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Haphazard   /hæphˈæzərd/   Listen
Haphazard

adjective
1.
Dependent upon or characterized by chance.  Synonym: hit-or-miss.  "His judgment is rather hit-or-miss"
2.
Marked by great carelessness.  Synonyms: slapdash, slipshod, sloppy.  "Slapdash work" , "Slipshod spelling" , "Sloppy workmanship"



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"Haphazard" Quotes from Famous Books



... idea that fashions are haphazard, and are dictated and guided by no fixed principles of action, and represent no great currents in politics or movements of the human mind. Women, who are exceedingly subtle in all their operations, feel that it is otherwise. They ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... the veriest stranger. Jimmy flushed scarlet. Kettering turned away and plunged haphazard into conversation ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres

... that the alchemist set about his task of assisting nature in a haphazard way, and without training in the various alchemic laboratory methods. On the contrary, he usually served a long apprenticeship in the rudiments of his calling. He was obliged to learn, in a general way, many of the same things that must ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... other hand De Wet's release from immediate subordination to Cronje seemed to make him a more dangerous foe. His capture of the convoy at Waterval Drift on February 15 was followed in three days by a daring raid on a British army with a handful of men. It was an impudent and haphazard enterprise, which would hardly have been attempted if he had been in possession of fuller information, but it was justified by its success. De Wet had been reinforced at Koffyfontein, and if he had brought all the commandos at his disposal with him to Paardeberg Cronje ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited

... echoed, annoyingly haphazard. "Why so? You're being well cared for, I take it; and I'm under engagement ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... haunted the Crow's Nest, and the insurrectionary faction, starting with the trainmen and spreading to the track force, threatened to involve the telegraph operators—threatened to become a protest unanimous and in the mass. Worse than this, the service, haphazard enough before, now became a maddening chaos. Orders were misunderstood, whether wilfully or not no court of inquiry could determine; wrecks were of almost daily occurrence, and the shop track was speedily filled to the switches with ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde

... sentence, dropped at haphazard, the secret might never have been resolved. As it was, the clue—that the author of Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings was private chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman—had only to be followed up; and it led to the name of Thomas Traherne. ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... names to the essays they have written. The essays are in three blank envelopes, which now lie before me on the table." Here Sir John touched three envelopes with his hand. "I will proceed to read them aloud, taking them up haphazard, and having no idea myself who the writer of each essay is. I have selected as the subject of the test essay the great and wonderful subject of Heroism, for I feel that such a theme will give scope for the real mind, the real heart, the real soul ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade

... from the simplicity of her bucolic life by the discovery of gold and diamonds. This was, of course, some years before the fountains of her boundless potential wealth had become fully unsealed. I was one of that band of light-hearted, haphazard pioneers who, rejoicing in youthful energy and careless of their own interests, unwittingly laid the foundation upon which so many great fortunes ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully

... together. Small groups formed haphazard squadrons, keeping each other company, but many ships were isolated and ploughed their way alone over the dreary sea. Many, despite hard work at the pumps, settled lower and lower in the water each day, ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training, if I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... utterances that seem so full of life and are apparently the product of flashed thought are either the welling up of some subconscious ideas quickly reconstructed to fit the situation or they are a haphazard jumble either meaningless or conveying an unintended impression. They are generally in the humorous line and frequently make an impression that was not anticipated by ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness

... great clearing in the woodland was not a matter of haphazard; though the river had driven a road whereby men might fare on each side of its hurrying stream. It was men who had made ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris

... cut flints. The forearms and the hands were subjected to the same treatment as the head. In many cases no trace of them appears, in others they are deposited by the side of the skull or scattered about haphazard. Other mutilations are frequently met with; the ribs are divided and piled up behind the body, the limbs are disjointed or the body is entirely dismembered, and the fragments arranged upon the ground or enclosed ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... instances of the treatment meted out to the unfortunate natives, taken at haphazard from the official reports. There are plenty more of the same nature if ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard

... There was always, if the worst came to the worst, the farm. But if Mr. Gwynne was no business man still less was he a farmer. Tied to his store by reason of his inability to afford a competent assistant, the farming operations were carried on in haphazard fashion by neighbours who were willing to liquidate their store debts with odd days' work at times most convenient to themselves, but not always most seasonable for the crops. Hence in good years, none too good with such haphazard ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor

... have been blown and sapped out to, and after trench mortars have "strafed" consistently for many months and torn the original surface of the ground to pieces, the actual position of the trenches themselves becomes haphazard. They cease in many cases to bear the slightest likeness to the ordinary trenches of commerce; they become deep gorges in mountains of sandbags. I have sometimes wished that those officers who apparently write home to devoted bands of female workers asking for more sandbags ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile

... commonly applied to a mere board or tablet of wood on which the necessary dots are made with ink or chalk. ) The following scheme of a geomantic operation will show the application of the above rules. Supposing the first haphazard dotting to produce these sixteen ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne

... colours. There is a heavenly game, on south-west wind days, when the clouds are bowled by a breeze from behind the evening. They are round and brilliant, and come leaping up from the horizon for hours. This is a frolic and haphazard sky. ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell

... in the morning of September 26th we were again working our way down the torrential river. Anybody who tries to go through here in any haphazard fashion will surely come to grief. It is a passage that can safely be made only with the most extreme caution. The walls grew straighter, and they grew higher till the gorge assumed proportions that seemed to me the acme of the stupendous and ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... speculators bought lands at haphazard, certain parties who found favour at the government offices managed to secure the best lands which were for sale or location, before they were exposed to fair competition at the periodical public sales in the different districts. Thus a large portion of the wild lands in the colony were and are ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... remarked my looking at her dress which was all darned and mended in the most unaccountable places, "O, Mademoiselle," she said. "I suppose you are wondering about my waist? But wasn't it lucky I was here with Andre when the troops passed through our village? The soldiers fired haphazard in the windows and the wardrobe in which my clothes were hanging caught seven bullets and the headboard of ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow

... with the Nisan natives, walked up the bank, and in a few minutes the guns were at work. Never before had I seen such thousands of pigeons in so small an area. It could hardly be called sport, for the birds were so thick on the trees that when a native fired at haphazard into the branches the heavy charge of shot would bring them down by the dozen—the remainder would simply fly off to the next tree. Owing to the dense foliage the skipper and I seldom got a shot at them on the wing, and had to ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke

... names tend to be phonetic and haphazard. Eg Pensanz, Pensans, Pensants, Pensance, and Penzance are all the ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew

... hard to condense into an article. I can do no more than skim over his career, and make out a feature here and there. He was an unstudious youth. He was not disciplined. He grew as he might, and he absorbed information at haphazard from any book he found to his liking, but he was a sort of intellectual Ishmael. He studied things not in the curriculum. He plunged into Arabic and Hindustani, and was "rusticated." He cared nothing for the classics, yet he left a redaction of ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... will arouse men's energies enough to get them into action. It's absurd to think that business men . . . they're the flower of the nation, they're America's specialty, you know . . . can only find their opportunity for service to their fellow-men by such haphazard contracts with public service as helping raise money for a library or heading a movement for better housing of the poor, when they don't know anything about the housing of the poor, nor what it ought to be. Their opportunity for public service is right in their own legitimate ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... but, side by side with these exterior characteristics, there ran a streak of almost feminine delicacy of perception and ideality of purpose. Diana had once told him, laughingly, that he was of the stuff of which martyrs were made in the old days of persecution, and in this she had haphazard lit upon the fundamental force that shaped his actions. The burden which fate, or his own deeds, might lay upon his shoulders, that he would bear, be ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler

... a great pleasure to me, owing to your loving comprehension of my works. That in composing them I do not quite work at haphazard and grope about in the dark, as my opponents in so many quarters reproach me with doing, will be gradually acknowledged by those among them who may be honest enough not to wish entirely to obstruct a right insight into the matter through preconceived views. As I have for years ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated

... of the 1696 catalogue is indisputable. And now, after wading through this dry forest of figures and dates and haphazard or dogmatic attributions, we are at the fatal number, thirty-four—only thirty-four authentic Vermeers in existence. Some one must be mistaken. Who owns the thirty-fifth Vermeer? I ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... Introductions—as, when meeting others, or at outdoor sports—need not be formal, but can be done haphazard. This does not imply further acquaintance if ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green

... know but what this was the norm of average visualization methods; so I tried this same series upon a number of normal individuals for comparison; by normal individuals, I mean, at this time, merely anyone who is free from stuttering, and chosen in a haphazard way from the hospital community; for example, one was our executive secretary, another a typewriter, another a telephone operator ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... secretly carrying a considerable parcel of high explosive. He wandered until he could wander no more, and then he entered a tea-shop that was nearly full of young girls. It was a new world to him. He saw "Mutton pie 8d" on the menu and ordered it haphazard. He discovered to his astonishment that he was hungry. Having eaten the mutton pie, he ordered a second one, and ate it. The second mutton pie seemed to endow the eater with the faculty of vision—a result which ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett

... events, I confined myself at first simply to looking on, and decided to attempt nothing serious. Indeed, I felt that, if I began to do anything at all, I should do it in an absent-minded, haphazard sort of way—of that I felt certain. Also, it behoved me to learn the game itself; since, despite a thousand descriptions of roulette which I had read with ceaseless avidity, I knew nothing of its rules, and had never even ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... surmised, had come about as the result of Ma's early reading: a haphazard choice of story books, in which were tales of treasure trove, of pirates, of wronged maidens and gallant squires—romantic stories peculiarly designed to stir a cramped imagination like hers. It was from them that she ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach

... Her manuscript draft had not once left her hands. No; it was a coincidence, nothing more—one of those fateful coincidences with which the scientific and literary worlds are crowded. And he, this unknown Vickers, this haphazard genius of Ash Fork, Arizona, had the prior claim. Her "Patroclus" must remain unwritten. The sob caught and clutched at ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... much better to have the textbook before one than to teach the lesson after a disconnected and haphazard fashion from lack of familiarity with its points. An excellent substitute for the text, however, is an outline, or plan of the lesson embodying the main points, illustrations, and applications to be made. Such an outline will save the teacher ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts

