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Staccato   /stəkˈɑtˌoʊ/   Listen
Staccato

adjective
1.
(music) marked by or composed of disconnected parts or sounds; cut short crisply.  Synonym: disconnected.  "A staccato command" , "Staccato notes"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Staccato" Quotes from Famous Books



... coat sleeve. He turned, still dazed. His mother, very pink-cheeked, very bright-eyed, pulled him through the throng. As they reached the edge of the crowd, there came a great burst of applause, a buzz of conversation, the turning, shifting, nodding, staccato movements which mean approval ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber

... this matter of close-ups to him, and write your scene straight, with emphasis on the points that should be brought out most strongly? I don't say that this surmise is right; I merely am wondering. In any event, we do not want to see the close-up overdone. We don't want too much of the Griffith staccato. It leads to what a certain friend of mine once called Tom Lawson's method of ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... him helplessly, with wide-open eyes. Did he really think any girl was ever moved by this sort of address, deliberately uttered, with the words well chosen, well considered? As different as possible from the abrupt, staccato method used by Dudley ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden

... Staccato, hurried, nervous, brisk, Cascading, intermittent, choppy, The brittle voice of Mrs. Fiske Shall serve me now as copy. Assist me, O my Muse, what time I pen a bit ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams

... into this affair, but Bert had not seen their coming. A staccato of shots came over to him, reminding him of army manoeuvres, of newspaper descriptions of fights, of all that was entirely correct in his conception of warfare. He saw quite a number of Germans running from the outlying houses towards the power-house. Two fell. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... of the crowd could be heard the sharp staccato click of the telegraph wires. Special trains were coming from Omaha, came the news. The police force had tried to keep the crowds from smothering each other, but they had torn down the gate of the station and rushed through, afraid to be ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... supposed—and carried her up the stairs and put her to bed like a child in the great sumptuous guest-room, in a great sumptuous nest of all the best linens and blankets, with the Little Crippled Girl superintending the task with many hysterical suggestions and sharp staccato interruptions. For once in his life the Senior Surgeon did not stop to quarrel with ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... suddenly cried out at a number of tongues of smoky red flame leaping up above the houses in front of them against the hot, blue sky. The tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling of many voices, the gride of many wheels, the creaking of waggons, and the staccato of hoofs. The lane came round sharply not fifty yards from ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... I fancied myself a discoverer. I was ignorant at the time of the thousands of acute intellects engaged in the same pursuit as myself, and with the advantage of instruments a thousand times more powerful than mine. The names of Leeuwenhoek, Williamson, Spencer, Ehrenberg, Schmaltz, Dujardin, Staccato, and Schlseiden were then entirely unknown to me, or if known, I was ignorant of their patient and wonderful researches. In every fresh specimen of cryptogamic which I placed beneath my instrument I believed that I discovered wonders of which the world was ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various

... her out of nowhere, tottered, was edged sideways, and of a sudden disappeared helplessly out through the open window with a frightened, fragmentary cry that died staccato on the bosom of the clamor. By the faint light streaming from the building backing on the area Edith had a quick impression that it had been the tall soldier ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... of an inharmonic drum, struck without rhythm by a hand gone lax. The singers no longer knew they sang. The border feast had lasted long. Keg after keg had been broached. The Indian drums were going. Came the sound of monotonous chants, broken with staccato yells as the border dance, two races still mingling, went on with aboriginal excesses on either side. On the slopes as dusk came twinkled countless tepee fires. Dogs barked mournfully a-distant. The heavy half roar of the buffalo wolves, ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough

... staccato. Short contributions from the men crowded into corners. Frenzied beating of the typewriting machines, and overhead and far away the band. There was no air in the room. Sara Lee was to find out a great deal later on about ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... he would dance a hornpipe, whistling his own music in sharp staccato notes, as from a piccolo. He could likewise "present arms" with a little straw musket which I had provided for him; besides feigning to be dead, and allowing you to take him up by the legs, his head hanging down, apparently lifeless, the while, ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson

... morn hung heaviness, until, Near sunless noon, we heard the ship's bell beating A melancholy staccato on dead metal; Saw the bare-footed watch come running aft; Felt, far below, the sudden telegraph jangle Its harsh metallic challenge, thrice repeated: 'Stand to. Half-speed ahead. Slow. Stop her!' They stopped. The plunging pistons sank like a stopped heart: She held, she swayed, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various

