the free nation!) The panic spread with the swiftness of lightning: the shops were closed, the populace flocked together at all the corners of the streets, and the orderlies who galloped through the streets were hissed. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... rabble of passions, quite too tender, quite too hungry and irritable. Later, the interiors of mind and heart open, and supply grander motives. We learn the fatal compensations that wait on every act. Then,—one mischief at a time,—this riotous time-destroying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... in the orchestra of the San Samueli Theatre; of the pranks which he and his companions had played in the alleys, taverns, dancing halls, and gaming-houses of Venice—sometimes masked and sometimes unmasked. In telling the story of these riotous escapades, he was careful to avoid the use of any offensive epithet. He phrased his narrative in choice imaginative language, as if paying due regard to the presence of the young girls, who, like their ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler

... that that fellow up there is a monster of infamy, a rebel and a riotous blackguard, who must be repressed in the interests of peace ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson

... estimated from the fact that boats from the ships of war in port, his own included, tried in vain to approach and had to run for safety to the inner harbor. With sword drawn,—for many of the soldiers were drunk and riotous,—Pellew maintained order, guided with a seaman's readiness the preparations for landing, and saw the women, the children,—one child but three weeks old,—the sick, landed first, then the soldiers, lastly the ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... inside too Is not less riotous; where this same medly Waste the whole night, destroying health and fortune, Of ev'ry social ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard

... a state of siege, and patrols of troops began to parade the streets, sending all stragglers whom they met to their homes, on the admirable principle that it is the duty of every man who finds himself in a riotous crowd to leave it instantly unless he can do something towards restoring order. Persons who found themselves in other people's houses, however, had some difficulty in at once returning to their own, and as it has been ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford

... was heavy, bay-windowed, three-storied. Ugly, immense, unfriendly, it struck an inharmonious note in the riotous free growth of the surrounding woods. The dark entrance-hall was flanked by a library full of obsolete, unread books, and by double drawing-rooms, rarely opened now. All the windows on the ground floor were darkened by the shrubbery outside and by ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris

... the end of their purposes, which is a lamentable hearing. Beside this, being for the most part either gentlemen or rich men's sons, they often bring the universities into much slander. For, standing upon their reputation and liberty, they ruffle and roist it out, exceeding in apparel, and banting riotous company (which draweth them from their books unto another trade), and for excuse, when they are charged with breach of all good order, think it sufficient to say that they be gentlemen, which grieveth many not a little. But to proceed with ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed

... you were from four until almost six," Val laughed. "I don't know that I approve of this riotous living. Will Jeems take me to ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton

... in front of the gate mounted and rode forward, probably a hundred yards, pursued by a riotous shouting and cracking of whips. Presently a train of buffaloes, yoked and tugging laboriously at something almost too heavy for them, appeared on the swell of earth; and there was a driver for every yoke, and every driver whirled a long stick with a longer ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... possible. No system of native industry could be created on demand, to take the place of that which had been thus wantonly crushed forever. From this epoch dates the social ruin of Spain. In less than a century her people were riotous with famine; and every sequestered glen and mountain pathway throughout the country had become a lurking-place for robbers. Whoever would duly realize to what a lamentable condition this beautiful peninsula had ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... Satan, where now are they? The fact still dimly perceptible is, Europe, thanks to that pair of Black-Artists, Gortz and Alberoni, not to mention Law the Finance-Wizard and his French incantations, had been kept generally, for these three or four years past, in the state of a Haunted House; riotous Goblins, of unknown dire intent, walking now in this apartment of it, now in that; no rest ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle

... soon left the valley of the Drac behind them; on ahead the path became very rocky, winding its way beside a riotous little mountain stream, whilst higher up still, peeping through the intervening trees, the white-washed cottages of the tiny hamlet glimmered with dazzling clearness in the frosty atmosphere. At a sharp bend of the road, which ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... written now, we'd view it with a cooler eye, And term the Trial Scene a piece of "riotous tomfoolery;" While Jane Eyre's thrilling narrative of Rochester's sad revelries Of "shilling shockers" scarcely would to-day above ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various

