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Dial   /dˈaɪəl/  /daɪl/   Listen
Dial

noun
1.
The face of a timepiece; graduated to show the hours.
2.
The control on a radio or television set that is used for tuning.
3.
The circular graduated indicator on various measuring instruments.
4.
A disc on a telephone that is rotated a fixed distance for each number called.  Synonym: telephone dial.



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"Dial" Quotes from Famous Books



... her gaze was still full of sausage as she turned it upon me. I immediately lost all appetite, and a feeling of nausea came over me. When I reached the market-place I went to the fountain and drank a little. I looked up; the dial marked ten ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun

... but the square tower, with its abnormal battlements and stone courses and facings, rises up nakedly. The peculiarity of the church is that the tower is at the east end. The conical copper spire was added in 1784. An old clock-dial of stone ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... but it seems to me that all their life of this so-called freedom is a continuous self-deception and falsehood. The life of each of these people, whom I have seen during these days, is moving in a strictly defined circle, which is just as solid as the corridors of our prison, just as closed as the dial of the watches which they, in the innocence of their mind, lift every minute to their eyes, not understanding the fatal meaning of the eternally moving hand, which is eternally returning to its place, ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev

... kings, but the constitutional freedom which the French arms had introduced in many parts of Europe was annulled wherever possible. The Congress of Vienna, in which the allied powers formulated their policy, did its best to turn back the shadow twenty years on the dial of progress, and England either joined in the effort or stood by consenting to the death of so many newly ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Peabody. Perhaps from this gathering of friends, which Emerson attended, came what is called the Transcendental Movement, two results of which were the Brook Farm Community and the Dial magazine, in which last Emerson took great interest, and was for the time an editor. Many of these friends were frequent visitors in Concord. Alcott moved thither after the breaking up of his school. Hawthorne also came ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... the planet Hume spun a dial to bring in the image of the wide stretches of continents, the small patches of seas. They would set down on the western land mass. Its climate, geographical features and surface provided the best site. And he had the very important co-ordinates for their camp already taped ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton

... this inner enclosed side. The old buildings were low and irregular, one portion of the roof thatched, another tiled. In the quadrangle there was an old-fashioned garden, with geometrical flower-beds, a yew tree hedge, and a stone sun-dial in the centre. A peacock stalked about in the morning light, and greeted the newly risen sun with a discordant scream. Presently a man came out of a half glass door under a verandah which shaded one side of the quadrangle, and strolled about the garden, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... fluttering the muslin curtain and filling the apartment with delicious perfume. In the same parlor a few chosen friends were assembled, to witness the solemn ceremony that was to deprive them of the pride and favorite of the village. As the dial upon the delicate face of the little bronze clock on the mantel marked the hour of eight, the flutter of robes and the rustling of footsteps ushered in the expectant pair, and at once all ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott

... my watch. A fickle ray—the merest filtration of moonlight—glimmered on the dial. Fourteen minutes past one! "Past yin o'clock, and a dark, haary moarnin'." I recalled the bull voice of the watchman as he had called it on the night of our escape from the Castle—its very tones: and this echo ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... is well set forth by Conrad Aiken in The Dial, who refers to the conclusions of M. Nicolas Kostyleff after a tentative study of the mechanism of poetic inspiration: "An important part in poetic creation, he maintains, is an automatic verbal ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor

... descent; and it having been ascertained by experiment in shoal water that the apparatus, in descending, would cause the propeller to make one revolution for every fathom of perpendicular descent, hands provided with the power of self-registering were attached to a dial, and the instrument was complete. It worked beautifully in moderate depths, but failed in blue water, from the difficulty of hauling it up if the line used were small, and from the difficulty of ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne

... proceeded half a mile. After raising the "portcullis", he got the man down from the black rohorse, dragged him inside, and propped him against the rec-hall bar. Then he got the man's helmet and spear and laid them beside him. After considerable reflection, he went into the control room, set the time-dial for June 10, 1964, the space-dial for a busy intersection in downtown Los Angeles, and punched out H-O-T-D-O-G S-T-A-N-D on the lumillusion panel. Satisfied, he went into the generator room and short-circuited the automatic throw-out unit so that when rematerialization ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young

