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cull
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  • The twenty-five debutantes had been culled from an original group of fifty nominees.†   (source)
  • Then he went and put five acres into raspberries and dumped money into that experiment—wire and cedar posts, labor to build trellises—it set them back until he figured how to cull the canes and train them to produce.†   (source)
  • He assured her that everything that had been on-screen was publicly available, none of it embarrassing, all of it culled from things she'd posted herself, after all.†   (source)
  • The whole city is cull of idiots thinking they've been containing the virus.†   (source)
  • They use the plagues to cull the population of weak genes, the same way the Trials pick out the strongest.†   (source)
  • My Starburst, already culled of the orange.†   (source)
  • Her rising rate of breathing gave way to moans and sighs and woman-sounds that culled forth a measure of something sweet and taut within me.†   (source)
  • In a dozen years sudden death culled the city of dilettantes until only the Shrike and I remained.†   (source)
  • Somebody cull you for a copper?†   (source)
  • Danny was hunched over the first of the five battered primers Jack had dug up by culling mercilessly through Boulder's myriad secondhand bookshops.†   (source)
  • He would use the Cup on any child he could capture, and cull out the twenty percent who survived to be his army.†   (source)
  • From those he selected 400 for his annual book of the nation's top prospects, and from the book he culled his list of the Top 100 players in the nation.†   (source)
  • The seriousness of such an occasion is directly proportionate to the number of bodily emissions you are asked to cull for analysis.†   (source)
  • Jennifer Anne clearly had a list of talking points she had culled from the newspaper or CNN she believed would allow us to converse on a level she deemed acceptable.†   (source)
  • This bunch has done been culled once up on the mesa, aint it?†   (source)
  • She had read and reread them—cullings from Chaucer, from Spenser, from the Elizabethan lyrists, the border balladry, fierce, tender, oh, so human—till she knew pages of them by heart, and their vocabulary influenced her own, their imagery tinged all her leisure thoughts.†   (source)
  • Of course Edward and Alice weren't really related (in Forks the story was that all the Cullen siblings were adopted by Dr. Carlisle Culler and his wife, Esme, both plainly too young to have teenage children), but their skin was precisely the same pale shade, their eyes had the same strange golden tint, with the same deep, bruise-like shadows beneath them.†   (source)
  • Across the room from the Acutes are the culls of the Combine's product, the Chronics.†   (source)
  • The term comes from the fourteenth-century French trier, "to pick or cull," and was first used to describe the sorting of wool according to its quality.†   (source)
  • I accepted all the gifts-the tables, the earthenware jugs-though I could not possibly carry them with me, and culled for travel only a small copper cooking bowl.†   (source)
  • From what she culled from the media she built a picture of its participants.†   (source)
  • A culling of man's population and planetary influence might be the very thing we need at this juncture.†   (source)
  • I would do what I called "cheerlead for life," sometimes rallying her to the point where she would come down for dinner or at least laugh at the obscene jokes I culled for just this purpose.†   (source)
  • In the kitchen, I chose a couple of the spotted apples I'd culled from the buckets and walked out to the stables.†   (source)
  • Cull me, Marcia had written.†   (source)
  • The following is a sample culled from fifteen minutes of conversation between two young men aged about eighteen in June 2003.†   (source)
  • Into it each crab pot will be emptied and from it the legal-sized crabs—hard, peeler, and soft—will be culled from their smaller kin as well as from the blowfish, sea nettles, seaweed, shells, and garbage, all such unwelcome harvest as the Bay seems ever generous to offer up.†   (source)
  • He had spread every scrap of information he could cull from the files to every post in Europe, placed agents in the Paris-London-Amsterdam axis on alert.†   (source)
  • These were not scheduled, but were called as needed, and were held to discuss national matters such as a drought, the culling of cattle, policies ordered by the magistrate, or new laws decreed by the government.†   (source)
  • Be nice if he culled some Freys too.†   (source)
  • Eve culled them out with little hope or enthusiasm.†   (source)
  • With the candles she'd finished boxed for transport to her shop, she began to set the ones she'd culled out on shelves.†   (source)
  • Although the IIC at any crash scene was a senior investigator operating out of the NTSB headquarters in Washington, other members of a Go-Team could be culled from specialists in field offices all over the country: Anchorage, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Kansas City, New York City, and Seattle.†   (source)
  • They'd stand by and watch the culling.†   (source)