... invited for the 23d. Many regulations were given to these noble youths, that they might discharge their duties with befitting decorum. Among other orders, they received particular injunctions that they were to abstain from all drinking among themselves, and from all riotous conduct whatever, while the sovereigns and potentates should be at dinner. "It would be a shameful indecency," it was urged, "if the great people sitting at table should be unable to hear themselves talk on account of the screaming of the attendants." ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... a road wound he saw wild and desperate rushes of men perpetually backward and forward in riotous surges. These parts of the opposing armies were two long waves that pitched upon each other madly at dictated points. To and fro they swelled. Sometimes, one side by its yells and cheers would proclaim decisive blows, but a moment later ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... sought for opportunities of advancement where they most abounded; and, while he waited for them, he enjoyed the pleasures of life. In the use of his leisure he may not always have been more discreet than his riotous dependents. His wife is reported to have remarked of a censure upon their elder son's addiction to equivocal society, that she had heard Ralegh in his youth showed similar tastes. Aubrey, whom nobody believes and everybody quotes, the 'credulous, maggotty-headed, and sometimes little better ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing

... recommendation in a time of universal depravity. 24. Otho, who had long been a favourite of Galba, and hoped to be adopted a successor in the empire, finding himself disappointed, and stimulated by the immense load of debt which he had contracted by his riotous way of living, resolved upon obtaining the empire by force, since he could not do it by peaceable succession. Having corrupted the fidelity of the army, he stole secretly from the emperor while he was sacrificing, and, assembling the ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... buffoonery of his fellows, he affects to participate in them; and soon, in tone and gesture, this conventional depravity gets hold of his heart. Thus, at Anvers, an ex-bishop experienced, at first, all the outpourings of the riotous jests of his companions; they always addressed him as monseigneur, and asked his blessing in their obscenities; at every moment they constrained him to profane his former character by blasphemous words, and, by dint of reiterating ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... next flat someone began to play very brilliantly a Hungarian Rhapsody of Liszt's. And even the faint sound of that riotous torrent of melody, so arrogantly gorgeous, intoxicated her soul. She shivered under the sudden vision of the splendid joy of being alive. And how she envied the player! French she had learned from 'Madame,' but she had no skill on the piano; ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... of thy substance that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living. 13 And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together and took his journey into a far country; and there he wasted his substance with riotous living. 14 And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that country; and he began to be in want. 15 And he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country; and he sent him into his fields ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman

... perceived certain far-away things: a large yellow flower in the middle of a lawn, a sheet of water falling from a lofty rock, a colossal tree filled with a swarm of birds; and all this steeped, lost, blazing in such a tangle of greenery, such riotous luxuriance of vegetation, that the whole horizon seemed one great burst of shooting foliage. The door banged to, ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... their infancy, and unacquainted with all the duties of life, are fitted to bestow? To touch a musical instrument with useless skill, to exhibit their natural or affected graces, to the eyes of indolent and debauched young men, who dissipate their husbands' patrimony in riotous and unnecessary expenses: these are the only arts cultivated by women in most of the polished nations I had seen. And the consequences are uniformly such as may be expected to proceed from such polluted sources, private misery, ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]

... quite Utopian to hope that we can keep the average child free from what is in the atmosphere. Children crave for excitement, and unless we give it to them in legitimate form, they will take it in any riotous form it presents itself, and if from our experience we can control their mental digestion by a moderate supply of what they demand, we may save them from devouring too eagerly the raw material they can so easily find ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock

... leaves or crouched in long grown grasses, and I stared and mourned as I looked on men. For Nemed and four couples had been saved from that fierce storm, and I saw them increase and multiply until four thousand couples lived and laughed and were riotous in the sun, for the people of Nemed had small minds but great activity. They were savage ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens

... plunge himself into an absolute abandonment of all the restraints and discipline that had hitherto held him. He did not know, he could not analyse to himself—for what purpose those restraints had been formerly enforced upon his life. Only now—at this moment, his body was being flooded with a warm, riotous satisfaction at the thought of the indulgences that were ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... appears a fortnight later, in the middle of June. There are fifty in the first tube examined. The riotous multitude is in the full enjoyment of the pairing-season, for the two sexes always figure among the guests of any one caterpillar. What animation! What an orgy of love! The carnival of these pigmies bewilders the observer and makes his ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... the Viennese with their devotion to the reigning family. Consequently their delight and interest, which had been fed by the festivities and all the details of the journey, made the sudden return of the mistress of the robes a cause of surprise and even of anxiety. There were riotous assemblies, and the affair was the subject of most unfavorable comment. As the Baron of Meneval has said, "The reconciliation on the part of the aristocracy and people of Austria was not sincere. Marie Louise's departure from Vienna was followed by many ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... mimicking parroquets at our heels a while, and then, when they are well infected, well perfumed with the wind of our vices, dropping them off, as tadpoles do their tails, joint by joint into the mud! to strain at such gnats as an ill-mouthed colt or a riotous puppy, and swallow that camel of camels, ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley

... in TANNHAeUSER, though, as we shall see, the redeeming act is not so sharply defined as in the Dutchman. In the first scene Tannhaeuser is sleeping in the arms of Venus, while bacchanals indulge in riotous dances. Tannhaeuser suddenly starts from sleep: he has dreamed of his home as it was before his fall—of the village chime, the birds, the flowers, the sweet air; and he asks permission to return from this hot, steaming ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman

... who was upon the Dvina front writes: "We would have given anything we owned and mortgaged our every expectation to have been one of that great delirious, riotous mob that surged over Paris on Armistice Day; and we thought we had something of a title to have been there for we claimed the army of Pershing for our own, even though we had been sent to the Arctic Circle; and now ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore

... That greeting was, indeed, a frightful outburst of sound, the uproar of the carnivora cage when the step of the bucket-bearing keeper is heard in the distance. There was an offensive tone in it, perhaps, and yet in the main it struck me as mere riotous outcry, the noisy reception of one who amused and interested them, rather than of one they disliked or despised. Challenger smiled with weary and tolerant contempt, as a kindly man would meet the yapping of a litter of puppies. He sat slowly down, blew out ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Fulfilled with clamour and clangour and storms of psalms; Red hands rent up the roots of old-world trees, Thick flames of torches tossed as tumbling seas Made mad the moonless and infuriate air That, ravening, revelled in the riotous hair And raiment of the ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... Accordingly Dicaeopolis dispatches an envoy to Sparta on his own account, who comes back presently with a selection of specimen treaties in his pocket. The old man tastes and tries, special terms are arranged, and the play concludes with a riotous and uproarious rustic feast in honour of the ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes

... common-weal than that by which society would thus lose one of its noblest, instead of getting rid of one of its vilest members? Or, when in England, a thrifty son, by consenting to cut the entail of an estate to which he is heir-apparent, enables a prodigal father to consume in riotous living substance which would otherwise have eventually become his, is he not clearly taking the worse course for the public by permitting the property to be wasted, instead of causing ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... arrival by their constant acts of insubordination, and by their apparent indifference to the punishment awarded them. At night the convicts were lodged in wooden buildings, where, so long as they were not riotous, they were allowed to talk and converse freely, as indeed was the case when their work for the ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty

... with the nickname of Givenaught—intolerable humbug! Before I would be such a fraud as that, I would cut my right hand off. Your life is a continual lie. But go on, I have tried MY best to save you from beggaring yourself by your riotous charities—now for the thousandth time I wash my hands of the consequences. A maundering old fool! that's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... was taken seriously ill, and was ordered to the German baths for two months, during which his work was done by another master, who had not the same influence. From all which causes, this half-year at Saint Winifreds was the most turbulent, the most riotous, and the most unhappy, ever known in that ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... the Veronica, Our Koromiko, whitens on the cliff, The honey-sweet Manuka buds, and bursts In bloom, and the divine Convolvulus, Most fair and frail of all our forest flowers, Stars every covert, running riotous. O quiet valley, opening to the East, How far from this thy peacefulness am I! Ah me, how far! and far this stream of Life From thy clear creek fast ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens

... Babcock was ready to agree with him, intending thereby a free-handed two days at the fair. As has been intimated, his manner of life before marriage had not been irreproachable, but he had been glad of an opportunity to put an end to the mildly riotous and coarse bouts which disfigured his otherwise commonplace existence. He had no intention now of misbehaving himself, but he felt the need of being enlivened. His companion was a man who delighted in what he called a lark, and whose ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... situation, nothing so incredulous to its own true state, and hard to give credit to a reverse. Often had this good steward, this honest creature, when all the rooms of Timon's great house have been choked up with riotous feeders at his master's cost, when the floors have wept with drunken spilling of wine, and every apartment has blazed with lights and resounded with music and feasting, often had he retired by himself to some solitary spot, and wept faster than the wine ran from the wasteful casks ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb

... for Esther. I can see her there quite plainly, in her blue dress, filling the rose bowl which stands upon the round table in a dusky corner of the hall. Over her shoulder, through the open door, glows the riotous colour of the garden. Her pure profile gleams like mother-o'-pearl against the dark panelling—say, Willits, just go and look up that house, will you? I am going to ask her to marry me. And I never knew before what a coward ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... Ferrybeeville, June 17, 1849. After acquiring a good education, he entered politics. Mr. Miller held many local and State offices, and was nominated by his party, in 1878, for the office of Lieutenant-Governor of the State. Due, however, to riotous actions of the Democratic party throughout the elections that year, the ticket was withdrawn. Mr. Miller was seated in the 51st Congress after a contested election with Col. William Elliott. In 1896, he was elected president of the State Colored College at Orangeburg, South Carolina.—Biographical ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... those exasperating women who pervade their mansions like a domestic steam-engine one week and take to their sofas the next, absorbed by fidgets and foot-stoves, shawls and lamentations. There were three riotous and robust young brothers, whom it is unnecessary to describe except by stating that they were boys in the broadest sense of that delightful word. There was a feeble little sister, whose patient, suffering face demanded constant love and care to mitigate the weariness of a life ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott

... of Montreux there are busy people engaged in the labours of the day. There are also idlers endeavouring to "kill" the little span of time that has been given them, in which to do their quota of duty on the earth. So, also, there are riotous young people who are actively fulfilling their duty by going off to skate, or slide down the snow-clad hills, after the severer duties connected with book and slate have been accomplished. These young rioters ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne

... what he had made. The Bible sets no premium upon wastefulness. God lets us know that to waste anything of value is not only foolish but wicked. What was the sin of the Prodigal Son? It was this, that he "wasted his substance with riotous living." He spent his treasure without ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell

... the conventional minds and prim teas she surrounded herself with. Result: A very nice young man, of whom no maid's mother need ever be in trepidation; a very strong young man, whose substance had not been wasted in riotous living; a very learned young man, with a Freiberg mining engineer's diploma and a B.A. sheepskin from Yale; and, lastly, a ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London

... what. Maladjusted to life—man's organism! One's mode of life might be high and scrupulous, but there was always an, undercurrent of greediness, a hankering, and sense of waste. Did women have it too? Who could tell? And yet, men who gave vent to their appetites for novelty, their riotous longings for new adventures, new risks, new pleasures, these suffered, no doubt, from the reverse side of starvation, from surfeit. No getting out of it—a maladjusted animal, civilised man! There could be no garden of his choosing, of "the Apple-tree, the singing, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... youths at home in the favour of their mistresses. There is in the poems of Catullus(9) and the other fragments of the literature of this period something of that fervour of personal and political hatred, of that republican agony overflowing in riotous humour or in stern despair, which are more prominently and powerfully ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... If a wine merchant has collected a riotous assembly in her house and has not seized those rioters and driven them to the palace, that wine merchant ...
— The Oldest Code of Laws in the World - The code of laws promulgated by Hammurabi, King of Babylon - B.C. 2285-2242 • Hammurabi, King of Babylon

... of which we hear so much nowadays. In this system a trained wrestler can seize his opponent in such a manner that the other man is quite at his mercy, or with a slight impetus he can fling the other about as he pleases. One writer speaks of seeing a very small Japanese policeman arrest a huge, riotous Russian sailor, a man much more than six feet high. It seemed a contest between a giant and a child. The sailor made rush after rush at his tiny opponent, but the policeman stepped nimbly aside, waiting ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore

... not much work to do, the sole object of the owner being to keep them alive and prevent their running away till sold at the coast. They generally looked sullen and full of despair; but occasionally, at night, they danced and became even riotous, till a word from the earless imp restored ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... of the streets was chill and depressing. Craven shivered. He thought of the warmth and sunshine that he had left in Japan. The dreariness of the present outlook contrasted sufficiently with the gay smiling landscape, the riotous wealth of colour, and the scent-laden air of the land of his recollections. A feeling almost of nostalgia came to him. But with the thought came also a vision—a little still body lying on silken cushions; ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull

... mythology and delighting in the manifold shapes which the one deity assumes. It freely used the terminology of the Sankhya but the first place in philosophy belonged to the severe pantheism of Sankara which, in contrast to this riotous exuberance of legend and sculpture, sees the highest truth in one Being to whom no epithets can ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... careless now. Here was a swordsman of the best school calling upon him for all the skill and strength and cunning that he could command. Again the saintly element was near being thrown aside by the worldly in the old man's breast. Alice lying there seemed mutely demanding that he avenge her. A riotous something in his blood clamored for a quick and certain act in this drama by moonlight—a tragic close by a stroke of terrible yet perfectly ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

... of the blood, it facilitates the performance of every function; and so tends alike to increase health where it exists, and to restore it when it has been lost. Hence the intrinsic superiority of play to gymnastics. The extreme interest felt by children in their games, and the riotous glee with which they carry on their rougher frolics, are of as much importance as the accompanying exertion; and as not supplying these mental stimuli gymnastics must be radically defective, and can never serve ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... understood in a more general sense than treason, and extends to other offences, not capital, of a like tendency, but without any actual design against the king in contemplation, such as contempts of the king and his government, riotous assemblings for political purposes, and the like; and in general all contemptuous, indecent, or malicious observations upon his person and government, whether by writing or speaking, or by tokens, calculated to lessen him in the esteem of his subjects, or weaken his government, or raise ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various

... name he gave in exchange for mine—said that the row at the Ferry was nothing but a riotous demonstration by the workmen. He came from quite a distance, and, hearing these vague reports, had turned off to visit his patients in this quarter, so that he might learn the real facts; and as it was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various

... had from his work is the falseness of human estimation, fame, and speech. But for the poet who thus summed up the purport of his twenty thousand verses, this was not the whole truth of the matter. Here, as always, that immense, even riotous, vitality of his made the hazards and vicissitudes of the process even more precious than the secure triumph of the issue, and the spirit of poetry itself lured him along the devious ways of minds in which personality set its own picturesque or lurid tinge upon truth. The execution ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... all the mysticism, all the discredited and riotous vagaries of his insubordinate soul, Franklin possessed a saving common sense; yet it was mere freakishness which led him to accept a vagrant impulse as the controlling motive at the crucial moment of his life. His nature was not more ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough

... but grace subordinated to stability, and have shunned embellishment. Embellishment for its own sake is the easiest and commonest sin against good art wherever art becomes self-conscious. It is having a riotous time just now in concrete. I have rarely seen a commercial concrete garden-seat which was not more ornate than I should want it for my own acre. I happen to have two or three articles in my garden which are a trifle elaborate but they are of terra-cotta, are not ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable

... yellow flowers up among the withered leaves, and he took account of the faint blue sheen beneath the beech trunks not far away. There was a vein of artistic feeling in him, and the elusive beauty of these things curiously appealed to him. He had seen the riotous, sensuous blaze of flowers kissed by Pacific breezes, and the burnished gold of wheat that rolled in mile-long waves; but it seemed to him that the wild things of the English North were, after all, more wonderful. They harmonized with the country's deep peacefulness; their ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss

... office in the city of Bristol, where he afterwards worked as a journeyman. Although he was considered a man of sense, he was never thought to be overburdened with religious sentiments; he certainly was not in his latter days. Yet he was MORE than suspected of being actively engaged in the riotous proceedings connected with the trial of Dr. Sacheverell, in Queen Ann's time. In London, Bristol, and many other places, the mobs and riots were of a very serious nature. In London several meeting houses were sacked and pulled down, and the materials and contents made into bonfires, ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies • Anonymous

