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unwieldy
in a sentence

show 96 more with this conextual meaning
  • Again, Dudley appeared to grapple with thoughts too unwieldy for expression before mumbling, "You saved my life," "Not really," said Harry.†   (source)
  • Skeptical Sherpas promptly dubbed the unwieldy canisters "English Air.†   (source)
  • DELPHI: Brooms—such unwieldy, unnecessary objects.†   (source)
  • FORCE doctrine held that, while a world could be reduced from orbit, actual military invasion of an industrialized planet was an impossibility; the problems with landing logistics, the immense area to be occupied, and the unwieldy size of the invading army were considered to be the ultimate arguments against invasion.†   (source)
  • They are unwieldy and cumbersome, and for generations the craft has been used to teach BUD/S students to pull a paddle as a tight-knit crew, blast their way through the incoming surf, nig properly, and drag the thing into place in a regimented line for inspection on the sandy beach about every seven minutes.†   (source)
  • Perhaps the unbecoming force of my outburst brought home to him the gravity of his task, filled him with intimations of an unwieldy fate.†   (source)
  • A master luthier, Illien transformed the archaic, fragile, unwieldy court lute into the marvelous, versatile, seven-string trouper's lute we use today.†   (source)
  • I rearranged my leg delicately, spoke delicately, as if my words were an unwieldy stack of fine china.†   (source)
  • It was a large box camera with an accordion apparatus for the lens, unwieldy and as heavy as a stone around his neck, and he disliked it thoroughly.†   (source)
  • As unwieldy as Mars's spear was, the piece of tinder was worse.†   (source)
  • Norah's heart surged with love, with vast unwieldy happiness and sorrow.†   (source)
  • I will do mine best to translate them, but the results may be rough and unwieldy.†   (source)
  • A little unwieldy, but that's what it is.†   (source)
  • In the 1980s, he founded his own venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California, and began buying up pieces of other companies that had grown too large and unwieldy.†   (source)
  • The machine would turn into an unwieldy behemoth.†   (source)
  • Amoskeag never saw it coming and was too unwieldy to adapt.†   (source)
  • "Not that what it was called before wasn't a name, but it's rather unwieldy to keep calling it 'The Island at the Edge of the World,' don't you think?"†   (source)
  • It's an awfully unwieldy business, this evacuation.†   (source)
  • It makes a party unwieldy, don't you think?†   (source)
  • He seized Aarfy by the shirt front and, struggling to his feet for traction, dragged him to the rear of the nose compartment and flung him down like a bloated and unwieldy bag in the entrance of the crawlway.†   (source)
  • She hugged me so tightly I couldn't breathe, an unwieldy biography of General Sherman cutting into my ribs.†   (source)
  • There were items of furniture here and there; the white sheets thrown over them turned them into humped, unwieldy ghosts.†   (source)
  • A bullet grazed one of his unwieldy patched-on wings, but he kept flying awkwardly, rising upward slowly but steadily.†   (source)
  • The conference room was the size of an average suburban dining room but with a long heavy table and dark masculine furniture, the chairs thick, unwieldy and quite comfortable.†   (source)
  • America was "a great, unwieldy body," he decided.†   (source)
  • Jeb let the unwieldy box fall onto the mattress.†   (source)
  • It was uncharacteristically silent and seemed little more than an unwieldy length of metal.†   (source)
  • She places my hands upon the unwieldy handlebars.†   (source)
  • I stop still, watching her running figure with the coat flying out on either side and the unwieldy overshoes, as if she's just some other person I'm watching, someone in a race.†   (source)
  • Though now, or in the recent now, I've begun to understand how easily one can stand by and watch a pile of dross steadily grow, allow the fetter of one's quotidian life to become an unwieldy accumulation, which seems somehow much more daunting to clear away once it has settled, gained a repose.†   (source)
  • A rifle is too unwieldy in such tight quarters, so men use the butt end rather than the barrel.†   (source)
  • Too many names are unwieldy.†   (source)
  • The big Krag, long as a Kentucky squirrel rifle and as unwieldy, would be in reserve.†   (source)
  • The web address is descriptive, but it's length makes it too unwieldy to write or type.
