toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

pendulum
in a sentence

show 189 more with this conextual meaning
  • Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.†   (source)
  • The pendulum had swung.†   (source)
  • Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.†   (source)
  • A grandfather clock lay splintered at their feet, its face cracked, its pendulum lying a little farther away like a dropped sword.†   (source)
  • Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in orbit, spacecraft going to the moon, pendulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of thing.†   (source)
  • We walked quickly past the Octopus and another ride that looked like a swinging-ax pendulum.†   (source)
  • The pendulum swings on and on in the old grandfather clock.†   (source)
  • The hard part for them back then was inventing a clock that would work on a boat (pendulums don't work on boats).†   (source)
  • And they could see his knife, which Stephano was moving slowly like the pendulum of a grandfather clock.†   (source)
  • To break windows for robbery, to determine depth of wells, to use as ammunition, as pendulum, to practice carving, wall building, to demonstrate Archimedes' Principle, as part of abstract sculpture, costh, ballast, weight for dropping things in river, etc., as a hammer, keep door open, footwiper, use as rubble for path filling, chock, weight on scale, to prop up wobbly table, paperweight, as firehearth, to block up rabbit hole.†   (source)
  • "Foucault's pendulum.†   (source)
  • They had no right to swing me back and forth like a pendulum on a clock.†   (source)
  • Murky portraits, china spaniels on the mantelpiece, golden pendulum swinging, tockety-tock, tockety-tock.†   (source)
  • With every blow Kuba swung back and forth like the pendulum of a grandfather clock.†   (source)
  • Her leg was swinging like a pendulum, and the troll's breath was breaking over her face in rancid waves.†   (source)
  • It turned out that Christoffels belonged to an almost vanished trade, the itinerant clockmender who trudged on foot throughout the land, regulating and repairing the tall pendulum clocks that were the pride of every Dutch farmhouse.†   (source)
  • A crane on the deck of the Enterprise has swung itself over to dangle a small wire cage over the tanker, just a few feet off the declc it bobs up and down and glides back and forth over a fairly large area as the two ships rock in different ways and it swings like a pendulum at the end of its cable.†   (source)
  • Reluctantly, Hezekiah allowed the gosha to subside to the end of its leather string like a slowing pendulum.†   (source)
  • I would probably start with a pendulum of some sort.†   (source)
  • Kopelowicz says he agrees with Jacobs that the pendulum has swung too far to the side of leaving people like Nathaniel to fend for themselves.†   (source)
  • I waited patiently—years—for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer.†   (source)
  • The eleven strokes of the pendulum clock sounded in the depths of the house.†   (source)
  • The minister's voice was a pendulum.†   (source)
  • As the display swung down like a pendulum, the lion leaped off onto the model earth's North Pole.†   (source)
  • As the basket swung in an upglided pendulum he saw her squinched blind-sewn eyes, the ears with moss in them, the pale wrinkled apricot mouth mummifying the air it drew in, trying to taste what was wrong with his act, his thought.†   (source)
  • It swings in front of her like a pendulum, an enormous and muscled worm.†   (source)
  • The silence is heavy between us, everything past and remembered and forgotten and wanted swinging there like a pendulum.†   (source)
  • I was reaching for anything to escape into, even "The Pit and the Pendulum."†   (source)
  • More even than a clock's pendulum, those breaths pulled me through the burning seconds toward the end.†   (source)
  • A mighty pendulum, that fugger.†   (source)
  • Then the tone arm shifted laterally and the disc began to spin and this series of laboriously linked actions with their noises and pauses and teeterings, their dimwit delays, seemed to place him in some lost mechanical age with the pendulum clock and hand-cranked motorcar.†   (source)
  • She dangles them before me like a pendulum.†   (source)
  • Pendulum rides are a little like the swing sets you might remember from your childhood.†   (source)
  • This giant pendulum took its rider full speed toward the water before arcing into the air over the lake.†   (source)
  • But then, as if knowing exactly what she was thinking, the person waved, his arm moving slowly back and forth like the pendulum of a grandfather clock.†   (source)
  • Window, bed, back again, her head turns like a pendulum swinging.†   (source)
  • From there, lying on my belly, I can see one of Father's legs crossed at the knees, moving back and forth like a pendulum.†   (source)
  • She went to the sewing room to look for her pendulum.†   (source)
  • The pendulum of the grandfather clock had stopped in mid-swing.†   (source)
  • It is attached to it like a tender naked woman to the pendulum of an enormous clock.†   (source)
  • Coming through the door into the kitchen, he saw the pots and pans swinging like pendulums from their hooks.†   (source)
  • The basket was swinging slowly in the depths like a pendulum suspended by the balloon on the surface.†   (source)
