(n.) A forked tool used by clothiers in dressing cloth.
(n.) To dress with, or as with, a preen; to trim or dress with the beak, as the feathers; -- said of birds.
(n.) To trim up, as trees.
Example Sentences:
(1) "Anne Hathaway at least tried to sing and dance and preen along to the goings on, but Franco seemed distant, uninterested and content to keep his Cheshire-cat-meets-smug smile on display throughout."
(2) His running here was unstinting and he doubled his tally with a clinical finish after a first touch too smart for Pogatetz, preening perhaps after giving Boro a sniff of reprieve.
(3) Having started out preening (he tells a former colleague that he lives "the life of Riley"), he ends up howling alone on a small rock, the decision to adorn himself with a beautiful young wife having stolen his stature, robbed him of his dignity.
(4) What's more, his genial stiffness and shy self-awareness give him a kind of awkward dignity compared to the preening smugness of Cruz.
(5) He remembers Obama's incoming cabinet posing for portraits in the White House during the height of the crisis: “what a weird and preening thing for us to do while the world is burning”.
(6) 'Jonathan Saunders, Preen, Berardi, Kane and JW Anderson are on fire' Those are the names you will be raving about now.
(7) Romney's event is being organised by Scott Preen, a London company that specialises in high-profile political fundraising parties.
(8) If the Packham show emphasised a disconnect between the fashion industry's quest for trends and pure red carpet dressing, then the Preen show later in the day underlined how a move to the US can give a British label a healthy dollop of slickness.
(9) At best, these corporate-dominated panels are mostly useless: preening sessions in which chief executives exercise messiah complexes.
(10) Total lipid was extracted from chicken (Gallus domesticus) epidermis, leg scale, claws, feathers and preen glands and analyzed by quantitative thin-layer chromatography.
(11) Comparatively higher activity was observed in the extent of ambulation and rearing at 5 weeks old, rearing and preening at 7 weeks old, and preening and defecation at 11 weeks old in the Sprague-Dawley rats compared with the Wistar rats.
(12) In his preening, know-it-all professional arrogance, Cruise thinks he's bulletproof, but the mouse roars, and the hitman pays (incidentally, when casting a soullessly efficient, emotionally unavailable professional, could there be a more perfect candidate than Cruise?).
(13) The animals showed depressed response of preening on day 2 and 6.
(14) In 1909, the American illustrator Rose O’Neill drew a comic strip about “kewpies” (taken from cupid) – preening babylike creatures with tiny wings and huge heads, which were handed out as carnival prizes and capered around Jell-O ads (to this day, Kewpie Mayonnaise, introduced in 1925, is the top-selling brand in Japan).
(15) Trichobilharzia ocellata cercariae attach readily to the foot skin of their duck host, but poorly to preen-gland contents.
(16) Jane, a journalist in her 40s, thinks so: "I won't stay long in the weights room," she says: "The men are preening themselves.
(17) In the short-term, times spent feeding, drinking and preening decreased.
(18) Daily decrease was observed in ambulation, rearing and preening responses, with maximum decrement on the seventh day of Dimecron intoxication.
(19) From day 9, the preening response exhibited a continuous increasing pattern until the last day of the experiment.
(20) Power is meaningless unless it’s displayed, enacted: hence Vladimir Putin’s bare-chested preening or his sessions of bone-crushing judo .
Prune
Definition:
(v. t.) To lop or cut off the superfluous parts, branches, or shoots of; to clear of useless material; to shape or smooth by trimming; to trim: as, to prune trees; to prune an essay.
(v. t.) To cut off or cut out, as useless parts.
(v. t.) To preen; to prepare; to dress.
(v. i.) To dress; to prink; -used humorously or in contempt.
(n.) A plum; esp., a dried plum, used in cookery; as, French or Turkish prunes; California prunes.
Example Sentences:
(1) A case of "Prune Belly" syndrome, its sonographic diagnosis, from the 15th week and its monitoring by sonography and biochemical exams of fetal urine for study of renal function is described.
(2) With an incidence of between 1 in 30,000 and 1 in 50,000 births, prune-belly syndrome (PBS) is a rare malformation syndrome.
(3) We report the clinical findings, diagnostic problems and treatment of a 1-year-old Coloured child (with classic 'prune belly syndrome') in whom the spleen had undergone torsion, thus simulating an intra-abdominal abscess.
(4) Others have found more striking-power, or more simple poetry, but none an interpretation at once so full (in the sense of histrionic volume) and so consistently bringing all the aspects together, without any shirking or pruning away of what is inconvenient.
(5) That is, when distal branches are pruned off surgically, the axon compensates by producing extra proximal branches.
(6) The current controversies revolving around the fetal treatment of hydrocephalus and obstructive uropathies (posterior urethral valves, prune belly syndrome, hydronephrosis) are compared and contrasted with the remarkably similar controversies that raged when fetal transfusions were first introduced.
(7) This organization supports rapid pruning of the list of drugs.
(8) The X-linked prune (pn) eye-colour mutation of Drosophila melanogaster has a highly specific, complementary lethal interaction with the conditional dominant Killer of prune (awdK-pn) mutation.
(9) Aggressive surgical management of patients with the prune belly syndrome provides improved abdominal wall function and appearance, and offers excellent testicular salvage.
(10) The prune belly syndrome is a well-recognized entity consisting of deficient abdominal musculature, cryptorchid testes, and urinary tract abnormalities most consistent with an obstructive phenomenon.
(11) Reduction cystoplasty is a useful procedure to treat a large, poorly functioning bladder in boys with prune belly syndrome who are candidates for urinary tract reconstruction.
(12) Staff, which account for half of the NHS's costs, are being pruned, and services are now following.
(13) Their growth could be divided into three distinct phases: first, a period of initial outgrowth (55-70%) during which the basic skeleton of major neurites is formed; second, a shorter period of rapid growth (70-80%) during which the basic skeleton is elaborated by the addition of many side branches; and third, a period of maturation (80-95%) during which the branches formed during earlier growth appear to be pruned.
(14) As the protests were staged the centre-left cabinet in Portugal called an emergency session to try to prune more from public spending, as it grappled with a debt and deficit crisis that has thrown the spotlight back on to the country.
(15) The pathophysiology of hyperammonemic encephalopathy in association with the prune belly syndrome and a review of the literature are presented.
(16) Male infants predominate and have either isolated genital abnormalities, hydronephrotic conditions, or classic prune-belly syndrome.
(17) Under the conditions of chronic caloric restriction, the phenomenon of exuberance was retarded and pruning was not observed.
(18) Cholangiograms showed attenuation and pruning of the intrahepatic bile ducts, some with beading and dilatation of the common bile duct.
(19) The majority of the new class of mutations, designated pnts-e, do not interact with the mutation Killer of prune (Kpn) at all of the experimental temperatures, i.e., pnts-e, Kpn flies do not die.
(20) It will need lots of tweaking to avoid annoying people – it's already being prodded to see whether it takes more or fewer clicks to reach the phone-dialer (more), and whether you can still set wallpaper (no, but your friends do with their picture – you may need to prune your friends).