... Haphazard from their shoulders hang the garments of the hawker—combining in their person the motley of many manners with the ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler

... it all was unpremeditated, incoherent, and discursive, and yet strangely effective. She described the contortions of her kaleidoscope as they came to mind haphazard, with an indifference, a precise objectivity that made the picture all the more real and universal, not the special ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... up in astonishment, at this incursion into her very sanctuary, of a stranger met at haphazard on the hills. Hadria wheeled up an easy-chair for ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... excellent modern English when he liked, and usually did so, but, and in this he resembled others of his kind, in times of excitement he used the older form which is still the tongue of Lancashire. I made some haphazard answer, but it seemed appropriate, for Alice smiled upon us as we shook hands heartily. When I turned toward her a feeling of pity came upon me—she looked so wan and frail. Still her eyes were bright with good-will, and her voice seemed to tremble a little as she said, "I am so glad to see you ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... been content to travel in this haphazard way, and it was long before he would acknowledge the benefits of a compass and map. That he could travel straight there was no gainsaying, for if, as I sometimes did, I pointed out our line and sent him ahead, he would go as straight as a die, ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... for a moment from the nebulae in the sky to the conclusions to which philosophers had been irresistibly led by a consideration of the features of the solar system. We had before us in the sun and planets obviously not a haphazard aggregation of bodies, but a system resting upon a multitude of relations pointing to a common physical cause. From these considerations Kant and Laplace formulated the nebular hypothesis, resting it on gravitation alone, for at that time the science of the conservation of energy ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various

... Chevalier's rapier hit him in the forehead, cutting and dazing him. He rose, staggering, and indulged in a little profanity which made him eminently human. One by one he gathered up the fallen garments and cloaks. It was haphazard work: for now the floor was where the partition had been, and the ceiling where the bunk had stood. Keys had rolled from the Chevalier's pockets—keys, coins, and rings; and Breton scrambled and ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... Three yards apart we became invisible to each other. I followed behind MacRae more or less mechanically, though I was, in a way, acutely conscious of the necessity for stealthy going, one part of my mind busy turning over the quick march of events and guessing haphazard at the future. ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... complaints, however badly his feet might be blistered. And withal he possessed a most orderly mind, ever carefully arranging and classifying his little belongings in his drawers, and looking down with contempt on the haphazard way in which his sisters kept ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... down the profits to an irreducible minimum, in a world that was able to count its disengaged tonnage twice over every day, and in which lean charters were snapped up by cable three months in advance, there were no chances of fortune for an individual wandering haphazard with a little bark—hardly indeed any room ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad

... north, humanity has made a fight for it, and the white, dusty roads struggle with an almost visible effort up the heavy grade of the hill until they attain the summit. The effect is of a terraced and piled-up city, straggling in haphazard fashion up to the point where the great Roman Catholic cathedral, square-hewn and twin-towered, crowns the mass of ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton

... inn, looking out upon the sea; and we are really very comfortably lodged. I can just stand upright in my bedroom. Otherwise, it is a good deal like one of Ballard's top-rooms. We have a very obliging and comfortable landlady; and it is a clean nice place in a rough wild country. We came here haphazard, but could not ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens

... by dozens of people as he stood before the footlights and brandished his dagger; but his swift horse quickly carried him beyond any haphazard pursuit. He crossed the Navy-Yard bridge and rode into Maryland, being joined very soon by Herold. The assassin and his wretched acolyte came at midnight to Mrs. Surratt's tavern, and afterward pushed on through the moonlight ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay

... work on the haphazard methods of pure chance. Nor, on the other hand, are its operations conducted in the rigid, mechanical method of a machine. Nor, again, can the result we see be due to the working of blind physical and chemical processes alone. There is a great ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband

... with, I worked to repeat the phenomena I had seen, getting some haphazard results from the start. My purpose throughout was to exchange intelligent comment with the individual I had beheld on that snow-stone within the Spot; and in the ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... of Correspondence.—Up to this time the resistance of the colonists had been carried on in a haphazard sort of way. Now Committees of Correspondence began to be appointed. These committees were of two kinds. First there were town Committees of Correspondence. These were invented by Samuel Adams and were first ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing

... contain never an idle word, and the phrases bite like vitriol. Moreover he employs an idiom that is (I conjecture) a direct transcription from native speech, which adds enormously to the effect. Understand me, not for worlds would I commend these volumes haphazard to the fastidious; I only say they are clever, arresting and violently individual. Also that, if you have not so far met the work of Mr. EVANS, here is your opportunity, in a volume that shows it at its best, or worst. Half-an-hour's reading will give you an excellent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various