  • His shadow swung like an irregular pendulum across the pavement, describing the course of a soundless battle: it was a man fighting himself to enter that door or to escape.†   (source)
  • He was mortified to find himself the center of attention, when a hundred eyes turned on him asthe chandelier swung like a pendulum and tinkled prettily, with a sound like glass dominoes falling.†   (source)
  • He stepped towards the bathroom, the yellow pendulum of lamp beside his knees.†   (source)
  • I believe life is a pendulum swing.†   (source)
  • The patient swung his right forearm down, a pendulum sweeping aside all objects in front of it.†   (source)
  • He was half convinced that climbing the Gianicolo, coming up the steps, and rounding the corners was a pendulum in some great clockwork that would set everything right.†   (source)
  • I stood and walked to the other end of the porch, where Oliver had moved and was sitting on the banister, his tail going back and forth like a pendulum.†   (source)
  • It was Natural Process; it was the slow shift of a pendulum's swing into a different plane.†   (source)
  • And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside.†   (source)
  • Wandering among the sleeping houses, I learned that tin roofs crackle under the power of the sun, and when I tired and came back to my grandmother's house, I padded into her dark cool living room, lay flat on the floor, and listened to the hypnotic beatof her pendulum clock on the wall ticking the meaningless hours away.†   (source)
  • No sound but the steady dripping from the corner of the house; no motion but the pendulum of the clock.†   (source)
  • and to make myself swing back and forth like a pendulum.†   (source)
  • This in turn could only be accomplished by making the North comprehend that the South no longer desired—in Lamar'swords—to be the "agitator and agitated pendulum of American politics.†   (source)
  • The purse, like a little pendulum, slowed down in his hand.†   (source)
  • It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang;   (source)
    pendulum = a weight hanging from a fixed location so that the weight swings freely back and forth under the influence of gravity (such as is seen in some mechanical clocks)
  • The clock ticks with its pendulum, keeping time; my feet in their neat red shoes count the way down.†   (source)
  • The plane of the pendulum's swing rotates every hour.†   (source)
  • The shadow of the giant pendulum flickered in and out, and swayed from side to side.†   (source)
  • He swayed his index finger back and forth like a pendulum when he said this.†   (source)
  • The secretary general looked up at the pendulum.†   (source)
  • But the pendulum before him had been completely modernized.†   (source)
  • He turned to the consuls and said, "I have just shut off power to the pendulum.†   (source)
  • Those standing under the Pendulum Monument only saw a great brightness in space.†   (source)
  • We all understand the historical significance of the pendulum.†   (source)
  • Three Body: Einstein, the Pendulum Monument, and the Great Rip†   (source)
  • The princeps and all the consuls once again came to the Pendulum Monument.†   (source)
  • Its large, silvery image was reflected by the surface of the pendulum weight.†   (source)
  • There was no pyramid, no United Nations Headquarters, no sign of the Pendulum Monument.†   (source)
  • The massive metal pendulum swung magnificently, pounding the frigid air.†   (source)
  • The meeting of consuls occurred under the Pendulum Monument.†   (source)
  • After three more swings from the pendulum, someone asked, "Has the Earth responded?"†   (source)
  • The secretary general solemnly announced, "Start the pendulum."†   (source)
  • The pendulum had long stopped, and the weight hung still like a solid rock between the tall pillars.†   (source)
  • The princeps and all the consuls again came and stood under the Pendulum Monument.†   (source)
  • The two pillars holding up the pendulum were made of metal, each as tall as the Eiffel Tower.†   (source)
  • He was reminded of the giant pendulums in Three Body.†   (source)
  • Wang noticed that all the pendulums swung in step.†   (source)
  • All the pendulums were swinging as groups of soldiers in armor kept them in motion.†   (source)
  • "You're one of those who saw the pendulums of the Warring States Period with your own eyes!"†   (source)
  • Fu Xi suggested that I build those pendulums you see out there and keep them in constant motion.†   (source)
  • They swept back and forth, pendulums of light.†   (source)
  • Huh?" said Max, blinking at the spoon that was swinging before his eyes like a hypnotist's pendulum.†   (source)
  • The brass weights stirred behind the casement doors, the pendulum slowly swept.†   (source)
  • The blue harpy feather in her hair swung like a pendulum.†   (source)
  • The pendulum on the clock began to move almost imperceptibly.†   (source)
  • What causes the feeling of "weightlessness" on pendulum rides?†   (source)
  • Why do riders experience high g-forces on pendulum rides?†   (source)
  • Riders often experience near-weightlessness as they approach the top of a pendulum ride.†   (source)
  • At the very top of the pendulum ride, riders begin to fall out of their seats.†   (source)
  • One sure place to find them is on an amusement park pendulum ride.†   (source)