... of current in the battery, according to the registering gauge," murmured the lad. "I can't understand it." He reversed the current, thinking the wires might have become crossed, but the machine would move neither backward nor forward, yet the dial indicated that there was enough power stored away to send it ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton

... looked up—the general was absorbed in his correspondence. The bootblack drew a tin putty-blower from his pocket, took unerring aim, and nailed in a single shot the minute hand to the dial. Going on with his blacking, yet stopping ever and anon to glance over the general's plan of campaign, spread on the table before him, he was at last interrupted by the ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... from letters having reference to these changes may show something of the interest to him with which Gadshill thus grew under his hands. A sun-dial on his back-lawn had a bit of historic interest about it. "One of the balustrades of the destroyed old Rochester Bridge," he wrote to his daughter in June 1859, "has been (very nicely) presented to me by the contractors for the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... what snail-pace the traitor time creeps by When one is out with fortune and undone! how tauntingly upon the dial's plate The shadow's finger points the dismal hour! Thus Wyndham, with hands clasped behind his back, Watching the languid and reluctant sun Fade from the metal disk beside the door. The hours hung heavy up there on the hill, Where life was ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... that it detracts from a dial that in order to tell the time the sun must shine upon it; so neither does it detract from the Scriptures, that though the best and holiest they are yet Scripture, and require a pure heart and the consequent assistances ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... composed of a table and a wooden tabernacle. It was shaped like a little house surmounted by a cross and encircled, under the pediment, by the dial-like figure of the tetragram. He brought the silver chalice, the unleavened bread and the wine. He donned his sacerdotal habits, put on his finger the ring which has received the supreme benedictions, then he began ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... his seat from morning till night, just moving sufficiently to avoid the sun and keep in the shade of a large tree; so that the neighbors could tell the hour by his movements as accurately as by a sun-dial. It is true he was rarely heard to speak, but smoked his pipe incessantly. His adherents, however (for every great man has his adherents), perfectly understood him, and knew how to gather his opinions. When anything that was read or related displeased ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson

... for me to do but watch Sandoval as Kennedy prepared a little instrument with a scale and dial upon which rested an indicator resembling a watch hand, something like the new horizontal clocks which have only one hand to register seconds, minutes, and hours. In them, like a thermometer held sidewise, the hand moves along from zero to twenty-four. ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve

... and, after one gets accustomed to its use, it is very simple. If the prismatic compass is preferred, nothing smaller than two and one half inches in diameter should be used. In the smaller sizes the magnet is not powerful enough to move the dial quickly or accurately. ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... forests shook three Summers' pride; Three beauteous springs to yellow Autumn turn'd In process of the seasons have I seen, Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd, Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green. Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand, Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived; So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand, Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived: For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred: Ere you were born was ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... untasted; and, in restless pacings up and down the room, and constant glances at the clock, and many futile efforts to sit down and read, or go to sleep, or look out of the window, consumed four weary hours. When the dial told him thus much time had crept away, he stole upstairs to the top of the house, and coming out upon the roof sat down, with ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens

... complicated from the outside. It was a black plastic box about an inch and a half square and maybe three and a half long. On one end was a lensed opening, half an inch in diameter, and on two sides there were flat, silver-colored plates. On the top of it, there was a dial which was, say, an inch in diameter, and it was marked off just ...
— ...Or Your Money Back • Gordon Randall Garrett

... pupitro. despatch : ekspedi, depesxo. dessert : deserto. destine : (for), difini (por). destroy : detrui. detail : detalo. detriment : malutilo, perdo. develop : plivastigi, disvolv'-i, -igxi, (phot.) aperigi. devil : diablo, demono. devoted : sindona. devout : pia. dew : roso. dexterous : lerta. dial : ciferplato. diarrhoea : lakso. dice : ludkuboj. dictate : dikti. dictionary : vortaro. die : morti. differ : diferenci. digest : digesti. dignity : digno, rango. dine : tag', vesper', -mangxi. dip : trempi, subakvigi. diploma : diplomo. diplomacy : diplomatio. direct : direkti, rekta, senpera. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer

... dial a foggy finger, Moving to set the minutes right With tentative touches that lift and linger In the wont of a moth on a summer night, ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy

... used to keep a spare pair for her in a box. She was always fresh and bright, but I've heard say she was never painted—no, not since the day the ship was launched. She kept like that. And one day young Belfast MacCormick slipped a tar-brush over her dial. Said it was idolatry. And what happened to him? You ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... and fashionable company with his performances, in which no falling off whatever was visible, he fixed his eyes on the biographer, and, turning to the watch which lay on the floor, and on which he was accustomed to point out the hour, deliberately passed his snout twice round the dial. In precisely four-and-twenty hours from that time ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... refrained Myself, now will I destroy'; and with a crash one more hoary iniquity disappears from the earth which it has burdened so long. For sixty times sixty slow, throbbing seconds, the silent hand creeps unnoticed round the dial and then, with whirr and clang, the bell rings out, and another hour of the world's secular day is gone. The billows of the thunder-cloud slowly gather into vague form, and slowly deepen in lurid tints, and slowly roll across the fainting blue; they touch—and then ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... that broad-faced, flat-headed sundial away down there. It has not a word to say. I am going to strike now. One—two—three! There—how musical!' But when this bombastic speech was ended, the sun broke forth, and the Dial only smiled to show that the boasting clock had not told the truth by some hours. The thirteenth chapter of John is the Lord's sundial on feet-washing. Probably, after all, the best way to discuss this question with any one would be just to read in his hearing ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... older, and shared in the sports of his companions, a strange thing came to pass. Beside the shadow that follows us all in the light, another, like that, but something deeper, began to go with Roger Pierce,—not falling with the other, a dial-mark to show the light that cast it, but capriciously to right or left; on whomever or whatever was nearest him at the moment, there that Shadow lay; and as time crept on, the Shadow pertinaciously crept with it, till it was forever hanging about him, ready to chill with vague terror, or harden ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various

... yellow dial of the clock in a church tower. An illuminated clock-face—but blank, featureless, expressionless, useless; in a word, without hands. Now I could not help thinking that if there had really been a Providence it would ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... he spoke toward the dial of the clepsydra, and Giulia followed his look in the same direction; it was half ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... exposure to the weather,—its heavy projecting cornice, its unglazed doubly-grated windows, its gloomy porch decorated with fetters, and defended by an enormous iron door, had a stern and striking effect. Over the Lodge, upon a dial was inscribed the appropriate motto, "Venio sicut fur." The Gate, which crossed Newgate Street, had a wide arch for carriages, and a postern, on the north side, for foot-passengers. Its architecture was richly ornamental, ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth

... raised ground, the farm-house was of stone. It had been a plain, square building; but in the days of Poniatowski some attempt had been made at ornamentation in the French style. A pavilion had been built in the garden amid the pine-trees. A sun-dial had been placed on the lawn, which was now no longer a lawn, but had lapsed again into a meadow. The cows had polished the sun-dial with their rough sides, while the passage of cold winters and wet springs had left the plaster ornamentation ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... than any other existing single work in any language, gives the layman a clear idea of the scope and development of the broad science of biology."—The Dial. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... morrow; when life seems concentrated in one short hour which we would wish to make eternal, and which we feel slipping away minute by minute, while we listen to the pendulum which counts the seconds, or look at the hand that seems to gallop o'er the dial, or watch a carriage-wheel, of which each turn abridges distance, or hearken to the splashing of a prow that distances the waves, and brings us nearer to the shore where we must descend from the heaven of our dreams on the bleak and ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine

... the button of the electric clock that stood on the table by her bedside, and looked up at the monstrous white dial it threw on the ceiling. Half-past one. She rolled over and cried into the pillow, "Richard! Richard!" She had already been three hours in bed. There were six more hours till morning, six more hours in which ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... go of itself without supervision, without oiling; that there are no wheels which will revolve without our help, except the great wheel of the constellations or that great circle of the sun's which has its hand upon the dial plate, and which was made by a hand much ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... a monopoly against our clothiers. Our clothiers would probably have been able to defend themselves against it; but it happens that the greater part of our principal clothiers are themselves likewise dyers. Watch-cases, clock-cases, and dial-plates for clocks and watches, have been prohibited to be exported. Our clock-makers and watch-makers are, it seems, unwilling that the price of this sort of workmanship should be raised upon them by ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... length of their control transmitter! If only he could find—but there it was: a direction finder. Hastily, he lighted its tubes and tuned to the frequency shown by the meter. He rotated the loop over the compass dial and carefully noted maximum and minimum signals. He had a line on the transmitter! And it must be close by, for the intensity of the ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various