... "punish, by fine not exceeding twenty dollars, or by solitary imprisonment not exceeding twenty days, any trespasses, batteries, larcenies under five dollars, gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, disorderly and riotous conduct, and for the sale of spirituous liquors within the territory, or on the lands of these Indians and people of color.[8] The guardian or other justice of the peace might issue his warrant directed to the constable ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various

... so devoutly, for most of his epistles were dictated in his bands: "Joseph," saith [3858]Austin, "got more credit in prison, than when he distributed corn, and was lord of Pharaoh's house." It brings many a lewd, riotous fellow home, many wandering rogues it settles, that would otherwise have been like raving tigers, ruined themselves ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... there—he is newly appareled, and wears the signet ring of native prestige; he hears the sound of familiar music and dancing, and it may be that the young and beautiful forms mingling with him in this festival are the riotous youths and maidens of his far-country revels, also come to themselves and home, of whom also the Father saith: These were dead and are alive again, they were lost and are found. The starvation and sense of exile had been parts of a troubled dream—a dream which had also had its ecstasy, but had ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... miles wide. Three hundred villages were swept away and 1,000,000 people made homeless. Famine and pestilence speedily followed, so that the whole catastrophe assumed appalling proportions. Even American communities are apt to become reckless and riotous in time of calamity, and in China this tendency of human nature was intensified by a superstition which led the people to believe that the disaster was due to the baleful influence of the foreigners, ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... white face—white as an orange-blossom—of a black-bodied steer, in advance of the drove, gleaming ghost-like through the vapors; and presently, forgetting his limp, with rapid shout and gesture, he was more eager, even than the troubled farmers, their owners, in driving the riotous cattle back into Barbican. Monomaniac reminiscences were in him—"To the right, to the right!" he shouted, as, arrived at the street corner, the farmers beat the drove to the left, towards Smithfield: "To the right! you are driving them back to the pastures—to the right! ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville

... was outwardly covered with great plaits of auburn hair, through which broke riotous, frivolous curls, the inside held a distinctly active and developed brain, which had acquired the habit of thinking deeply upon such subjects as woman, wife ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest

... far too exclusively occupied in chuckling over the remembrance of the agreeably riotous train of circumstances which had brought his new acquaintance and himself together, to take any notice of his own personal condition, or to observe that his course over the pavement was of a somewhat sinuous nature, as he walked home. It was only when he pulled the door-key ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins

... popular in Henry VIII.'s time, notwithstanding the protests of Sir Thomas More and others. Under Elizabeth they became more frequent in town churches. In Charles I.'s time, they had so far gained ground as to be often a source of hot and even riotous contention between those who opposed them and others who insisted on erecting them. Even in Charles II.'s reign they were exceptional rather than otherwise, and the term had not yet become limited to boxes in church. ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... half-choked with confetti, which filled his eyes, his nose, his ears, and of which quite a liberal amount found access to his mouth. The three ladies of the yashmak ran screaming from their vengeance-seeking victims, Sime pursuing two, and Cairn hard upon the heels of the third. Amid this scene of riotous carnival all else was forgotten, and only the madness, the infectious madness of the night, claimed his mind. In and out of the strangely attired groups darted his agile quarry, all but captured a score of ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer

... fighting mania which then prevailed in Ireland. There were also numbers of crippled and deformed beggars in every town,—quarrelling and fighting in the streets,—rows and drinkings at wakes,—gambling, duelling, and riotous living amongst all classes of the people,—things which could not but strike any ordinary observer at the time, but which have now, for the most part, ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... a noisy entr'acte enough. Three vaudevilles have already been played, and while the fourth is in preparation the public amuses itself according to its own riotous will and pleasure. Nuts and apple parings fly hither and thither; oranges describe perilous parabolas between the pit and the gallery; adventurous gamins make daring excursions round the upper rails; ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