  • The stairway gave like a chain, the pendulum shivered in the clock.†   (source)
  • The Pit, the Pendulum, and the ape, the chimney, the Murders in the Rue Morgue.†   (source)
  • He didn't stop, repeating the word over and over; a mucus-thick strand of saliva finally crested over his bottom lip and swung back and forth like a hypnotist's pendulum.†   (source)
  • The pendulum was in motion.†   (source)
  • That's where she was swinging, just lightly, like a pendulum; the way you could swing as a child, hanging by your hands from a tree branch.†   (source)
  • The pendulum is swinging.†   (source)
  • Another human pendulum.†   (source)
  • It was a pendulum clock — an antique, white and gold china; it had been Grandfather's; it stood on the mantelpiece in the library.†   (source)
  • Once, when she was eight or nine, her father took her to the Pantheon in Paris to describe Foucault's pendulum.†   (source)
  • At ten minutes before twelve, Sara Noriega climbed up on a chair to wind the pendulum clock, and she reset it on the hour, perhaps trying to tell him without saying so that it was time to leave.†   (source)
  • But what Marie-Laure remembered, standing at the rail as it whistled past, was her father saying that Foucault's pendulum would never stop.†   (source)
  • The furnishings in the reception rooms, including the pendulum clock that stood like a living sentinel in the drawing room, were all original English pieces from the late nineteenth century, and the lamps that hung from the walls were all teardrop crystal, and there were Sevres vases and bowls everywhere and little alabaster statues of pagan idylls.†   (source)
  • High above, my kite was tilting side to side like a pendulum, making that old paper-bird-flapping-its-wings sound I always associated with winter mornings in Kabul.†   (source)
  • Now it is as if she can hear the pendulum in the air in front of her: that huge golden bob, as wide across as a barrel, swinging on and on, never stopping.†   (source)
  • The girl climbs into the swing and pendulums back and forth, pumping her legs, and watching her opens some valve in Werner's soul.†   (source)
  • The flag-bearer kept on changing, but the flag waved ceaselessly, like a perpetual pendulum, counting down the remainder of her short life.†   (source)
  • Just as the heat became unbearable, the edge of the light spot swept past the Pendulum Monument and everything dimmed.†   (source)
  • Under the watchful eyes of the crowd, the princeps ascended onto the base of the pendulum and flipped a red switch.†   (source)
  • Wang walked around the building and was greeted by a breathtaking sight: a colossal pendulum that seemed to stretch between the sky and the earth.†   (source)
  • He saw that the giant weight of the pendulum was being pulled up by a thin cable whose other end was attached to an elevated winch.†   (source)
  • All the members of the General Assembly session are behind the building attending the Pendulum Initiation Ceremony.†   (source)
  • Unlike a pendulum in the real world, this giant pendulum's period was not stable, but changed constantly.†   (source)
  • Below the pendulum was a crowd of people dressed in suits, probably the leaders of the various countries attending the General Assembly session.†   (source)
  • Wang felt the great force generated by the movement of the pendulum, as though the ground was shaken by its swings.†   (source)
  • In reality, the Pendulum Monument was one of the few objects in the game that really did exist on Trisolaris.†   (source)
  • The elevated winch released the cable tied to the pendulum, and the weight noiselessly fell along a smooth arc.†   (source)
  • When the giant moon was on this side of the planet, its gravity partially canceled out the gravity of the planet, causing the pendulum to lose weight.†   (source)
  • When it was on the other side of the planet, its gravity was added to the gravity of the planet, causing the pendulum's weight to increase, almost to the level it would have had before the great rip.†   (source)
  • By the time the noise disappeared, the pendulum had followed the arc to its highest point on the other side, and, after pausing for a moment, began its backward swing.†   (source)
  • The pendulum resembled those constructed by Fu Xi to hypnotize the sun god during the Warring States Period, back when Wang Miao first logged on to Three Body.†   (source)
  • The weight of each pendulum was a giant rock, suspended from a thick rope tied to a bridge that stretched between the tops of two slender stone towers.†   (source)
  • As he gazed up at the awe-inspiring swings of the Trisolaran Pendulum Monument, Wang asked himself, Does it represent the yearning for order, or the surrender to chaos?†   (source)
  • The pendulum line, made of some ultrastrong material, was so thin as to be almost invisible, and the weight seemed to float in the air between the two towers.†   (source)
  • Wang also thought of the pendulum as a gigantic metal fist, swinging eternally against the unfeeling universe, noiselessly shouting out Trisolaran civilization's indomitable battle cry….†   (source)
  • As Wang Miao's eyes blurred with tears, he saw a line of text appear against the background of the swinging pendulum: Four hundred and fifty-one years later, Civilization 192 was destroyed by the fiery flames of twin suns appearing together.†   (source)