... which the favourite bear was repeatedly introduced. Placed in the middle of the terrace between a sashed-door opening from the house and the central flight of steps, a huge animal of the same species supported on his head and fore-paws a sun-dial of large circumference, inscribed with more diagrams than Edward's mathematics enabled ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... were the wheels, that told Of the lapse of time, as they moved round slow; And the hands, as they swept o'er the dial of gold, Seemed to point to the girl below. And lo! she had changed: in a few short hours Her bouquet had become a garland of flowers, That she held in her outstretched hands, and flung This way and that, as she, dancing, swung In the fulness of grace and of womanly pride, That told me she soon was ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... zenith with wide circles Above my kite. And the hills sleep. And a farm house, white as snow, Peeps from green trees—far away. And I watch my kite, For the thin moon will kindle herself ere long, Then she will swing like a pendulum dial To the tail of my kite. A spurt of flame like a water-dragon Dazzles my eyes— I am shaken as ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters

... long corridor which divides the house unequally; on the right side there is one window, on the other, two. At the garden end, the corridor opens with a glass door upon a portico with steps to the lawn, where there's a sun dial and a plaster statue of Spartacus, painted to imitate bronze. Behind the kitchen, the builder has put the staircase, and a sort of larder which we are spared the sight of. The staircase, painted to imitate black marble with ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... Nelson Betty, William Henry West (the young Roscius) Beyle, M., his 'Histoire de la Peinture en Italie' His account of an interview with Lord Byron at Milan Bible, the, read through by Lord Byron before he was eight years old Biography 'Bioscope, or Dial of Life,' Mr. Grenville Penn's Birch, Alderman Blackett, Joseph, the poetical cobbler His posthumous writings Blackstone, Judge, composed his Commentaries with a bottle of port before him Blackwood's Magazine Blake, the fashionable tonsor ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... had twisted a dial and gotten another view on the left hand screen, this time from close to the target. That camera was radar-controlled; it had fastened onto the approaching missile, which was still invisible. The stars swung slowly across the screen until Richardson ...
— The Answer • Henry Beam Piper

... inspected the Museum, and were shown SHAKSPEARE'S jug, a rather ordinary concern; the identical dial which one of the clowns in his plays drew out of a poke, and a ring with W. S. engraved on it, found in the churchyard some years ago, and, no doubt, dropped there by the poet himself, while absorbed in the composition of his famous ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... unexpected that the manner of the Sauk betrayed the discovery, the instance being one of those rare ones in which he was caught off his guard. He reproached himself, for the back of his companion was turned toward the other, who was moving as silently as the shadow over the face of a sun-dial. ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... told, he aspired to eminence. The swift disappointment of these brave hopes, the fast coming years of sickness, distress, and grief endow the old chambers with something of tragedy; but in June, 1740, the shadows were still but a sententious word on the dial. ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... close with a lawyer's testimony to the moral qualities of his brethren. In the garden of Clement's Inn may still be seen the statue of a negro, supporting a sun-dial, upon which a legal wit inscribed ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

... thoroughfare through it. In the eastern wall of the south porch is a stoup, which was formerly open, both within the porch and outside it. Over the porch is a parvis or priest's chamber. Outside the church, near the top of the wall of a cupola-shaped finial of the rood loft turret is an old sun dial. The interior of the nave has a massive heavy roof of beams somewhat rudely cut, ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter

... in a locomotive. Placed vertically, thus, the engines remain motionless. Thrown forward, thus, the engines will turn ahead. And thrown backward, thus, they will turn astern. That is simple enough. And so is this," directing attention to a dial on his left hand which stood facing him. The dial had a single hand which was obviously intended to travel over a carefully graduated arc of ninety degrees painted on the dial-face, and which, in addition to the graduations, was marked in the proper positions with the ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... of it all?" he demanded. "What caused it? The shock was like no earthquake I've ever known. And this tidal wave—" He was reaching for a small switch. He turned a dial to the words: "News Service—General," and the instrument ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... Madge were duly examined and passed as "sound". She was called then, and after her name and age had been entered on her chart, and her height taken, she was told to step on to the weighing machine. Round swung the pointer, and stopped at 8 stone 4 lb. Dr. Mary looked at the dial almost incredulously. She thought there must be something wrong with ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil

... brought in this resolution because you thought the cause might be injured among the liberals in religion. In other words, if she had written your views, you would not have considered a resolution necessary. To pass this one is to set back the hands on the dial of reform. It is the reviving of the old time censorship, which I hoped ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... notice,—not even seeing the Flying Dutchman; and if I except the white-winged albatross which followed in our wake, and the graceful Cape pigeon that strove to emulate our speed, I may say that, to all appearance, we were alone upon the ocean,—the moving centre of one vast dial of water enlarging its circumference as we advanced. But here I must be allowed to notice the occurrence of one of those coincidences which serve to keep alive those smouldering fires of superstition, which Education and Experience have done so much to quench. It had been the practice ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay

... computers, network communication nodes, and communication media. Each component scales (e.g., computers range from PCs to supercomputers; network nodes scale from interface cards in a PC through sophisticated routers and gateways; and communication media range from 2,400-baud dial-up facilities through 4.5-Mbps backbone links, and eventually to multigigabit-per-second communication lines), and architecturally, the components are organized to scale hierarchically from local area networks to international-scale networks. Such growth is ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly

... Light Infantry sentinel under my window, and the smart soldier laddies fall in for the inspection of the officer of the day. What a thoroughly military town it is! By-and-by the evening gun booms from the heights above, where Sergeant Munro, taking time from his sun-dial and the town major, notifies the official sunset. Bang go the gates. We are imprisoned. Anon the streets are traversed by patrols in Indian file to warn loiterers to return to barracks, the pipers of the 71st skirl a few wild tunes on Commercial Square, the buglers sound the last post, the second ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... "when the pin, passing through the hole in the card, drops into the little cup of mercury it closes a current passing through an electro-magnet controlling a counter or a dial corresponding with each possible item of information on the card, and for each contact made to each dial, an added unit is registered. The tabulating process is completed by an automatic recording and printing system, somewhat along the stock ticker plan, connected with each dial. When ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... be a favorite seems to us a safe prediction.... There is no part of it which, once begun, is likely to be left unread."—The Dial. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... through those hours of trial I had watched a calm clock dial, As the hands kept creeping, creeping,—they were creeping round to four, When the old man said, "They're forming with their bayonets fixed for storming: It's the death grip that's a coming,—they will ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)

... shimmering blue of heaven? Is he more disreputable than the knave who frisks his watch meanwhile? And suppose he does see an angel, or even only a blue acre of sky—is that not worth as much as the dial in his poke? ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley

... one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakespeare, reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he saw the object; you may say what he himself says of Shakespeare: 'His characters are like watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... wind, and rain or snow, came in together. It was about half an hour before it would be time to stop work. There was no clock in the room, and there were only three in all Lincoln. Clocks such as we have were then unknown. They had but two measures of time—the clepsydra, or water-clock, and the sun-dial. When a man had neither of these, he employed all kinds of ingenious expedients for guessing what time it was, if the day were cloudy and the sun not to be seen. King Alfred had invented the plan, long before, of having candles to burn a certain time; the monks knew how long it took to repeat certain ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt

... long and thick, standing up above the edge of the ditch, told the hour of the year as distinctly as the shadow on the dial the hour of the day. Green and thick and sappy to the touch, they felt like summer, soft and elastic, as if full of life, mere rushes though they were. On the fingers they left a green scent; rushes have a separate ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... progressive way, each evening marking a step toward completion. When our low book shelves were ranged in the spaces about the walls, the books wiped and put into them; when our comfortable chairs were drawn about the fireplaces; when our tall clock with a shepherdess painted on the dial had found its place between the windows and was ticking comfortably—we felt that our dream of that first day was coming true, and that the reality was going to be ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine

... here, during which the two lads looked out at the garden flooded with sunshine, where Nat was working very deliberately close by the sun-dial. And beyond him, at the lake, from which the sunbeams flashed whenever a fish or water-fowl disturbed ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn

... time we had reached the entrance to the enclosure it was ten minutes past two, and, as Berry got out to open and hold the gate, I saw our passenger bring out a handsome timepiece and, after a glance at the dial, replace it in ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates

... that fortune is with me. I descend at Market Street, and the City Hall dial, shining softly in the fast paling blue of morning, marks 7:30. Now I begin to enjoy myself. I reflect on the curious way in which time seems to stand still during the last minutes before the departure of a train. The half-hour between 7 and ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... matter to my wife afterwards. To my surprise she took it very seriously, and begged me if any more came to let her see them. None did come for a week, and then yesterday morning I found this paper lying on the sun-dial in the garden. I showed it to Elsie, and down she dropped in a dead faint. Since then she has looked like a woman in a dream, half dazed, and with terror always lurking in her eyes. It was then that I wrote and sent the paper to you, Mr. Holmes. ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... space would allow of it, the garden was further decorated with statues, fountains, "fair mounts," labyrinths, mazes,[347:2] arbours and alcoves, rocks, "great Turkey jars," and "in some corner (or more) a true Dial or Clock, and some Antick works" (Lawson). These things were fitting ornaments in such formal gardens, but the best judges saw that they were not necessaries, and that the garden was complete without them. "They be pretty ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... which bears the name of compass, there were two on board. One was placed in the binnacle, under the eyes of the man at the helm. Its dial, lighted by day by the diurnal light, by night by two side-lamps, indicated at every moment which way the ship headed—that is, the direction she followed. The other compass was an inverted one, fixed to the bars of the cabin which Captain Hull formerly occupied. By that means, without leaving ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne

... physical impossibility to get through the whole list but he was making a strong attempt on a representative of each subdivision. He'd had a cocktail, a highball, a sour, a flip, a punch and a julep. He wagged forth a finger to dial a fizz, a ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... true that absence makes the heart grow fonder, there are limitations, believe me, to man's endurance. Three months will find me worn to a scant shadow, a mere tissue, so sharp that the dial at noonday cannot point with finer finger the passage of the sun under the meridian wire. Only the first month is now waning, and I dare not look a weighing machine in the face, for fear I might fall in the slot. I am not ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... the chimes on the frosty midday air. Not midnight, you perceive, but midday, for the church clock had just given forth its twelve strokes. Another round of the dial, and the old year would have departed into ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various

... 1694, says: "I went to see the building beginning near St. Giles, where seven streets make a star from a Doric pillar placed in the middle of a circular area, said to be built by Mr. Neale." Gay also refers to the central column in his "Trivia." The column had really only six dial faces, two streets converging toward one. In the open space on which it stood was a pillory, and the culprits who stood here were often most brutally stoned. One John Waller, charged with perjury, was killed in ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant

... Senor Rodriguez repeated excitedly. "Last night after I locked the safe door I tried it to make certain that it was locked. I happened to notice then that the pointer on the dial had stopped precisely at number forty-five. This morning, when I unlocked the safe—and, of course, I didn't know then that the money had been taken—the pointer was still ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle

... accounted a fair judge of his own writings, this is my best effort in the imaginative line; and as it is no new brain-child (we always love the last baby best), but was written little short of fifty years ago, the impartial opinion of an old judge is probably a correct one. The sun-dial is still in my garden,—and as I stood by it half a century since, there grew up to my mind's ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... scorpion," &c. xxvi. 25, "a wicked wife makes a sorry countenance, a heavy heart, and he had rather dwell with a lion than keep house with such a wife." Her [2370]properties Jovianus Pontanus hath described at large, Ant. dial. Tom. 2, under the name of Euphorbia. Or if they be not equal in years, the like mischief happens. Cecilius in Agellius lib. 2. cap. 23, complains much of an old wife, dum ejus morti inhio, egomet mortuus vivo inter vivos, whilst I gape ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... uppermost, the glass case open and smashed, the hands: stopped at the hour of half-past nine. It was a clock of the seventeenth century, of a design still to be found occasionally in old English houses. A landscape scene was painted in the arch above the dial, showing the moon above a wood, in a sky crowded with stars. The moon was depicted as a human face, with eyes which moved in response to the swing of the pendulum. But the pendulum was motionless, and the goggle eyes of the mechanism stared up almost ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... manners. [33] The ambassadors who resorted to Ravenna from the most distant countries of Europe, admired his wisdom, magnificence, [34] and courtesy; and if he sometimes accepted either slaves or arms, white horses or strange animals, the gift of a sun-dial, a water-clock, or a musician, admonished even the princes of Gaul of the superior art and industry of his Italian subjects. His domestic alliances, [35] a wife, two daughters, a sister, and a niece, united the family of Theodoric with the kings of the Franks, the Burgundians, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... waited, he noticed a curious little dial, in a lower corner of the instrument board, which he had not seen at first. One end of its graduated scale was marked, "Earth Normal," the other, "Pygmy Planet Normal." A tiny black needle was creeping slowly across the scale, toward ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson

... an ordinary clock, my friend. No, no. That one hand goes round the dial. As I put it, so it regulates the hour at which the door shall open. See! The hand points to eight. At eight the door opened, as you saw ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins

... pistol at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for greater exertion, increased the gravity pull in his space-suit boots as he neared the ...
— Acid Bath • Vaseleos Garson

... time Mary sat watching the hands of her desk clock slowly proceed round the dial. Someone knocked at the door and she said to come in, but her voice sounded faint ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley

... high towards the heavens,—the ancient mansion, with its square chimneys, and bodyguard of old trees, and cincture of low walls with marble-pillared gateways,—the fields, with their various coverings,—the beds of flowers,—the plots of turf, one with a gray column in its centre bearing a sun-dial on which the rays of the moon were idly shining, another with a white stone and a narrow ridge of turf,—over all these objects, harmonized with all their infinite details into one fair whole by the moonlight, the prospective heir, as he deemed himself, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... became visible, behold there stood before me a skeleton, in the regal robe of the kings of Granada, and on its grisly head was the imperial diadem. With one hand raised, it pointed to the opposite wall, wherein burned, like an orb of gloomy fire, a broad dial- plate, on which were graven these words, BEWARE—FEAR NOT—ARM! The finger of the dial moved rapidly round, and rested at the word beware. From that hour to the one in which I last beheld it, it hath not moved. Muza, the tale is done; wilt thou visit with me this enchanted chamber, and ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... making the necessary alterations. In the case of Ireland this is so to a much greater extent, and one must recognise the truth of that saying of some Irish member to the effect that a new Chief Secretary was like the change of the dial on a clock—the difference was not great, for the works remain ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell

... them walked through the churchyard (which has a very curious sun-dial in it) to the meadows beyond, in search of the castle, the site of which is mentioned on the map, but is quite undiscoverable now; while Robert made friends with an old labourer smoking his pipe outside the great tithe barn, and asked him about the road up Bredon' ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas

... kail-yard. My faith! if Love distemper thus the spectral ichor of the gods, is it remarkable that the warmer blood of man pulses rather vehemently at his bidding? It were the least of Cupid's miracles that a lusty bridegroom of some twenty-and-odd should be pricked to outstrip the dial by a scant week. For love—I might tell you ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell

... to the last, while the glittering hands of the clock were seen in the firelight, creeping swiftly over the dial, and its solemn tick measured off the awful minute on which Elizabeth had agreed with her own soul to go forth on her terrible errand, the wretched woman was compelled to pause in that dim chamber, worse than dead herself, to comfort and soothe the creature ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens

... clock ticking in leisurely fashion in the corner behind him, solemn and sedate, as it had done since, (as the neat inscription upon the dial testified), it had first been made in the Year of Grace 1732, by one Jabez Havesham, of London;—this ancient time-piece now uttered a sudden wheeze, (which, considering its great age, could scarcely be wondered at), and, thereafter, the wheezing having subsided, gave forth a soft, and mellow ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol

... for Carleton Barker, and I doubt if, when the clock hands pointed to half after eleven, Barker himself was more apprehensive over what was to come than I. I found myself holding my watch in my hand, gazing at the dial and counting the seconds which must intervene before the last dreadful scene of a life of crime. I would rise from my chair and pace my room nervously for a few minutes; then I would throw myself into my chair ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs

... eye, while in the shop, on the clock, every now and then—although, as he admitted afterwards, it seemed a long quarter of an hour—he still kept off his persecutors. When the hand approached the quarter on the false-telling dial, one canvasser, bolder than the rest, laid 35 pounds on a box of cigars, as the bid for it. But Master Pipes only was sold, for just as he was about to take up the tissue paper bearing the magic name ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian

... foot-rug in case the ground should be damp; some paint-boxes of the little boys'; a box of fish-hooks for Solomon John; an ink-bottle, carefully done up in a great deal of newspaper, which was fortunate, as the ink was oozing out; some old magazines, and a blacking-bottle; and at the bottom a sun-dial. It was all very entertaining, and there seemed to be something for every occasion but the present. Old Mr. Bromwick did not wonder the basket was so heavy. It was all so interesting that nobody but the Tremletts went ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale

... looking through the curtains of the great window of the drawing-room overhead, at my lord as he stood regarding the fountain. There was in the court a peculiar silence somehow; and the scene remained long in Esmond's memory:—the sky bright overhead; the buttresses of the building and the sun-dial casting shadow over the gilt memento mori inscribed underneath; the two dogs, a black greyhound and a spaniel nearly white, the one with his face up to the sun, and the other snuffing amongst the grass and stones, and my lord leaning ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray

... attraction rays, the second the repulsion force. The third dial regulates the orange-ray by which you will be returned to Earth. The fourth switch directs the electrical bolt that destroyed New York City. Next it is a device that we have never had occasion to use. It releases the Krangor-wave throughout Xlarbti. Its effect is to make each atom of Xlarbti, ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei

... jest for a minute or two together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the end. And there is something singularly engaging, often instructive, in the simplicity with which he thus exposes the process as well as the result, the works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal he has his hours of inspiration. Apt words come to him as if by accident, and, coming from deeper down, they smack the more personally, they have the more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the earliest inventories. Bradford also mentions the filling of a "runlet" with water at the Cape. The "steel-yards" and "measures" were the only determiners of weight and quantity—as the hour-glass and sun dial were of time—possessed at first (so far as appears) by the passengers of the Pilgrim ship, though it is barely possible that a Dutch clock or two may have been among the possessions of the wealthiest. Clocks and watches were not yet in common use (though the former ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames

... on my knees and began to fiddle with the dial, of course in vain. Miss Emory, with more practical decision of character, began to run through the innumerable bundles and loose papers in the desk, tossing them aside as they proved unimportant or not germane to the issue. ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... are in getting home," she said, and bent forward so that the light from the window might fall upon the dial of her wrist watch, then gave a little startled cry and half rose from her seat. For the darkness was now tempered by moonlight, and she could see that they were no longer in the populous districts of the town, but were speeding ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew

... much more fuel they had than they needed to get home. When they were moving away from station, she dropped in alarmed little jumps, but when they were headed home, she inched along in serene contentment, or if they were coasting, sneaked triumphantly back up the dial. ...
— Slingshot • Irving W. Lande

... was leaving the club, Mrs. Austen, rising from the dinner-table, preceded Margaret into the drawing-room and looked at the clock, a prostrate nymph, balancing a dial on the soles of her feet. At the figures on the dial, the nymph pointed ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... the king's table, have they any settled time for dining, but each man's stomach serves as his sun-dial; nor does any one eat after he ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... original interpretation of life by the great lecturer's hermit brother of which the Dial, Chicago says: "Truly a satirist and humorist of a different kidney from the ordinary sort is this companionable hermit. There is many a chuckle in ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys



Words linked to "Dial" :   pick out, finger hole, telephone, selector switch, selector, clock dial, choose, face, take, timekeeper, select, horologe, control, telephony, controller, telephone dial, indicator, operate, timepiece, dial phone, dial telephone



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