(v.) To peck at, as a bird with its beak; to strike at with anything pointed; to act upon with a pointed instrument; to pierce; to prick, as with a pin.
(v.) To separate or open by means of a sharp point or points; as, to pick matted wool, cotton, oakum, etc.
(v.) To open (a lock) as by a wire.
(v.) To pull apart or away, especially with the fingers; to pluck; to gather, as fruit from a tree, flowers from the stalk, feathers from a fowl, etc.
(v.) To remove something from with a pointed instrument, with the fingers, or with the teeth; as, to pick the teeth; to pick a bone; to pick a goose; to pick a pocket.
(v.) To choose; to select; to separate as choice or desirable; to cull; as, to pick one's company; to pick one's way; -- often with out.
(v.) To take up; esp., to gather from here and there; to collect; to bring together; as, to pick rags; -- often with up; as, to pick up a ball or stones; to pick up information.
(v.) To trim.
(v. i.) To eat slowly, sparingly, or by morsels; to nibble.
(v. i.) To do anything nicely or carefully, or by attending to small things; to select something with care.
(v. i.) To steal; to pilfer.
(n.) A sharp-pointed tool for picking; -- often used in composition; as, a toothpick; a picklock.
(n.) A heavy iron tool, curved and sometimes pointed at both ends, wielded by means of a wooden handle inserted in the middle, -- used by quarrymen, roadmakers, etc.; also, a pointed hammer used for dressing millstones.
(n.) A pike or spike; the sharp point fixed in the center of a buckler.
(n.) Choice; right of selection; as, to have one's pick.
(n.) That which would be picked or chosen first; the best; as, the pick of the flock.
(n.) A particle of ink or paper imbedded in the hollow of a letter, filling up its face, and occasioning a spot on a printed sheet.
(n.) That which is picked in, as with a pointed pencil, to correct an unevenness in a picture.
(n.) The blow which drives the shuttle, -- the rate of speed of a loom being reckoned as so many picks per minute; hence, in describing the fineness of a fabric, a weft thread; as, so many picks to an inch.
Example Sentences:
(1) S&P – the only one of the three major agencies not to have stripped the UK of its coveted AAA status – said it had been surprised at the pick-up in activity during 2013 – a year that began with fears of a triple-dip recession.
(2) The information about her father's semi-brainwashing forms an interesting backdrop to Malala's comments when I ask if she ever wonders about the man who tried to kill her on her way back from school that day in October last year, and why his hands were shaking as he held the gun – a detail she has picked up from the girls in the school bus with her at the time; she herself has no memory of the shooting.
(3) This is not for the most part revolutionary.” Trump has made some of his least ideological picks in the area of national security and foreign policy.
(4) Critics of wind power peddle the same old myths about investment in new energy sources adding to families' fuel bills , preferring to pick a fight with people concerned about the environment, than stand up to vested interests in the energy industry, for the hard-pressed families and pensioners being ripped off by the energy giants.
(5) Careless Herbicidal aerial spray of a field for weed control and defoliation of cotton before machine picking, resulted in the contamination of an adjoining reservoir, killing large volume of fish.
(6) It would cost their own businesses hundreds of millions of pounds in transaction costs, it would blow a massive hole in their balance of payments, it would leave them having to pick up the entirety of UK debt.
(7) Joe Gregory, parked outside the arena while waiting to pick up his girlfriend and her sister from the concert, captured its impact on his car’s dashcam.
(8) Everyone worked hard, but it is fair to pick out Willian because of his work-rate, quality on the ball, participation in the first goal and quality of the second.” It had been Willian’s fizzed cross, 11 minutes before the break, which Dragovic had nodded inadvertently inside Shovkovskiy’s near post to earn the hosts their initial lead.
(9) Taxpayers will pick up an immediate £40m bill for compensating the four shortlisted companies that bid for the west coast franchise.
(10) "While it seems possible that more will join the two MPC dissenters in coming months if wage growth picks up, it looks a long way to go before a majority on the MPC vote to raise interest rates," he said.
(11) Those are our picks, but what have you been enjoying on Android this week?
(12) Phil Barlow Nottingham • Reading about the problems caused by a lack of toilets reminded me of the harvest camps my father’s Birmingham school organised in the Vale of Evesham during the war, where the sixth-formers spent weeks picking fruit and vegetables on farms.
(13) This is no doubt a captain’s pick by Malcolm Turnbull and we hope for the sake of the relationship that it has been a good pick.” The planned appointment of Hockey to the Washington role has been one of the worst-kept secrets in Australian politics .
(14) Now another deep cross is thrown into the box and Guzan leaps to claim it, but can only parry it down and pick up the second ball.
(15) After winning his prize, Malcolm Turnbull must learn from Abbott's mistakes Read more Abbott appointed Warren Mundine to head his hand picked advisory council on Indigenous affairs.