  • Despite living in New York City for most of his adult life, where he was surrounded by a large supply of story material that other writers had culled with critical and financial success over the years, Jack Cardinal had chosen to base all his novels upon the place the train was carrying his family to: the mountains of Virginia that rose high in the toe of the state's topographical boot.†   (source)
  • Although I had already been disabused of the truth of a good many scientifically established beliefs about wolves by my own recent experiences, I could hardly believe that the all-powerful and intelligent wolf would limit his predation on the caribou herds to culling the sick and the infirm when he could, presumably, take his choice of the fattest and most succulent individuals.†   (source)
  • It must have been culled two weeks ago at the least.†   (source)
  • He had an image, culled from some old book, perhaps, or a sermon he'd heard—an image of his house taken over by owls and ravens and cormorants and bitterns, and strange shapes dancing in his cellar.†   (source)
  • Florence could think of no adventure, or even any news culled from the wire, that could compete with telling off Kitty Offenhaus—except her experience with Randy Bragg.†   (source)
  • Louie was never more than an inch from juvenile hall or jail, and as a serial troublemaker, a failing student, and a suspect Italian, he was just the sort of rogue that eugenicists wanted to cull.   (source)
    cull = select for elimination
  • Under that white dressing sat a fat little bumblebee, culled from the laminated ring binder of images that the tattoo artist had handed us when we walked in.   (source)
    culled = selected
  • I think of the first time I looked into those eyes, as a freezing six-year-old getting pummeled in the culling pen.   (source)
    culling = selection
  • Then you can cull the weak ones, if necessary.†   (source)
  • Leaving an egg you should cull might have disastrous results on the healthy ones.†   (source)
  • There Call, his hands in heavy rubber gloves, would cull, using a culling hammer.†   (source)
  • There Call, his hands in heavy rubber gloves, would cull, using a culling hammer.†   (source)
  • He would open the rakes and drop his catch onto the wooden culling board.†   (source)
  • I could see my culling like a trail behind us on the quickly forming ice patches.†   (source)
  • A live oyster, a good one, when it hits the culling board has a tightly closed shell.†   (source)
  • "Well," I said, "I guess you won't be culling for Daddy this winter."†   (source)
  • They'd sailed in search of the Northwest Passage, as many Spaniards did in those days, and their pilot and captain, Martin de Aquilar of the Vizcaino expedition, sent a work detail ashore to cull a fresh spar pole from among the hemlocks at water's edge.†   (source)
  • Carl and the boys were out culling raspberry canes, and she found them down among the southward trellises, Carl cutting free the older stock, the boys filling the wheelbarrow.†   (source)
  • Cull them.†   (source)
  • "Forget it, Cull," broke in the anxious Redhead, "We may have a bigger problem, and I don't know what it means."†   (source)
  • Culling the professional association lists by using the Internet had been tedious and time-consuming, but he'd stayed at it, diligent in his pursuit, looking for exactly the right man as he'd moved from one town to the next.†   (source)
  • Okay, Cull, I'll simply refer him to you," said the Redhead, otherwise known as the vice president of the United States, as he hung up the phone.†   (source)
  • That you, Cull?" came the voice of Redhead over the line, intruding on Parnell's thoughts as he wrote a seventh obscenity on the legal pad.†   (source)
  • I mean actually threatening me, Cull!†   (source)
  • Will you please tell me, Cull?†   (source)
  • At first, I was only a culler, but if we found a rich bed, I'd tong as well, and then when the culling board was loaded, I'd bring in my last tong full hand over hand, dump it on the board, and cull until I'd caught up with my father.†   (source)
  • My father took a few days off to shoot duck, and then put the culling board back on the Portia Sue and headed out for oysters.†   (source)
  • Of course, we could not help but bring up some spat, as every oyster clings to its bed until the culling hammer forces a separation, but compared to the dredge, we left the precious bottom virtually undisturbed to provide a bed for the oysters that would be harvested by our children's children.†   (source)
  • At first, I was only a culler, but if we found a rich bed, I'd tong as well, and then when the culling board was loaded, I'd bring in my last tong full hand over hand, dump it on the board, and cull until I'd caught up with my father.†   (source)
  • We tongers stood perched on the washboards of our tiny boats, and, just as our fathers and grandfathers had before us, used our fir-wood tongs, three or four times taller than our own bodies, to reach down gently to the oyster bed, feel the bottom until we came to a patch of market-sized oysters, and then closing the rakes over the catch, bringing it up to the culling board.†   (source)