  • The sound was generated by the numerous giant pendulums that could be seen all over Zhao Ge, each tens of meters in height.†   (source)
  • The giant pendulums surrounded an even more enormous pyramid, standing like a tall mountain in the dark night.†   (source)
  • Chanting incomprehensibly, they rhythmically pulled ropes attached to the giant stone weights, adding to the pendulums' arcs as they slowed.†   (source)
  • He claims that the pendulums can have a hypnotic effect on the sun god and cause him to sink into a long slumber.†   (source)
  • In this place, in a distant age separated from the here and now by many civilizations, he and King Wen had passed through a forest of giant pendulums on their way to the palace of King Zhou.†   (source)
  • But the fourth solution—to swing one rope back and forth like a pendulum and then grab hold of the other rope—occurred to only a few people.†   (source)
  • He pulled his belt from the loops of his pants and held it with the buckle end penduluming back and forth by the floor.†   (source)
  • He lived at that time in a paradise of disemboweled animals, of mechanisms that had been taken apart in an attempt to perfect them with a system of perpetual motion based upon the principles of the pendulum.†   (source)
  • I sit down here to write in an act of desperation (this is not one of Poe's gory inventions of fiction: no young girl who can set schools afire; no dog that behaves as if possessed; no giant pendulum swinging to cut one in half!†   (source)
  • Charles Halloway saw but did not see her flinch, sensed but seemed in no way to consider her withdrawal, for almost immediately, seizing the initiative, she flung herself forward, not touching, but mutely gesticulating at his chest as one might try to spell an antique clock pendulum.†   (source)
  • In the deep blue above it, the stranger's plane was a single spark changing color and flashing from side to side, like the tip of a pendulum swinging in the darkness, beating time.†   (source)
  • He would spend the nights walking around the room thinking aloud, searching for a way to apply the principles of the pendulum to oxcarts, to harrows, to everything that was useful when put into motion.†   (source)
  • The pendulum having failed, she went out to look for her by carriage, hoping that her instinct would guide her in her search, but that method also was unsuccessful.†   (source)
  • As soon as his head was down he was unconscious, surrounded by a dizzying blackness that rocked him in smooth stressful arcs that compromised with gravity like a pendulum or a swing, and then, for eight hours, he was free.†   (source)
  • Sure enough, after he did that, most people suddenly said aha! and came up with the pendulum solution.†   (source)
  • It was then that she began her first serious attempts to communicate with extraterrestrial beings and that, as she herself noted, she beg;an to have her first doubts regarding the spiritual messages she received from the pendulum and the three-legged table.†   (source)
  • Sure enough, after he did that, most people suddenly said aha! and came up with the pendulum solution.†   (source)
  • Flung from side to side, like a battered pendulum, clinging to the wheel, half in her seat, half on her knees, she fought to pull the ship into a glide, for an attempt to make a belly-landing, while the green ground was whirling about her, sweeping above her, then below, its spiral coils coming closer.†   (source)
  • He asked him what had happened to the project he had explained to him a few days before about the possibility of building a pendulum machine that would help men to fly and he answered that it was impossible because a pendulum could lift anything into the air but it could not lift itself.†   (source)
  • But the fourth solution—to swing one rope back and forth like a pendulum and then grab hold of the other rope—occurred to only a few people.†   (source)
  • Clara's communication with wandering souls and extraterrestrials was conducted through telepathy, dreams, and the pendulum she used for that purpose, dangling it in the air above an alphabet she had arranged in proper order on the table.†   (source)
  • The pendulum's autonomous movement pointed to the letters, forming messages in Spanish and Esperanto, which proved that these, and not English, were the only languages of interest to beings from other dimensions, as Clara wrote in letters to the ambassadors of the English-speaking powers.†   (source)
  • Then she spread a map of the city on the floor and held the pendulum a foot and a half above it, waiting for the oscillations to tell her her sister-in-law's address, but after trying all afternoon she realized that the system would not work unless Ferula had a fixed address.†   (source)
  • Yet at the top of a pendulum ride, the same 180-pound person will feel less than this normal sensation of weight.†   (source)
  • Many pendulum rides take the form of large boats, and it's probably no coincidence that a number of people find this ride evokes in them the same sense of seasickness that a real boat produces.†   (source)
  • Pendulum.†   (source)
  • The pendulum made a final stroke.†   (source)
  • Charles awakened on the stroke of four-thirty as surely as though the brass pendulum of the clock had nudged him.†   (source)
