(n.) A loose outer garment, extending from the neck downwards, and commonly without sleeves. It is longer than a cape, and is worn both by men and by women.
(n.) That which conceals; a disguise or pretext; an excuse; a fair pretense; a mask; a cover.
(v. t.) To cover with, or as with, a cloak; hence, to hide or conceal.
Example Sentences:
(1) But when people's jobs, homes and businesses are in jeopardy, it is not enough for the prime minister and the chancellor to use the eurozone crisis as a cloak to hide their lack of action.
(2) Winston Churchill, when he was offered the role of minister of the local government board in 1906, commented: "There is no place more laborious, more anxious, more thankless, more cloaked with petty and even squalid detail, more full of hopeless and insoluble difficulties."
(3) I can't pull an invisibility cloak over my house – nor would I wish to," she said, a little wistfully, as if she really wished she had Harry Potter's magic powers.
(4) Wearing royal blue cloaks with pointed hoods, the boys line up beside the road in a small village just outside the city of Ségou, chanting in unison.
(5) The most promising addition is the under-construction National Museum of African American History and Culture, designed by the British architect David Adjaye and scheduled to open in 2015, which cloaks a modernist structure with shimmering bronze-coated decorative panels.
(6) Brennan's testimony theoretically represents a rare chance to learn more about drone killing, warrantless wiretapping, torture, rendition, foreign meddling and other odd cloak-and-daggery.
(7) "The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy.
(8) We, and the public, cannot meaningfully evaluate execution protocol cloaked in secrecy.
(9) There's the odd scene where he's scrambling around naked, but it's cloaked in a more intelligent context.
(10) I will put prices up if I suddenly want a velvet cloak or a bejewelled cock ring.
(11) Images of her being dragged and stomped on - her black abaya cloak torn open to reveal her naked torso and blue bra - became a rallying symbol for the revolution and undermined the interim military rulers who held power between Mubarak's fall and Morsi's rise.
(12) His small frame could be seen following the tree line until eventually it was swallowed by the dense forest cloaking the border.
(13) The hypothesis is advanced that while the Hawaiian Islands contain one of the world's largest percentages of endemic species in the flora, only a few of these species were used for illnesses, though many endemic species were used for building, tapa making, and the foundation of the elaborate and renowned feather cloaks.
(14) However the value of training at altitude for competition at sea level appears on the one hand to lack total acceptance amongst sports scientists; and on the other to hold some cloak of mystery for coaches who have yet to enjoy first hand experience.
(15) It’s like bike sharers are given a cloak of visibility when they set out on a journey.
(16) The pair, whose identities have not been revealed, were dressed in white robes and bowed their heads as they were whipped by officials wearing brown cloaks and masks with eye slits.
(17) We acknowledge the complexity and elegance of the theoretical substance and program algorithms of existing work in these disciplines, while simultaneously observing that many presentations of this material cloak the essential facts and concepts in unnecessary jargon and hyperbole.
(18) No mention of UK Muslim women who are unhappy with this antisocial black cloak.
(19) Ermine cloaks the coalition's first post-local election test on Wednesday.
(20) Those sentiments had been echoed in the seemingly very different context of Qom, the centre of Shia religious studies, where most women move about in full-length black cloaks – the chadors that are the ultimate expression of Shia modesty.
Croak
Definition:
(v. i.) To make a low, hoarse noise in the throat, as a frog, a raven, or a crow; hence, to make any hoarse, dismal sound.
(v. i.) To complain; especially, to grumble; to forebode evil; to utter complaints or forebodings habitually.
(v. t.) To utter in a low, hoarse voice; to announce by croaking; to forebode; as, to croak disaster.
(n.) The coarse, harsh sound uttered by a frog or a raven, or a like sound.
Example Sentences:
(1) The first two experiments imply that stimulation of the skin of the trunk initiates the release croak; Experiments 3 and 4 suggest that an internal afferent source inhibits the release croak and might mediate an important aspect of receptivity in female frogs.
(2) The cathartic moment, in which the king realises he's OK and lovable just as he is, was wonderful for the film-makers to discover, and has been wonderful for worldwide audiences ever since (and the king doesn't die… he merely "croaks").
(3) Poppies in the long grass, frogs croaking for mates, wasps droning lazily at the window, tomatoes and strawberries ripening in garden pots and crickets buzzing at dusk: these are the sights and sounds of an English summer.
(4) We are all getting older thanks to better living conditions, and the French are way older than they have any right to be considering their diet, but the dependable Swedes who have always been goody-goodies are still croaking in their 80s, so most of us will have to settle for that.
(5) And so they hardly ever leave a flat in which, thanks to the croaking boiler, the temperature hovers around 10 degrees.
(6) With drugs, oblivious, in a basement, frozen nobly on a mountain top, screaming in a car crash, or traditionally in a bed surrounded by our family and children, croaking out our last wishes?
(7) "Intelligent tadpoles reconcile themselves to the inconvenience of their position by reflecting that although most of them will live to be tadpoles and nothing more, the most fortunate of the species will one day shed their tails, distend their mouths and stomachs, hop nimbly on to dry land and croak addresses to their former friends on the virtue by which tadpoles of character and capacity can rise to be frogs."
(8) Three decades later, in July 2011, to watch a slightly pasty, croaking, self-styled "humble" Murdoch appear before a televised committee of suddenly irreverent MPs was to see something dragged out into the light: a power relationship that would never be quite the same again.
(9) Talked a lot about Under Milk Wood: how he came to London in 1953, with a fiver in his pocket, and went in search of Dylan Thomas in the Soho and Fitzrovia pubs, only to find that he had just croaked in New York.
(10) But as the fearless Ali strutted on, inventing new ways, new scenes, new angles, new endings, those croaking pronouncements of veterans petered out.
(11) The only MacTaggarts regularly recalled with relish are those in which all-powerful television grandees were venomously slagged off in public - Dennis Potter's attack on the then BBC director general John Birt as a "croak-voiced Dalek" in 1993, and Michael Grade's escalation of his own feud with Birt the previous year.
(12) I learn to distinguish the croaks of the marsh frog from the scratchy cry of the reed warbler and watch brightly coloured damselflies darting about in the bullrushes.
(13) This report investigates the sources of stimuli which initiate and inhibit the release croak of Rana pipiens.
(14) It can be a surprisingly noisy place, what with the barking of the muntjac deer, the croaking of the frogs, the quacking of the widgeons … Look and listen out for Faint lights near the ground, especially in June and July.
(15) Cool off after a hot day on the beach in the natural swimming pond, complete with lily pads and croaking frogs.
(16) At the moment the city also sounds like seagulls croaking at each other from outside my window from about 3am every morning.
(17) Roger no longer expresses a desire to croak it prematurely although he is 69 years old now and back on the road.
(18) Even if it was in a husky croak, and I couldn't manage the chorus.
(19) There was no trace of human life, only the croak of a raven and a trickling stream.
(20) The pectoral fin of the croaking gourami, Trichopsis vittatus, has become modified as a sound-producing organ and retains its original function in locomotion and hovering.