(16) Trawling through the private telephone conversations of royals, politicians and celebrities in the hope of picking up scandalous gossip is not seen as legitimate news gathering and the techniques of entrapment which led to the recent Pakistani match-fixing scandal , although grudgingly admired in this particular case, are derided as manufacturing the news.
(17) This makes The Red Pill a continuous, multi-voiced, up-to-the-minute male complaint nestled at the heart of the so-called manosphere – a network of websites preoccupied with both the men’s rights movement and how to pick up women.
(18) We propose that MS at the age of 1 year 6 months would be more effective to pick up these cases, because treatment strategies depend on the different biological characteristics of tumor cells.
(19) Business picked up in the fourth quarter of 2013 but the consumer goods giant said those markets had continued to slow and it expected "ongoing volatility in the external environment".
(20) But I'm starting with the job that I can do something about right now – scrabbling around on the floor, picking up three-inch nails and cigarette butts so that the new four-year-olds will have somewhere safe to play at break.
Pluck
Definition:
(v. t.) To pull; to draw.
(v. t.) Especially, to pull with sudden force or effort, or to pull off or out from something, with a twitch; to twitch; also, to gather, to pick; as, to pluck feathers from a fowl; to pluck hair or wool from a skin; to pluck grapes.
(v. t.) To strip of, or as of, feathers; as, to pluck a fowl.
(v. t.) To reject at an examination for degrees.
(v. i.) To make a motion of pulling or twitching; -- usually with at; as, to pluck at one's gown.
(n.) The act of plucking, or the state of being plucked, at college. See Pluck, v. t., 4.
(v. t.) The lyrie.
Example Sentences:
(1) So Fifa left that group out and went ahead with the draw – according to legend, plucking names from the Jules Rimet trophy itself – and, after Belgium were chosen but decided not to participate, Wales came out next.
(2) The woman said it took her until the mid-1990s to pluck up the courage to report the abuse to Jersey's children's services department – and that her allegations were not taken seriously enough.
(3) Many of Long’s pieces are fragile and fleeting: a stripe of un-mown grass in an otherwise close cropped lawn at the Henry Moore foundation , a misty circle in Scotland that lasted only until the day warmed up, a stripe of green grass left by plucking daisies, or paintings in wet mud that dry out and crumble.
(4) They're partial to the odd eider duck and do lots of nifty fish-plucking from the waves.
(5) It described experiments in which skin cells plucked from mice were reprogrammed into what looked for all the world like embryonic stem cells.
(6) She said: "I have asked the migration advisory committee – and I am not going to pluck at figures from thin air – to look at these issues to see if we can get to a point where we can get a better assessment and a better judgment of the true picture, in relation to the costs or otherwise of the decisions that we are taking, because I do not believe that the impact assessment gives a full and true picture at the moment."
(7) Given how empty the sea is, it was a miracle that his distress signal, transmitted to the ever-watchful Falmouth Coastguard, was picked up by a Chinese supertanker whose crew plucked him from the water minutes before his boat sank.
(8) The various components of these muscles are provided with stiff as well as wide aponeuroses and tendons (much stronger than those observed in Columba), indicating forceful opening and closure of the beaks for plucking off the fruit, grasping it hard and manipulating it with the help of the beaks before swallowing.
(9) Usually but this time they're on their feet, plucking like workers in a chicken factory working on a bonus system for number of feathers plucked.
(10) Using the CRD, outer root sheath cells, isolated from plucked human hair follicles and plated on growth-arrested 3T3 feeder layers, were grown on native collagen lattices populated with living human fibroblasts.
(11) After this treatment, we plucked anagen hairs under standardized conditions both from the area treated with C and the contralateral, untreated area.
(12) The present study demonstrates the possibilities of DNA flow cytometry to study the pharmacological effects on cell kinetics of plucked human anagen hairs.
(13) I was much more comfortable with the data in Canada ( where he was governor before being plucked to run Threadneedle Street ), Carney replies .
(14) Dahl’s heroine, Sophie, is a lonely young girl plucked from her bed in an orphanage by the titular behemoth, and carried off to Giant Land, his home, lest she alert the normal world to the presence of giants.
(15) The number of carcasses which were positive after cooling was found to have decreased in poultry-processing plant B compared with the situation after plucking, whereas this number was not affected to any appreciable extent in processing plant A.
(16) Activities in both plucked and unplucked skin were higher in the animals fed diets with higher protein contents.
(17) counsels their mother, whose superb cheeriness and pluck are the things with which we truly built the empire), and seek out new friends and entertainments.
(18) Some boxing experts believe that, starting his career at light-middleweight against Hungary's Attila Molnar , Saunders will eventually emerge as the most successful of the trio Warren has plucked from the British Olympic team.
(19) Such organizations as Project Censored exist to call attention to, for instance, the "Top Censored Stories Corporate Media Won't Dare Touch" – pretty much all of which, of course, have been plucked from the corporate media.
(20) Rearing environment (enriched vs. normal) and method of vibrissae removal (cauterization of follicles vs. plucking) were examined to determine specific factors that m might influence the effect of vibrissae removal.