... self-restraint, said a few things a trifle staccato, defining Man, his dual destiny, his hope of heaven, and all the great business in which he himself had fought hard. But from a fine military tradition, he said nothing of his actions, nor even of his shrine in Normandy, of which he is naturally ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... road sped Peter on the horse—down the road and towards the foot-bridge. Mirestone ran a few steps and halted. He heard the hollow staccato of horse's hoofs on the planks for an instant, followed by a splintering crash that rumbled up from the gorge. A long, guttural cry pierced the black gloom as man and horse plunged down to the seething death ...
— The White Feather Hex • Don Peterson

... a sickening thud on the other side, a flounder of slipping hoofs, and the staccato pounding of the gallop broke out again. The chestnut had come down upon the fallen horse or helpless man, and was going on, uncontrollable. Crestwick rushed madly at the hedge, and scrambling through, badly scratched and bareheaded, ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss

... staccato jerks, the last part of it not until all were for the moment safe. The strange thing was that Weaver had not fired once as they scurried for shelter, even though Phil's foot had caught in a root and held him prisoner for an instant while he freed ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine

... up, and at once," said the captain. "In fact, ever since Erwin used that searchlight to show me the way down, I haven't felt that we were safe here. Therefore I say all aboard just as soon as we can be loaded in — what is that?" as a sharp staccato of shocks rose from Brodno's machine, the result of his tinkering with his air-exhaust. Even as he made haste to stop them, time being all important, Byers was placing the two women in his ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry

... and again Boris caught the sound of his voice, noticing that sometimes he spoke shortly, staccato—sometimes drawled as if he were singing, and then rapped out his words ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov

... sun and relieve the strain on his eyeballs, which ached fiercely. His pony, having worked off its excess of spirit, settled down into a tireless pace that tested the picked mounts the planters had selected as their best, and the miles passed in silence save for staccato pounding of hoofs on hard packed earth and the swish of underbrush that lined the narrow ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson

... surprise a fine piece of wireless telegraphy between husband and wife. It appeared that Mr. Negget sent off a humorous message with his left eye, the right being for some reason closed, to which Mrs. Negget replied with a series of frowns and staccato shakes of the head, which her husband found easily translatable. Under the austere stare of Mr. Bodfish their faces at once regained their wonted calm, and the ex-constable in a somewhat offended manner ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs

... with his breakfast, lay the three newspapers he had bespoken. Polly Sparkes throughout her leisurely toilet was moved to irritation and curiosity by the sound of frequent laughter on the other side of the party wall—uproarious peals, long chucklings in a falsetto key, staccato ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing

... became a contest as to which could drown the other's instrument, and the snapping time grew faster, until the dancers gasped, and men with long boots encouraged them with cries and stamped a staccato accompaniment upon the benches or on the floor. It was savage, rasping music, but one player infused into it the ebullient verve of France, and the other was from the misty land where the fiddler ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... Daniel in 1592 had preceded him; but he was the first to give the name popularity in England, and to lift the kind as Ronsard had lifted it in France; and till the time of Cowper no other English poet showed mastery of the short, staccato measure of the Anacreontic as distinct from the Pindaric Ode. In the Odes Drayton shows to the fullest extent his metrical versatility: he touches the Skeltonic metre, the long ten-syllabled line of the Sacrifice to Apollo; and ascends from the smooth and melodious rhythms of the New Year ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton

... he had returned in a condition approximating to collapse, without desire and without hope. The invincible cheerfulness of unseen men chanting music-hall songs in the drenched night made no impression on him, nor the terrible staccato curtness of a N.C.O. mounting guard. Volition had gone out of him; his heart was ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... hear the rapid tut-tut-tut of his machine gun. The man that dived ahead of you becomes mixed up with the topmost German. He is so close it looks as if he had hit the enemy machine. You hear the staccato barking of his mitrailleuse and see him pass from under ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell

... flurries: "That second movement—oh, exquisitely rendered!... No one has ever read Chopin so divinely.... How his family must idolize him!... They say.... That exquisite concerto!... Hasn't he the most stunning hair.... Those staccato passages left me actually limp—I'm starting Myrtle in Tuesday to take of Professor Gluckstein. She wants to take stenography, but I tell her.... Did you think the preludes were just the tiniest bit idealized.... I always say if one has one's music, ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson



Words linked to "Staccato" :   abrupt, disconnected, music, legato



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