  • Max found that many of the weapons were storied but ancient and unwieldy.†   (source)
  • 'No cuts,' said Yossarian with a thick, unwieldy tongue.†   (source)
  • And when I laugh (bratty, bratty New York girl who has never ventured to those big unwieldy middle states, those States Where Many Other People Live), he informs me that Missoura is a magical place, the most beautiful in the world, no state more glorious.†   (source)
  • Several pairs of rough hands lifted her like an unwieldy piece of furniture and she drifted into unconsciousness.†   (source)
  • …crumbled and ceased to exist at the boundary of the small space which soon became the length and breadth of Claudia's dressing room: a bed whose posters reached only to my breast buttons, and small mirrors that reflected only the legs of an unwieldy giant when I found myself lost among them; paintings hung low for Claudia's eye; and finally, upon her little vanity table, black evening gloves for tiny fingers, a woman's low-cut gown of midnight velvet, a tiara from a child's masked…†   (source)
  • His fingers felt gross and unwieldy.†   (source)
  • It is an ugly pistol, small in the round handle, large and flat in the barrel, and unwieldy.†   (source)
  • She continued working until she got too unwieldy to dust under the desks.†   (source)
  • Francie was tired of her unwieldy costume.†   (source)
  • In time, as he grew more unwieldy in figure, he adopted a third boy and employed him as a runner to the distant missions.†   (source)
  • Under his palms, the metal was cold, the heavy can unwieldy, a shifting steely glimmer under his eves.†   (source)
  • Towards the finish of the meal Chang entered and with a little bow began the exchange of politely conventional greetings which, in the English language, sounded just a trifle unwieldy.†   (source)
  • It had been a large unwieldy body.†   (source)
  • The car careened on, charged the cliff face, rebounded, attacked the lower wall furiously with all its unwieldy weight like a great bumble bee and, tumbling over, crashed with a brief and distant report into the depths below.†   (source)
  • By that time Katie was unwieldy.†   (source)
  • The neighbors were horrified when they watched her skipping rope on the street with other children, heedless of the yet-to-be-born baby who was now an almost unwieldy bulge.†   (source)
  • Now came the question of how we were to carry this unwieldy burden.†   (source)
  • It seemed as if Misfortune was never tired of worrying into motion that unwieldy exile.†   (source)
  • He stood towards the myth upon which no individual mind had ever drawn out a line of beauty and to its unwieldy tales that divided against themselves as they moved down the cycles in the same attitude as towards the Roman catholic religion, the attitude of a dull-witted loyal serf.†   (source)
  • The overloaded and unwieldy sled forged ahead, Buck and his mates struggling frantically under the rain of blows.†   (source)
  • Most of the cast were as unwieldy as oak chairs marching, and the setting was an arty arrangement of batik scarfs and heavy tables, but Maire Bruin was slim as Carol, and larger-eyed, and her voice was a morning bell.†   (source)
  • 'The unwieldy old man, lowering his big forehead like an ox under a yoke, made an effort to rise, clutching at the flintlock pistols on his knees.†   (source)
  • He stuffed his books, his notes, a shabby suit, his inadequate linen, and his one glory, the dinner clothes, into his unwieldy imitation-leather bag.†   (source)
  • The unwieldy crowd which had entered the Medical School nearly two years before had thinned out: some had left the hospital, finding the examinations more difficult to pass than they expected, some had been taken away by parents who had not foreseen the expense of life in London, and some had drifted away to other callings.†   (source)
  • Elizabeth guided her this way and that; guided her in her abstraction as if she had been a great child, an unwieldy battleship.†   (source)
  • Bathsheba's eyes, shaded by one hand, were following the ascending multitude against the unexplorable stretch of blue till they ultimately halted by one of the unwieldy trees spoken of.†   (source)
  • Sleek unwieldy porkers were grunting in the repose and abundance of their pens, from whence sallied forth, now and then, troops of sucking pigs, as if to snuff the air.†   (source)
  • However, we returned to those monsters, with fresh wakefulness on my part, and we left their eggs in the sand for the sun to hatch; and we ran away from them, and baffled them by constantly turning, which they were unable to do quickly, on account of their unwieldy make; and we went into the water after them, as natives, and put sharp pieces of timber down their throats; and in short we ran the whole crocodile gauntlet.†   (source)
  • The lower portion of the other is hidden from view by the head of the unwieldy bedstead which is thrust close up against it.†   (source)
  • It was, only at moments, however, as some slight impediment opposed itself to his loitering progress, that his person, which, in its ordinary gait seemed so lounging and nerveless, displayed any of those energies, which lay latent in his system, like the slumbering and unwieldy, but terrible, strength of the elephant.†   (source)