... a craving, a tendency, an unsatisfied impulse, often even a state of gestation full of discomfort. Moreover, it is concomitant, that is, under its form of pleasure or of pain, of hope, of spite, of anger, etc., it accompanies all the phases or turns of creation. The creator may, haphazard, go through the most diverse forms of exaltation and depression; may feel in turn the dejection of repulse and the joy of success; finally the satisfaction of being freed from a heavy burden. I challenge anyone to produce a solitary example of ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... of conscious assurance, travelled from table to table and arrived at Craven and his macaroni. She looked surprised, then sent him a brilliant smile, turned quickly and spoke to Lady Sellingworth. The latter then also looked towards Craven, smiled kindly, and bowed with the careless, haphazard grace ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens

... foot, in the open and when in the woods or in the short brush. He has also told us much about the habits of the beasts and birds that he has hunted, showing that he followed the sport intelligently and not in the haphazard fashion of many who go out merely to get a big bagful ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer

... properly defined, have a correlative. I add this condition because, if that to which they are related is stated as haphazard and not accurately, the two are not found to be interdependent. Let me state what I mean more clearly. Even in the case of acknowledged correlatives, and where names exist for each, there will be no interdependence ...
— The Categories • Aristotle

... Whitman's words) what I could do to it. Imagine it upon a windy night of winter, when a hundred discommoded passengers are turned out, grumbling, underneath the stars,—coughing invalids, and kicking infants, and indignant citizens, scrambling haphazard among tottering trunks, and picking their way from train to train. Imagine their faces, their voices, their gesticulations: here, indeed, you will see more than a theatre-full of characters. Or, if human beings do not interest you, imagine the mysterious gleam ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... Desperate, Fandor plunged haphazard about the disordered chamber, wrapped in darkness. Suddenly, he rushed into the study hard by, found there another lamp which he lit in haste, and hurried back ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain

... studies, I cannot help looking at things purely from an sthetic point of view, and what I valued in "Uncle Tom" was the genius, and not the moral. That is saying a good deal, for I never use the word genius at haphazard, and always (perhaps, too) sparingly. I am going to be as frank as I ought to be with one whom I value so highly. What especially charmed me in the new story was, that you had taken your stand on New England ground. You are one of the few persons lucky enough ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... then one may still be found to regard it with a captious eye. The far greater part, however, I have reason to flatter myself, receive my good-humored picturings in the same temper with which they were executed; and when I find, after a lapse of nearly forty years, this haphazard production of my youth still cherished among them; when I find its very name become a "household word," and used to give the home stamp to everything recommended for popular acceptation, such as Knickerbocker societies, Knickerbocker insurance companies, Knickerbocker steamboats, Knickerbocker ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... never quite revealed. We can only say that this thing happened to Mr. Conrad, that he knew such a man and that thus life passed him leaving those memories. They are the records of the events of his life, not in every instance striking or decisive events but rather those haphazard events which for no definite reason impress themselves upon the mind and recur in memory long afterward as symbols of one knows not what sacred ritual taking place ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad

... light, clatters over frail arches, rumbles upon the heavy ground, shoots beneath a wooden bridge which intercepts the light for a second like a wink, suddenly awakens all the slumbering echoes in the main street of a large town, and dashes on haphazard, pell-mell, neck-or-nothing, down the middle of the road. There - with mechanics working at their trades, and people leaning from their doors and windows, and boys flying kites and playing marbles, and ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens

... is fertile, and all sorts of fruits and vegetables thrive. In fact the natives live on what they raise in their haphazard way. They have a rude system of irrigation which carries water to every little garden. One other thing grows in abundance there—dogs! Such a flock of surly, mangy mongrels one would have to travel far to find. I don't know ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith

... into the cafe, and seated himself haphazard at one of the small tables. Glancing round the room, he saw no one in whom he could ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Dorn told the directors in the Tribunal Hall some minutes later, "is then this. There has been nothing haphazard about the Mars Convicts' plan to coerce us into accepting their terms. Considering the probable quality of the type of minds which developed both the stardrive and the extraordinary 'philosophy' we have encountered today, that could be taken for granted from the ...
— Oneness • James H. Schmitz

... that you resigned your commission in the army, and I laughed with delight at the news, knowing that the gods who are our servants had contrived it. I know why thou art here," she said; and the change from you to thou was not haphazard. ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy

... are dropped, all that are crude, gaulois or naifs, all that are local and provincial, or personal and made-up, all familiar and proverbial locutions,[3212] many brusque, familiar and frank turns of thought, every haphazard, telling metaphor, almost every description of impulsive and dexterous utterance throwing a flash of light into the imagination and bringing into view the precise, colored and complete form, but of which a too vivid impression would run counter ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... roofs of thatch or slate, and kept stumbling on the greasy and uneven cobble-stones. Now and again the corner of a street or the angle of a square was lit up dimly by a ray of light filtering through half-closed shutters. I went along haphazard, preceded by my friend B. We were quite determined to find beds, and ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont

... of being acquainted with any of them in particular, I chose at haphazard the djin with the umbrella and got into his little cart, of which he carefully lowered the hood. He drew an oilcloth apron over my knees, pulling it up to my face, and then advancing, asked me, in Japanese, something ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... but little and may result in positive injury. To pile up complications and intricacies having no practical educational value is utterly useless. It indicates the lack of a true conception of the school situation. Such haphazard methods will not teach alone any more than a saw will saw alone. Behind it all must be the simple, great teacher, and for him all these things, beyond a reasonable ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy

... here," he ventured, as, noticing the damage that the damp grass was doing to his trouser hems, he covered the remaining distance between them in a series of violent haphazard leaps. ...
— Stubble • George Looms

... Wages for Englishmen range from twenty-five shillings upwards weekly. We spoke to some of the wives of the workmen, several of whom are recent arrivals from Lancashire. Their dwellings are of the simplest description, made of corrugated iron or of straw, and scattered at haphazard in a clearing in the jungle or on the banks of the river. These pioneers of cultivation have to lead a hard life and bear many privations—circumstances in which the colonising qualities of the Anglo-Saxon race always come to ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... in a hurry," observed Eleanor, who was always vastly entertained by Betty's impetuous, haphazard methods. ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde

... all things equal, a diaphragm thickness that gives a maximum telephonic result. Such result, which is analogous to those that occur in other electro-magnetic phenomena, may explain the want of success of many tentatives made somewhat at haphazard, with a view to increasing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various

... in complete disregard of what soil, climate, etc., permit. One of the evils of an abstract or remote external aim in education is that its very inapplicability in practice is likely to react into a haphazard snatching at immediate conditions. A good aim surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... separate abode with the cheerfulness of the family home. She had her own servant, whose excellent cooking and, above all, whose scrupulous cleanliness and tidiness, astonished her after the rough meals and haphazard ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty

... current of associations that led her to meditate on freedom, wealth, power; on a career which should at the same time dazzle the imagination and gratify her heart. Notwithstanding the gossip of Paris, founded on no authentic knowledge of her husband's character or information, based on the haphazard observations of the floating multitude, Lucretia herself had no reason to fear that her influence over Lord Monmouth, if exerted, was materially diminished. But satisfied that he had formed no other tie, with her ever the test of her position, she had ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... his demand upon the illimitable wealth of Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He tamed certain animals, he developed his primordially haphazard agriculture into a ritual, he added first one metal to his resources and then another, until he had copper and tin and iron and lead and gold and silver to supplement his stone, he hewed and carved wood, made pottery, paddled down his river until he came to the sea, discovered the wheel ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... a confused, haphazard idea as to the type of man that was standing before her. She was seized with a prickling desire for him such as she had thus far never experienced. She began to love him, in her way. Something impelled her to seek shelter by him, near him, somewhat as a bird flies under the crown of a tree at ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... us would deal with affairs through a rather haphazard and shifting assortment of stereotypes, if a comparatively few men in each generation were not constantly engaged in arranging, standardizing, and improving them into logical systems, known as the Laws of Political Economy, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... quest of prey—of the romances in folio in the virgin stamped Spanish bindings, which they might have worn since they lay on the shelves of Don Quixote or the Licentiate, brought for sale, as it were haphazard, to some market-place in Seville or Valladolid in wine-skins. But the contents of the above-mentioned Bibliotheca were purely English. It was a small but choice assemblage of old poetry formed by Mr. Thomas Hill, otherwise ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... semicolons seem to be employed interchangeably; a semicolon almost invariably appears where nowadays we should employ the dash; and, lastly, the dash itself becomes a point of all work, replacing indifferently commas, colons, semicolons or periods. Inadequate and sometimes haphazard as it is, however, Shelley's punctuation, so far as it goes, is of great value as an index to his metrical, or at times, it may be, to his rhetorical intention—for, in Shelley's hands, punctuation serves rather ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... days of knight-errantry. In an instant his well-conceived project had gone by the board. He saw himself discredited, suspected, a skulking plotter driven into the open, a self-confessed trickster utterly at the mercy of some haphazard question that would lay bare his pretenses and cover his counterfeit ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy

... logical.—There was no effort to be philosophical, yet the teachings of Christ are full of philosophy. The language used and the manner of putting the truth were so simple that the ignorant man and the child were never left in doubt as to his meaning. Nevertheless his teaching was not haphazard; it was connected and logical. It contained so much of truth, so systematically put and so much to the point in view, that, while it appealed at once to the understanding of his hearers, it also furnished material for thought for ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley

... external basis is necessary in the progressive development of such phenomena, and that the teacher, who is to respond to the requests of the child in conscious evolution, cannot do so adequately by haphazard means; he must be guided by conditions previously determined by experience. In other words, those external means already alluded to several times, that staircase, the steps of which lead the soul upwards, must have been ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... his library, took up half a dozen books at haphazard and made him read, at the foot of the title pages, the dates 1826, ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About