... too far. An inexperienced and headstrong child needs wise counsel and occasional restraint, and within the limits of kindness is helped rather than harmed by a deep respect for authority. Lawlessness is one of the dangers of the current period. It appears in countless minor misdemeanors, in the riotous acts of gangs and mobs, in the recklessness of corporations and labor unions, and in national disregard for international law; and its destructive tendency is disastrous for the future of civilized society unless a new restraint from earliest ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... about on the sleds, and the refrain of a lumberman's chorus, with its riotous, "Whoop fa la larry, lo day!" came floating back to Sunkhaze long after the great sail had merged itself with the silvery radiance of the brilliant surface of ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day

... while said riotous prophecies of Boggs don't impress me a little bit, I'm bound to admit that the second night followin' the heegira of this yere Ryder, an' his advent that a-way into Red Dog, a outcast from the Floridas, who goes locoed as the frootes ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis

... around his eyes; he spoke gravely with his fellow-men, busied himself about political and national matters, looked into the affairs of his own estates, sought out trustworthy stewards and bailiffs, renounced riotous pastimes, spoke sensibly and intelligibly at the Diet; nobody could imagine what had come to him ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai

... all beheld happy families gathered together, each contributing to the general amusement? Are not the confidence and familiarity thus established, the innocence and the charm of the pleasures thus enjoyed, more than enough to make up for the more riotous pleasures of public entertainments? ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... the Marriage Service, the husband, as if in mockery, says, 'With all my worldly goods I thee endow': while the law allows him to gamble away her whole fortune the day after the marriage, or to live in riotous indulgence on her money, and give to her the barest necessaries of life.... He may maliciously refuse her the sight of her own children.... And if to gain one sight of them she return to ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... became more turbulent, and, amid the threatening hubbub, voices arose, showing too well the purpose of the gathering. Aroused to a fever of excitement by the shooting of the tenants, they were no longer skulking, stealthy Indians, but a riotous assemblage of anti-renters, expressing their determination in ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... of England. As a result, the loathsome jails of the day were soon filled with these objectors, and their property melted away in fines. This contumacy and their street meetings, regarded at that time as riotous breaches of the peace, gave the Government at first a legal excuse to hunt them down; but as they grew in numbers and influence, laws were enacted to suppress them. Some of them, though not the wildest extremists, escaped to the colonies in America. There, ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher

... by the City's ceaseless roaring I fly to Great or Little Snoring; When crowds grow riotous and lawless I seek repose at Stratton Strawless; When feeling thoroughly week-endish I hie in haste to Barton Bendish, Or vegetate at Little Hautbois (Still uninvaded by the "dough-boy"). The simple rustic fare of Brockdish Excels the choicest made ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 14, 1920 • Various

... adultery and sacrilege everywhere. I excited my senses with wine, and was justly known as the heaviest drinker in Madaura. Yet I was a Christian, and, in all my follies, kept my faith in Jesus crucified. Having devoured my substance in riotous living, I was beginning to feel the first attacks of poverty, when I saw one of my companions in pleasure suddenly struck with a terrible disease. His knees could not sustain him; his twitching hands refused to obey him; his glazed ...
— Thais • Anatole France

... was a crowd of rough boys, Who with rudeness and mischief and noise, Made one afraid To go where they played, But their riotous ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various

... Japan showed no signs of the extravagant wealth seen in America, she was far from being poor. She had gained little from centralized and artificial industry, but she had wasted less in insane competition and riotous luxury. ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings

... the Caspian, in the other southward along the Tigris to Persepolis. The Persian king fled for his life over the great Salt Desert, from the columns and statues of that city which had lain in ruins since the night of the riotous banquet of Alexander. One division of the Arabian army forced the Persian monarch over the Oxus. He was assassinated by the Turks. His son was driven into China, and became a captain in the Chinese emperor's guards. The country ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... he made friends with amazing innkeepers, and got into rows with the fishermen who came in to drink after midnight. At Brussels, where I was with him at the time of the Kermesse, he flung himself into all that riotous Flemish life, with a zest for what was most sordidly riotous in it. It was his own ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al

