(v. i.) Especially, to shake the voice; to utter or form sound with rapid or tremulous vibrations, as in singing; also, to trill on a musical instrument
(v. t.) To utter with quavers.
(n.) A shake, or rapid and tremulous vibration, of the voice, or of an instrument of music.
(n.) An eighth note. See Eighth.
Example Sentences:
(1) Another time I kissed this boy wearing flip-flops, and she said his toenails looked like quavers.
(2) Libya is part of freedom's future: it must not be buried by a quavering past.
(3) The familiar biblical words, the quavering congregation working its way through Victorian hymns, the priest, who often has never met the deceased: all these deaden and distance.
(4) He spoke in a soft, quavering voice while making his apology and describing what he said was his fragile state.
(5) My husband and I can’t read or write, and we want our children to go to school.” Before we leave, her husband shows us what the Taliban objected to so violently: a long-necked lute, on which he plays a quavering tune.
(6) Certain fans couldn't even look you in the face – you'd have to go over and say, 'Hi, I'm Jason', and they'd go – a quavering voice – 'Oh my God, I know!'"
(7) His songs were the soundtrack to my life: a quavering New York voice with little range singing songs of alienation and despair, with flashes of impossible hope and of those tiny, perfect days and nights we want to last for ever, important because they are so finite and so few; songs filled with people, some named, some anonymous, who strut and stagger and flit and shimmy and hitch-hike into the limelight and out again.
(8) This wine probably cheered someone up when Mozart died”, he quavered at one point, and it didn’t even sound a tenth as stupid as it looks written down.
(9) His face looks as confident as Jadav’s – but the quaver in his voice might just have betrayed some deeply harboured doubts.
(10) And the parliamentary Labour party led Europe’s social democrats into quavering irrelevance.
(11) It’s easy to say: ‘I’m out here working and he’s just sitting there spending his giro on booze.’ But there isn’t a show about Amazon or these tax-dodging corporations that are fleecing the country much more than a guy who’s pretending to have a sore back so he can eat Quavers and watch Storage Wars all day.” A vote for independence, he says, would have been a step away from all that.
(12) 8.03pm BST The plucky strings are basically Mel and Sue made into quavers and crotchets.
(13) On Etsy you can buy everything from appliqué and pendants to lanterns made of Quavers.
(14) But the timing of her pleas for food, her choice of words, the choice of ham sandwiches and a packet of Quavers – they were little nuggets of comedy gold, genius even.
(15) Subjects (Ss) either tapped with their two index fingers in synchrony (quavers against quavers; "2 against 2") or they tapped quavers against triplets ("2 against 3").
(16) Parliament suspended its normal sessions today to hear condolence speeches by legislators, many of them speaking in voices that quavered with emotion.
(17) A modification of Isshiki's technique has been applied in ten patients exhibiting the breathiness and quavering voice typical of an "elderly" larynx, eight of whom have been followed long enough to be evaluated, and in two younger patients with similarly unexplained vocal fold flaccidity.
(18) Either the right or the left finger started tapping the quavers (onset time t1), after about 4 s the other finger joined in (t2) either with quavers as well (easy rhythm) or with triplets (difficult rhythm).
(19) Djokovic, though, is nothing if not resilient and the Serb rallied to go 4-2 ahead, pulling himself up to his full champion's height, and drawing the first anxious, quavering clamour around Centre Court's steeply banked gunmetal green bowl.
Waggle
Definition:
(v. i.) To reel, sway, or move from side to side; to move with a wagging motion; to waddle.
(v. t.) To move frequently one way and the other; to wag; as, a bird waggles his tail.
Example Sentences:
(1) "Other than waggling, they don't have articulation."
(2) Lord Turner replies that neither the BoE nor the FSA were making a "regulatory instruction" (just a waggle of Merv's eyebrows?).
(3) Instead, all we've seen so far is waving and waggling, and that's not for me.
(4) Experiments on the division of labour in honeybee hives have revealed why some bees do the waggle dance while others nurse their queens.
(5) Back in Budapest, watching Charli and her all-girl band on stage, it's easy to see the appeal: live, she is a force, years of arena support slots whirled into a show full of wild mane-flicking, stomping, impressive back bends and tongue-waggling.
(6) Precocial copulation in 2-wk.-old male chicks, described behaviorally as free mount, tread, posterior contact, waggle, peek, and seize, was developed through hand-training experience and androgen treatment.
(7) Health secretary Jeremy Hunt might also be waggling a toe over the water with a column in the Telegraph today setting out how he thinks Britain could stay in the single market but not with that pesky free movement element: “a Norway-plus option”.
(8) In the courtroom below it was elbow-waggling room only as the usual throng of briefs and their bagmen were swamped by a crush of interested parties, among them a smattering of furrowed-looking men in replica shirts who would keep a determined vigil throughout the day.
(9) Farage wore the look of a man ground down by repetition; a man who knew that every aside, every waggled eyebrow, every non-joke that sounded like a joke because it was inexplicably delivered in a jokey see-saw cadence, would be greeted by the Ukip faithful with the same graceless “weeeeey” noise that daytime drinkers make in crap pubs whenever the barmaid drops a glass.
(10) Photograph: Rex Features Rest assured that Riva's waggling feet do not feature in the final cut of Amour – a film that sticks largely to the same book-lined apartment, keeping pace with its characters as they move inexorably towards the exit door.
(11) When performing their famous " waggle dance ", they even use an inbuilt clock to make allowances for the shift in the position of the sun during the time elapsed since they have flown back to the hive.
(12) If you could zoom out beyond the moon, beyond time itself, and picture the entirety of humankind since its creation to its eventual end, and somethow witness it repeatedly pinging the phrase PLEASE AUTHENTICATE MY EXISTENCE back and forth between itself, we'd probably resemble a squirming galaxy of bees endlessly performing needy little waggle dances in front of each other, minus the useful pollen co-ordinates.
(13) 1996 Michael Jackson's messianic performance of his new single, Earth Song, proved too much for Jarvis Cocker, who clambered on stage and waggled his bum defiantly in the King of Pop's direction, before being escorted away by security.
(14) "Then we work like this," she waggles her tongue with the rapaciousness of Michael Douglas, "and then we pick ourselves again."
(15) For three decades, the Brit awards have entertained the masses with fluffs, gaffes, pranks and waggled bums, while gathering the great and good of the music industry for an evening of back-slapping and recognition of the year's achievements.
(16) If their plastic grips and waggling antennae bore a passing resemblance to a £15 novelty golf ball finder, that was no coincidence.
(17) Her song finished second in the Austrian competition after Trackshittaz's hip-hop atrocity Woki Mit Deim Popo ("Waggle your arse"), but this year the national broadcaster, ORF, chose Conchita as the country's representative.
(18) Saenko then barges into Marchena, prompting the referee to waggle his finger at both of them.
(19) "I have panic attacks and I have breakdowns, and stuff like that, so I feel like if I'm just like la la la la la …" she waggles her head as if it's in the clouds.
(20) Behind Henson, Frank Oz was adjusting Miss Piggy, doing her splendid diva head-waggle as she addressed her "Kermie".