  • Formerly one was obliged to travel in India by the old cumbrous methods of going on foot or on horseback, in palanquins or unwieldy coaches; now fast steamboats ply on the Indus and the Ganges, and a great railway, with branch lines joining the main line at many points on its route, traverses the peninsula from Bombay to Calcutta in three days.†   (source)
  • Other motes there were which showed him as a heavy, selfish, drifting Booby, who, having stumbled, in the course of his unwieldy jostlings against other men, on the discovery that to get through life with ease and credit, he had but to hold his tongue, keep the bald part of his head well polished, and leave his hair alone, had had just cunning enough to seize the idea and stick to it.†   (source)
  • So fire with water to compare, The ocean serves on high, Up-spouted by a whale in air, To express unwieldy joy.†   (source)
  • At the first moment there had arisen from his poet's head, or, simply and prosaically, from his empty stomach, a mist, a vapor, so to speak, which, spreading between objects and himself, permitted him to catch a glimpse of them only in the incoherent fog of nightmare,—in those shadows of dreams which distort every outline, agglomerating objects into unwieldy groups, dilating things into chimeras, and men into phantoms.†   (source)
  • The transportation of a single heavy gun was often considered equal to a victory gained; if happily, the difficulties of the passage had not so far separated it from its necessary concomitant, the ammunition, as to render it no more than a useless tube of unwieldy iron.†   (source)
  • The latter, fortunately, was loose, so that it produced no great influence on the crab like movements of the unwieldy craft.†   (source)
  • As I understand it, that was a valid objection urged by Momus against the house which Minerva made, that she "had not made it movable, by which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided"; and it may still be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves.†   (source)
  • Meanwhile, Sir Huddlestone has hoisted himself unwieldily on the Nob: "Let's try Sowster's Spinney, Tom," says the Baronet, "Farmer Mangle tells me there are two foxes in it."†   (source)
  • There was a gentle breeze from the north, and boldly hoisting the sail, the young man laid the head of the unwieldy craft in such a direction, as, after making a liberal but necessary allowance for leeway, would have brought it ashore a couple of miles down the lake, and on its eastern side.†   (source)
  • Mr Pancks acknowledged this recommendation with such an extraordinarily abrupt, short, and loud utterance of the monosyllable 'Oh!' that even the unwieldy Patriarch moved his blue eyes in something of a hurry, to look at him.†   (source)
  • The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.†   (source)
  • The huge and unwieldy talons pawed stupidly about the grinning muzzle, and while Heyward kept his eyes riveted on its movements with jealous watchfulness, the grim head fell on one side and in its place appeared the honest sturdy countenance of the scout, who was indulging from the bottom of his soul in his own peculiar expression of merriment.†   (source)
  • Myriads of sea-fowl inhabited the most inaccessible of these, while on the lower ridges, seals, sea-bears and walruses, were to be seen, some basking lazily in the sun, some plunging into the water, or emerging awkwardly from it, hoisting their unwieldy bodies up the rocks by means of their tusks.†   (source)
  • The log which was to form the back-brand of the evening fire was the uncleft trunk of a tree, so unwieldy that it could be neither brought nor rolled to its place; and accordingly two men were to be observed dragging and heaving it in by chains and levers as the hour of assembly drew near.†   (source)
  • …with them, Arthur Clennam leaned this day to the opinion, without quite deciding on it, that the last of the Patriarchs was the drifting Booby aforesaid, with the one idea of keeping the bald part of his head highly polished: and that, much as an unwieldy ship in the Thames river may sometimes be seen heavily driving with the tide, broadside on, stern first, in its own way and in the way of everything else, though making a great show of navigation, when all of a sudden, a little coaly…†   (source)
  • As soon as the Delaware perceived that the girls avoided him, unable to manage his unwieldy craft, and knowing that flight from a bark canoe, in the event of pursuit, would be a useless expedient if attempted, he had lowered his sail, in the hope it might induce the sisters to change their plan and to seek refuge in the scow.†   (source)
  • Clennam could not withhold a smile, as the panting little steam-tug, so useful to that unwieldy ship, the Casby, waited on and watched him as if it were seeking an opportunity of running in and rifling him of all he wanted before he could resist its manoeuvres; though there was that in Mr Pancks's eagerness, too, which awakened many wondering speculations in his mind.†   (source)
  • Following the anxious, often contradictory instructions of my guides as best I could, I alternately pulled and pushed, easing the unwieldy mass of the foal around, bringing one foot forward, pushing another back, sweating and groaning along with the mare.†   (source)
  • …the gods who rule Olympus!"