... children, and children good enough and well trained enough for the demands of the developing civilised state. Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and decaying in its intimate substance, and unless it was presently to collapse, some very extensive and courageous reorganisation was needed. The old haphazard system of pairing, qualified more and more by worldly discretions, no longer secures a young population numerous enough or good enough for the growing needs and possibilities of our Empire. Statecraft sits weaving splendid garments, no doubt, but with a puny, ugly, insufficient ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... his accomplice have adopted a very simple system called the double book-cipher. The correspondents first agree upon some particular book; and both obtain a copy of the same edition. When one desires to communicate with the other, he opens the book haphazard, and begins by writing the number of the page. Then he must find on the same page the words that will express his thoughts. If the first word he wishes to write is the twentieth on the page, he places number 20 after the number ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau

... see what stuff he is made of, he shall have a rise. But I never do things at haphazard; and it's easier going up than coming down. I'm not a benevolent man, Mrs. Boyd, and you need not think it. But I've fought the world pretty hard myself, and I like to help those that are fighting it. Good evening. Isn't that your son coming round the corner? Well, he's back ...
— Twilight Stories • Various

... themselves in the peaceful influences of the hour. Shipwrecked, remote from human land, environed by dangers known or only conjectured, two solitary beings on a tiny island, thrown haphazard from the depths of the China Sea, this young couple, after passing unscathed through perils unknown even to the writers of melodrama, lifted up their voices in the sheer exuberance of good spirits ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... a shadow of doubt," said the doctor. "I've had Sir Abraham Haphazard, and Sir Rickety Giggs, and old Neversaye Die, and Mr Snilam; and they are all of the same opinion. There is not the smallest doubt about it. Of course, she must administer, and all that; and I'm afraid there'll be a very heavy sum to pay for the tax; ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope

... any one could see that they were steadily getting in deeper and deeper. The swamp was becoming much wilder now; and it was not hard to realize that a man getting lost here, and losing his head, might, after his bearings were gone, go wandering at haphazard for days, possibly crossing his own trail more than ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher

... it needed only the first lesson to demonstrate to him that these superficial conclusions were quite wrong. It was one thing to cut a board haphazard; but quite another matter to cut it evenly, and on a ruled line. Nor was the driving of nails as simple as he had supposed. At the end of the first hour Theo, feeling very awkward and clumsy, and rubbing a finger that ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett

... and muttering slowly to himself, "Tut! but a chance coincidence,—a haphazard allusion to a fact which he could not ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... precarious and monotonous subsistence that it is not infrequently combined with a primitive, shifting tillage. The Kalmucks of the Russian steppes employ men to harvest hay for the winter feeding. The Nogai Tartars practice a little haphazard tillage on the alluvial hem of the steppe streams.[1116] Certain Arab tribes living east of the Atbara and Gash Rivers resort with their herds during the dry season to the fruitful region of Cassala, which is ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... accumulated in one generation, are dispersed in the next. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman one will not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and pedigree in a race horse and a bird dog how dare you ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... of their minds and tempers, it was a true part of their personal gesture, and was something they could not, and need not, do anything about, as if it were the normal tendency in them in their several ways. We all of us know that modern art is not haphazard, it is not hit or miss in its intention at least, certainly not the outcome of oddity, of whim, or of eccentricity, for these traits belong to the superficial and cultivated. We have found that with the best moderns there has been and is inherent in them the ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... the country. If any man be competent to bring about this desirable consummation it is himself; for he possesses, to an eminent degree, that caution which is indispensable to the successful conduct of an offensive war in a mountainous country, and which is so much at variance with the haphazard arrangements usually found among ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot

... were already secret allies and the Don Juans of a coterie of haphazard Sixth Avenue beauties. There was a usefulness to both in the new alliance, and Einstein was already the destined secret patron ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... had arrived, and as many more were expected. A lively chatter had already begun; for each woman had been offered on her arrival a basket from which she had to choose a brightly coloured ribbon. These ribbons matched the rosettes presented in an equally haphazard way to every man. As Vincy observed, it gave one the rather ghastly impression that there was going to be a cotillion at once, on sight, before dinner; which was a little frightening. In reality it was merely so that the partners for the ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson

... for the motherless brood, and for Gran'ther and Mr. Fen Llewellen. They lived in a most haphazard fashion, for, although they were not really poor, the children never seemed to have any decent clothing to wear; and if, by chance, they got a new garment, something always happened to it as, for instance, ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr

... Quinnox stood their ground; a solid, defiant line that fired with telling accuracy into the struggling horde. On the walls two Gatling guns began to cackle their laugh of death. And still the mercenaries poured through the gap, forming in haphazard lines under the direction ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... we dropped anchor half a mile outside the entrance of Little Cove our deck became active. I went off first with the supplies to choose a spot where they should be stored, although in such a black night this might have been left haphazard to the men. But one never believes, on occasions so momentous as pitching camp, that others know a jot about it but oneself—to this there are ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris

... interference and excuses no indifference. The proverb tells us that "our lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing is of the Lord." And just as the dark forces that sweep through our life are not necessarily hostile forces but form part of the order of the world, so things that we regard as haphazard, merely cast into the lap of chance, may be divine agents working out a marvellous equality of opportunity throughout our human life. I affirm it without a shadow of qualification, that chance has no place whatever ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd

... anything that came to hand, with its houses squatted in haphazard, hasty fashion, and the country around bare and brown and bleak, San Francisco did not look attractive. But the bay was grand; and the hundreds of ships flying the flags of the United States, and England, and France and Spain and Mexico and ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin

... ought to have a French or a German governess next year, how she should dress, and in the distance the right school to be selected. Isabelle meant to do her best for the little girl, and looked back on her own bringing up—even the St. Mary's part of it—as distressingly haphazard, and limiting. Her daughter should be fitted "to make the most of life," which was what Isabelle felt that she herself ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... said "old Steve" hailing us as we went alongside, and directed him what to say, as Bob's phraseology was habitually seasoned far more highly with nautical slang than was my own, and he would, therefore, be less likely to be suspected in the carrying on of a haphazard conversation ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood

... Mitchell's; Miss Barnes, the fresh assistant mistress, was to take the Fourth; and the teaching of the three lower forms would be shared by Miss Hopkins, Mademoiselle, and Miss Fanny Pollard. Lessons, on a first morning, are usually more or less haphazard, but at any rate a beginning was made, the pupils were entered on their class registers, their capacities were tested, and they began in some slight degree to know their teachers. Before the school separated at 12.30 for ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil

... assertion of right be haphazard and by casual alliance or shall there be a common concert to oblige the ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty

... up to Margny, the assailants found the Burgundians scattered and unarmed. They took them by surprise; and the French set to work to strike here and there haphazard. The Maid, for her part, overthrew ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... the grain, and the adjoining piece of a mild-grained nature. Jointed boards should always be glued up with the grain running in the same direction if possible; this we show at Fig. 13, and nothing looks worse than a dressing chest end or similar piece of work in which the grain runs haphazard. When jointing thin timber (say, 1/4-in., 3/8-in., 1/2-in. and 5/8-in. boards) the best method is to use a shooting board (Fig. 26). It must be noted, however, that a shooting board and plane practically never give a true ...
— Woodwork Joints - How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used. • William Fairham

... understood that," Martin answered. "All the arts have their conventions." (Ruth was surprised at his use of the word. It was as if he had studied at the university himself, instead of being ill-equipped from browsing at haphazard through the books in the library.) "But even the conventions must be real. Trees, painted on flat cardboard and stuck up on each side of the stage, we accept as a forest. It is a real enough convention. But, on the other ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... organization of the rural school is haphazard and faulty. This is partly because of the small enrollment and irregular attendance, and partly because of the inexperience and lack of supervision of the teacher. Children are often found pursuing studies in three or four different ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts

... equipment was better than he knew. In a disorderly haphazard world hatred is as effective an impulse to drive men forward to success as love and high hope. It is a world-old impulse sleeping in the heart of man since the day of Cain. In a way it rings true and strong above the hideous ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson

... upon the table, but its disorderly arrangement, and the haphazard way in which each child was helping itself, caused the boy to give an involuntary shudder, as his host invited him to sit down "an' take a bite, while they ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various

... That, though the occupations named are entirely normal to all well-ordered states, descendants of persons in those occupations tend to become "subnormal"—so runs the cant of it—something handicapped by that haphazard bullet of a lifetime since, fired to advance the glorious cause ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... tragic series of circumstances, at the most critical moment of the contest, Lupin was turning his back on the battlefield and going away, at haphazard, to seek, he knew not where, and beat, he knew not how, the most formidable and elusive enemy that he had ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc

... assured until it was confirmed by repeated observations and by knowledge current among the blacks. When the scared snake descends into its own well-defined well, very little disturbance and no discoloration of the water takes place. But when in desperation it disappears down a haphazard hole, a dense little cloud of sediment is created. By careful watching I discovered that the snake entered its home head first, but in any other hole the tail had precedence, and that the frantic wriggling as it bored its way down caused the obscuration. Moreover ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... peculiarities have generally not till then been noticed. Possessing but a limited amount of education, the boatswain of the Plantagenet endeavoured, on attaining his present rank, to instruct himself; and having no one to advise him, he had purchased some books at haphazard, the contents of which he respected the more that they were totally beyond his comprehension. The work mentioned was among them, and as he thought that he understood it best it was his chief favourite. He was a short, spare man, with a red face tanned by tropical suns, ferrety eyes, sharp ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston

... movement began in the conviction that a great and sudden danger to the Church was at hand, and that an unusual effort must be made to meet it. But if the occasion was in a measure accidental, there was nothing haphazard or tentative in the line chosen to encounter the danger. From the first it was deliberately and distinctly taken. The choice of it was the result of convictions which had been forming before the occasion came which called ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... haven't gone through life as circumspectly as you have. I drank; success made me dizzy. But I love Patty—God bless her!—as I never hoped or dreamed of loving any woman. You're a man, John; you will understand. I've been alone all my life; buffeted here and there, living haphazard, without any particular restraint on my desires. The dear old aunt was the only tie, and that was delicate till I came home and found how good and kind she was. I miss her; months from now I shall miss her a hundredfold. I'm very lonely. ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath

... Increasing agitation for more practical education has led to the creation of various kinds of vocational schools, including a large variety of correspondence schools for those who wish specific training. There are still thousands of boys and girls who enter industrial occupations in the most haphazard way, and yield to irrational impulse in choosing or giving up a particular job or a place to live in; similar impulse induces them to mate in the same haphazard way, and as lightly to separate if they tire of each other; but the very ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... he was instantly aware, from the boy's unhappy face, that Dick believed him. Raven burst into a laugh, but he quickly sobered. What a snare they were getting themselves into, and only by an impish destiny of haphazard speech. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... most lads who have been expressly prepared for a university, and, thanks to an anglicised Swiss who acted as an assistant in Mr Reardon's business, he not only read French, but could talk it with a certain haphazard fluency. These attainments, however, were not of much practical use; the best that could be done for Edwin was to place him in the office of an estate agent. His health was indifferent, and it seemed likely that open-air exercise, of which he would have a good deal under the particular ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... interruptions and hindrances to work that one has planned out for oneself as discipline, trials sent by God to help one against getting selfish over one's work. Then one can feel that perhaps one's true work—one's work for God—consists in doing some trifling haphazard thing that has been thrown into one's day. It is not waste of time, as one is tempted to think, it is the most important part of the work of the day,—the part one can best offer to God. After such a hindrance, do not rush after the planned work; trust that the time to finish it will ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston

... satin divans, and sat down in Grant Sanderson's parquetry smoking-room to meals of junk and potatoes, bad of their kind, and often scant in quantity. Hemstead grumbled; Tommy had occasional moments of revolt, and increased the ordinary by a few haphazard tins or a bottle of his own brown sherry. But Hemstead grumbled from habit, Tommy revolted only for the moment, and there was underneath a real and general acquiescence in these hardships. For besides onions and potatoes, the Currency Lass may be said to have gone to sea without stores. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... extremity with a small wooden mallet. If we observe this rod by means of a direction needle at all parts, and successively during its gradual passage from one polarity to the other, there will be no sudden break into a haphazard arrangement, but a gradual and perfectly symmetrical rotation from one direction to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various

... away the interval, she possessed herself of a sister album, one of the many relations stacked against a wall, choosing it haphazard ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore

... called the stock character of mediaeval composition. That almost all are directly imitated from the French is probable enough, that most are is certain: but this matters, for our purpose, nothing at all. That the imitation was not haphazard or indiscriminate is obvious. Thus, though we have some, we have not very many representatives of the class which was the most numerous of all in France—the chansons de geste or stories of French legendary history, national or family. ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... people marriages exist, but to us they are only hypocrisy and violence. We feel it, and, to clear ourselves, we preach free love; but, really, to preach free love is only a call backward to the promiscuity of the sexes (excuse me, he said to the lady), the haphazard sin of certain raskolniks. The old foundation is shattered; we must build a new one, but we must ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy

... afterwards. It is impossible to read chap. ii. 11 and 12 without coming to the conclusion that we either have to do with the incoherent ravings of a disordered mind, or else that the leaves of the original manuscript were dislocated and then put together haphazard.[75] The "for" that connects the seventh and eighth verses of chapter vi. is forcibly suggestive of the line of argument which made Tenterden Steeple the cause of Goodwin Sands, while the nexus between the sixth and seventh verses of chapter xi. is scarcely ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon

... in the development of the child may modify such general principles for the management of infants as could be laid down in advance. With a few exceptions, therefore, mothers require during the early years of a baby's life skilled advice as to his upbringing—advice for which neither instinct nor haphazard counsel is a safe substitute. It is an excellent plan, and one which is becoming more and more popular, to have a physician supervise the care of the baby through the period of most active growth. According to this plan, the mother, even though her baby ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons

... as haphazard, as apparently absent-minded and as shrewd in her own house as in the houses of others, greeted Dion with a vague cordiality. Her husband, a robust and very definite giant, with a fan-shaped beard, welcomed ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... rammed himself into a faded guernsey and picked up three mackerel lines[9] from the dresser. He took some salted lasks from the brine-pot, blew out the lamp—and forth we went. After collecting together mast, sails and oars from where they were lying, strewn haphazard on the beach, we pushed and pulled the Cock Robin down to the water's edge, and filled up the ballast-bags with our hands, like irritable, hasty children playing at shingle-pies. "A li'l bit farther ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... the fugitive hoped with confidence to have lost himself in a taciturn and apathetic wilderness of peak-broken land where his discovery would be as haphazard an undertaking as the accurate aiming ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... one's desires and workings" he learned to look upon as after all the great matter. Of the lessons that are impressed upon us by his whole life and work rather than by specific teachings, perhaps the most precious is the inspiration to live our lives thoughtfully, in no haphazard and hand-to-mouth way, and to live always for the idea and the spirit, making all things else subservient. He does not dazzle us with extraordinary power prodigally spent, but he was a good steward of natural gifts, high, though below the highest. His life of forethought and reason may be profitably ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold



Words linked to "Haphazard" :   careless, hit-or-miss, random



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