  • The kitchen clock flashed its pendulum behind its glass skirt, and it ticked like a little wooden hammer striking on an empty wooden box.†   (source)
  • This was slow wore and it took a while to get the hang of it, as the period of that pendulum of which I was the weight was over a minute—and it does no good to try to hurry a pendulum; you have to work with it, not against it.†   (source)
  • Into a pit went Mr. Steffens, where, bound and tied, he was left to face the advancing razor steel of a great pendulum which now whirled down, down, closer and closer to his outraged body.†   (source)
  • She had access to the first and last, and she set about getting knowledge and materials, but while she did that she set in motion a series of imperceptible springs and pendulums and left them to pick up their own momenta.†   (source)
  • When he examined it, he saw the beating stick to be a pendulum that instead of hanging down stuck upwards.†   (source)
  • She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock.†   (source)
  • The hoist swung like a pendulum above the city.†   (source)
  • Let there be consummation, and superfluity be finished from the next drop of the pendulum onward!†   (source)
  • The time-piece bounced off his paunch and swung out on its gold chain like a pendulum.†   (source)
  • Bigger laughed and approached the bed with the dangling rat, swinging it to and fro like a pendulum, enjoying his sister's fear.†   (source)
  • And above it, like a pendulum swinging slowly to and fro, the flat piece of iron hung from Kushy's hand.†   (source)
  • In Silvester the Second a famous magician ascended the papal throne, although he was notorious for having invented the pendulum clock.†   (source)
  • It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.†   (source)
  • Her lips were slightly parted, and her breast rose and fell with the regularity of a pendulum.†   (source)
  • She would have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to the pendulum of the clock.†   (source)
  • It had no effect upon the cries; no pendulum could be more regular.†   (source)
  • His habits of mind had the regular swing of a pendulum.†   (source)
  • Was it probable that the bandage crossed my bosom in the track of the pendulum?†   (source)
  • This was the last oscillation of the pendulum.†   (source)
  • The sweep of the pendulum had increased in extent by nearly a yard.†   (source)
  • The vibration of the pendulum was at right angles to my length.†   (source)
  • But the stroke of the pendulum already pressed upon my bosom.†   (source)
  • Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones.†   (source)
  • Impelled by the blows that rained upon him, now from this side, now from that, White Fang swung back and forth like an erratic and jerky pendulum.†   (source)
  • At such moments, starting from a windward roll, I would go flying through the air with dizzying swiftness, as though I clung to the end of a huge, inverted pendulum, the arc of which, between the greater rolls, must have been seventy feet or more.†   (source)
  • Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum.†   (source)
  • There was a clock on the middle of the mantelpiece, with a picture of a town painted on the bottom half of the glass front, and a round place in the middle of it for the sun, and you could see the pendulum swinging behind it.†   (source)
  • But when they had all finished dessert, and the tall clock, a pendulum and chain affair at the far end of the room on the right, struck two, it had happened—much to Hans Castorp's puzzlement and shock.†   (source)
  • Of Pan and the elemental forces, the public has heard a 'little too much—they seem Victorian, while London is Georgian—and those who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long ere the pendulum swings back to her again.†   (source)
  • I try at times by dwelling on some of the things that he did to push that image of him away, as you might try to push aside a large pendulum.†   (source)
  • An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving.†   (source)
  • Between the post were ranged the milchers, each exhibiting herself at the present moment to a whimsical eye in the rear as a circle on two stalks, down the centre of which a switch moved pendulum-wise; while the sun, lowering itself behind this patient row, threw their shadows accurately inwards upon the wall.†   (source)
  • Now that, after this swing of the pendulum, Odette had naturally returned to the place from which Swann's jealousy had for the moment driven her, in the angle in which he found her charming, he pictured her to himself as full of tenderness, with a look of consent in her eyes, and so beautiful that he could not refrain from moving his lips towards her, as though she had actually been in the room for him to kiss; and he preserved a sense of gratitude to her for that bewitching, kindly…†   (source)
  • Granted that the great Life Force has hit on the device of the clockmaker's pendulum, and uses the earth for its bob; that the history of each oscillation, which seems so novel to us the actors, is but the history of the last oscillation repeated; nay more, that in the unthinkable infinitude of time the sun throws off the earth and catches it again a thousand times as a circus rider throws up a ball, and that the total of all our epochs is but the moment between the toss and the catch,…†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)