(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.
Twang
Definition:
(n.) A tang. See Tang a state.
(v. i.) To sound with a quick, harsh noise; to make the sound of a tense string pulled and suddenly let go; as, the bowstring twanged.
(v. t.) To make to sound, as by pulling a tense string and letting it go suddenly.
(n.) A harsh, quick sound, like that made by a stretched string when pulled and suddenly let go; as, the twang of a bowstring.
(n.) An affected modulation of the voice; a kind of nasal sound.
Example Sentences:
(1) Having personally witnessed their live act (Black Flag frantically twanging Bootsy’s Rubber Band) at Dingwalls in late August, I thought I’d made a great discovery until, two breathless days later, and a mere few hours before they left these fair isles, the Peppers deposited their press kit in my lap.
(2) Only 18, the son of a US serviceman and a German mother speaks English with a distinct Teutonic twang and is likely to be a game-changing option from the bench.
(3) However, the Nashville sound crossing the Atlantic isn't that of pedal steel guitars and twanging banjos.
(4) They represented scholarship, complicated lyricism, musical eclecticism and internationalism (as in Phife’s Caribbean twang) rather than street-corner parochialism; what hip-hop scholar and professor of global studies at New York University Jason King calls “the rise of a European, classically influenced concept of the artist in hip-hop; the rapper as more than a showman but a philosopher, individualist, soul-searcher”.
(5) He moved away from blues and jazz to concentrate exclusively on skiffle, transforming American folk songs by adding in a hefty beat and his distinctive nasal twang.
(6) In theory, there are initiatives – such as country-twanged theme songs and greater required alcohol consumption – that could incite soccer's urban, wine-sipping bourgeoisie to abandon their pretenses of supposedly Euro-centric civility.
(7) Simultaneous velolaryngeal videoendoscopy proved to be of great value for the understanding of the interaction of velar and laryngeal functions and for clarifying the mechanisms of nasal and twang qualities.
(8) But the headline band takes to the main stage and a fever swims in your eight-year-old blood, so we're acres away, pinned in a tent, the tent itself all membrane and fine net taking the drum's pulse, trawling the air for the twang of the bass and the singer's voice, and you sleep now in the curtained light, your face like the face in the back of a spoon, my lips to yours but for the merest breadth, mouthing the words, living your every breath.
(9) There is the voice, a crackling instrument coated with the dust and twang of an an eighth-generation Texan.
(10) "I wanted to start my own line of clothes – good denims, good T-shirts and dresses which are not really available in India," said the 28-year-old, who speaks with an American twang.
(11) The voice lowers and he leans forward to emphasise each word: “I did not come here to talk about US foreign policy in the Middle East, and I will not do it.” The Texan twang vapourises other efforts to elicit opinion.
(12) He hits a rising shot from a preposterous distance - and it twangs the post, Neuer mistakenly letting it go.
(13) And, for outsiders, it’s a solid preview of the personalities of the Democratic primary, barring any more candidates: Lincoln Chafee is a nice man; Hillary Clinton is formidably polished; Bernie Sanders is righteously angry;and Martin O’Malley will probably siphon energy and ideas from all of them, standing like a tall, handsome, safely male candidate with a slightly affected southern twang.
(14) I phoned him one morning to hear his Kent twang bark: "Can't talk, I'm chained to a petrol pump!"
(15) I’ve never been here and created as many chances as we made today.” For all the talk of twangs and tweaks Arsenal were still able to field a strong team with Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Joel Campbell replacing the injured Santi Cazorla and Alexis Sánchez, and Mathieu Flamini and Aaron Ramsey manning a depleted central midfield.
(16) 12.02pm BST The standby list, part II Our understanding is that these are the seven names on Hodgson's standby list, each of them trying to be a good person but still secretly praying to the God of Hamstring Strains and Groin Twangs for a little help: Andy Carroll (West Ham) John Stones (Everton) John Ruddy (Norwich) Jermain Defoe (Toronto) Michael Carrick (Man Utd) Tom Cleverley (Man Utd) John Flanagan (Liverpool) All of which looks to me to be good news for Rickie Lambert, Ben Foster and a few others.
(17) Learmount has suggested that a combination of mechanical failure and pilot error could be an explanation “That could have been something in the mechanics or the engine, a twang, that would be tremendously distracting at a point when milliseconds matter.,” he said.
(18) It's just a bloke twanging a rubber band that's been stretched over a box of tissues.
(19) My first musical memory is the twanging, swooping space-age sounds of Joe Meek's "Telstar".
(20) Ronald Koeman had used his three substitutes – the first two after injuries to Jack Cork and Dusan Tadic following late tackles from Aaron Ramsey and Santi Cazorla respectively – when Toby Alderweireld felt a hamstring twang on 84 minutes.