    "The cripple wins by craft."
    "The adulterer,
    he will pay the price!"
    So the gods would banter
    among themselves but lord Apollo goaded Hermes on:
    "Tell me, Quicksilver, giver of all good things—
    even with those unwieldy shackles wrapped around you,
    how would you like to bed the golden Aphrodite?"
    "Oh Apollo, if only!" the giant-killer cried.
    "Archer, bind me down with triple those endless chains!
    Let all you gods look on, and all you goddesses…†   (source)
  • Our unwieldy cargo stowed under blankets on a bench below, Murtagh and I met on the Cristabel's deck to survey the storm-tossed skies.†   (source)
  • Jamie was half-unconscious as it was, an unwieldy burden who protested being manhandled upright against the bulkhead.†   (source)
  • Then she began to struggle with him,but he flung her aside witha motion of his elbow and looked around at her for a moment, his eyes cold and harried, then he turned to the door again and the unwieldy keys.†   (source)
  • Facing the alternative of employing the unwieldy "am I not in this?" the American turns boldly to "/ain't/ I in this?"†   (source)
  • Our olde limbes well may be unweld*, *unwieldy But will shall never fail us, that is sooth.†   (source)
  • Down comes the rider headlong from his height: His horse came after with unwieldy weight, And, flound'ring forward, pitching on his head, His lord's incumber'd shoulder overlaid.†   (source)
  • About them frisking played All beasts of the earth, since wild, and of all chase In wood or wilderness, forest or den; Sporting the lion ramped, and in his paw Dandled the kid; bears, tigers, ounces, pards, Gambolled before them; the unwieldy elephant, To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed His lithe proboscis; close the serpent sly, Insinuating, wove with Gordian twine His braided train, and of his fatal guile Gave proof unheeded; others on the grass Couched, and now…†   (source)
  • Had she affections and warm youthful blood, She'd be as swift in motion as a ball; My words would bandy her to my sweet love, And his to me: But old folks, many feign as they were dead; Unwieldy, slow, heavy and pale as lead.†   (source)
  • The next time I went I cut the cables in pieces, carried off a hawser whole, with a great deal of iron work, and made another raft with the mizen and sprit-sail-yard; but this being so unwieldy, by the too heavy burden I had upon it, and not being able so dextrously to guide it, as the former, both my cargo and I were overturned.†   (source)
  • …glance, Show to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold; Or, in their pearly shells at ease, attend Moist nutriment; or under rocks their food In jointed armour watch: on smooth the seal And bended dolphins play: part huge of bulk Wallowing unwieldy, enormous in their gait, Tempest the ocean: there leviathan, Hugest of living creatures, on the deep Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims, And seems a moving land; and at his gills Draws in, and at his trunk spouts out, a sea.†   (source)
  • Murranus, boasting of his blood, that springs From a long royal race of Latian kings, Is by the Trojan from his chariot thrown, Crush'd with the weight of an unwieldy stone: Betwixt the wheels he fell; the wheels, that bore His living load, his dying body tore.†   (source)
  • And ere that he again were in the saddle There was great shoving bothe to and fro To lift him up, and muche care and woe, So unwieldy was this silly paled ghost.†   (source)
  • We found two and thirty men dead in the field of battle; some were slain with long arrows, which we found sticking in their bodies; & the rest were killed with great unwieldy wooden swords, which denoted their vast strength, and of which we found seventeen, besides bows and arrows: but we could not find one wounded creature among them alive; for they either kill their enemies quite, or carry those wounded away with them.†   (source)
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