... morning, a guard came and conducted the royal family again to the Assembly. Immediately the hall was surrounded by a riotous mob, clamoring for their blood. At one moment the outer doors were burst open, and the blood-thirsty wretches made a rush for the interior. The king, believing that their final hour had come, begged his ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... it is Saxon kinship or the fine qualities of the collection, we have found this volume the most entertaining of the three. Its riotous absurdities well overbalance its examples of the oppressively heavy.... The national impulse to make fun of the war correspondent has a capital example in the skit from Julius ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson

... hour, but of a lifetime. He knows that the treasure, amassed so painfully and with so many privations, will never be enjoyed by himself; that the fatal hour will come when this gold, which he loves more than life, shall be dissipated in riotous living, in foolish orgies, in the midst of which his name and memory shall, perhaps, be scoffed and insulted—and by his own son, alas! And yet he has no thought of punishing such insolent cupidity by destroying his treasure! Ah! believe me, Louis, avarice is a strong, mighty passion; ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue

... the hedge gap and, with a word of greeting, stopped to shake hands with him gravely. So it came about that they were sitting together, Dexter and Caleb, smoking in silence, when Barbara Allison's first wild scream came shrilling to their ears. They waited, staring at each other until the riotous clamor which rose set them to running across the lawn. But the scene which met Caleb's eyes when he burst through the shrubbery froze ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans

... the church before the sacristy, and the glories of the church are Donatello's. We have seen his cantoria in the Museum of the Cathedral. Here is another, not so riotous and jocund in spirit, but in its own way hardly less satisfying. The Museum cantoria has the wonderful frieze of dancing figures; this is an exercise in marble intarsia. It has the same row of pillars with little specks of mosaic gold; but its beauty is that of delicate ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas

... of the treeless hills—a riotous tangle of grasses and wild flowers—looking out to sea across Sky Pond. He had a rod; and as he stood he idly switched the gaily coloured flies ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers

... helm to be put up. These orders were promptly obeyed. Lieut. Parker took the mainsail off her, and had got the spanker about half brailed up, when the squall struck us. It did not appear to be very riotous, nor was its approach accompanied by any foaming of the water, or other indications which usually mark the approach of heavy squalls. But the Brig being flying light, having scarcely any water or provisions, and but six ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat

... whole great State is a wonderland of color. Wide wheat lands of a delicate yellowish green sweep mile on mile till brought to pause by the black green of the woods. Mighty acres of corn land, blue-green, march on the heels of the wheat. Great pastures riotous with early goldenrod are thick dotted with milk herds. White farmhouses with red barns and little towns with gray roofs and green shaded streets dot the State ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow

... near the end, a large party of gentlemen, apparently very riotous, and who were hallooing, leaning on one another, and laughing immoderately, seemed to rush suddenly from behind some trees, and meeting us face to face, put their arms at their sides and formed a kind of circle, which first stopped our proceeding and then our retreating, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... new inmate, and busy were we all from my busy Waller down to Charles. He with much riotousness did superintend all, and rejoiced greatly at the noise caused by the hammering, and taking down and putting up of bed-hangings, and did in no slight measure add thereto by strange outbreaks of riotous mirth, such as whooping and screaming; causing confusion, at the same time, by various demonstrations of his enjoyments, such as throwing nails against the windows, beating on the floor with the poker, and occasionally interrupting our ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various

... the issue as order, government by law, protection of private property, and even treason. The long history of riotous actions by Bostonians was recalled. The commons decided that the time had come to stand firm. Repeal of the Stamp Act and Townshend Duties had not brought respect for and acceptance of authority. Mason's ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education

... had, then she was to be seized. At the same time Dow had requested Mr. Sidebotham, his Majesty's officer in the Isle of Man, to cast off the Sincerity's headfast and sternfasts from the shore. But thereupon a riotous and angry mob, fearing that the cruiser should be able to get under weigh and seize the Dutch dogger, refused to allow Sidebotham to let go the ropes. Armed with bludgeons, muskets, swords, and stones they rushed down on to the quay, and did all they could to force the cruiser on shore by aiming ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton



Words linked to "Riotous" :   immoral, debauched, fast, riot, profuse, tumultuous, dissipated, profligate, unquiet, disruptive, degraded, exuberant, turbulent, libertine, degenerate, dissolute, luxuriant, lush, abundant, troubled



Copyright © 2024 e-Free Translation.com