  • There had been violence in 1957 when the women of Zeerust were ordered to carry passes; there was violence in 1958 with the enforcement of cattle culling in Sekhukhuniland; there was violence in 1959 when the people of Cato Manor protested against pass raids; there was violence in 1960 when the Government attempted to impose Bantu Authorities in Pondoland.†   (source)
  • And he swung both boys into the wheelbarrow and planted them on top of the culled canes.†   (source)
  • They were tying knots in the culled raspberry canes.†   (source)
  • All the questions have been culled from them.†   (source)
  • The new crop of horses coming into the barn was a big one, and the stable string had to be culled.†   (source)
  • "Sometimes diseased plants must be culled to preserve the whole garden," said Valentine.†   (source)
  • What he had burned had been nothing more than an illusion with a title page on top , blank pages interspersed with written rejects and culls.†   (source)
  • They were brandishing crude weapons culled from the debris of construction: jagged shards of glass, torn-off chunks of rebar, concrete blocks.†   (source)
  • Those who cannot are culled in training, along with those who cannot run all day in full pack, scale a mountain in the black of night, walk across a bed of coals, or slay an infant.†   (source)
  • His mother and grandmother were destitute, and my father offered to take him aboard the Portia Sue as an oyster culler.†   (source)
  • I was the child who had fished his crab floats and culled his oysters, but I was so far along in my ninth month that I knew better than anyone how crazy it would be to try such a trip; so Joseph went in my place and got back to the farm four days before our son was born.†   (source)
  • At first, I was only a culler, but if we found a rich bed, I'd tong as well, and then when the culling board was loaded, I'd bring in my last tong full hand over hand, dump it on the board, and cull until I'd caught up with my father.†   (source)
  • He concentrated, culling dispersion with every force of his will —failed†   (source)
  • Centuries of husbandry, decades of diligent culling, the work of numerous hearts and hands, have gone into the hackling, sorting, and spinning of this tightly twisted yarn.†   (source)
  • NORMAN COUSINS had gone to work in New York on the Maidens idea, and in late 1954 Dr. Arthur Barsky, the chief of plastic surgery at both Mount Sinai and Beth Israel hospitals, and Dr. William Hitzig, an internist on the Mount Sinai staff and Cousins' personal physician, arrived in Hiroshima to cull from among the Maidens those whose prospects for transformation by surgery were best.†   (source)
  • She forced herself to go out into society in order to cull its ridicules; she taught her eye to observe; she read the masterpieces of her language to discover its effects; she insinuated herself into the company of those who were celebrated for their conversation.†   (source)
  • And one day, towards the end of the year, as Caridwen was culling plants and making incantations, it chanced that three drops of the charmed liquor flew out of the cauldron and fell upon the finger of Gwion Bach.†   (source)
  • It was only toward sleep that ears had power to cull again and reassemble the shrill cry, the hoarse voice, the scream of fear, the bells, the thick-breathing, the roar of crowds and all sounds that lay fermenting in the vats of silence and the past.†   (source)
  • An embillance-go cull-oy!†   (source)
  • Cull a cop!†   (source)
  • "Hey, cull," he called in loud voice, "ain't ye goin' to cough up a drink?"†   (source)
  • ROXANE: Must I then bid thee mount to cull this flower?†   (source)
  • But it does mean that this class is not nearly so large as a fairer economic system might easily make it, that those who survive in the competition are handicapped so as to accomplish much less than they deserve to, and that, above all, the personnel of the successful class is left to chance and accident, and not to any intelligent culling or reasonable methods of selection.†   (source)
  • —Ay, My heart has clothed itself with witty words, To shroud itself from curious eyes:—impelled At times to aim at a star, I stay my hand, And, fearing ridicule,—cull a wild flower!†   (source)
  • 'The friendliness of this gentleman,' said Mr. Micawber to my aunt, 'if you will allow me, ma'am, to cull a figure of speech from the vocabulary of our coarser national sports — floors me.†   (source)
  • The hive has remained stationary, and they who flutter around the venerable straw are wont to claim the empty distinction of antiquity, regardless alike of the frailty of their tenement and of the enjoyments of the numerous and vigorous swarms that are culling the fresher sweets of a virgin world.†   (source)
  • With the Bible she had been early made familiar by her mother, and she now turned from passage to passage with surprising rapidity, taking care to cull such verses as taught the sublime lessons of Christian charity and Christian forgiveness.†   (source)
  • Not even courtesans: —creatures taken at childhood, culled and chosen and raised more carefully than any white girl, any nun, than any blooded mare even, by a person who gives them the unsleeping care and attention which no mother ever gives.†   (source)
  • He culled them, sorted out what he would think when he got up there-he would allow them to blossom once he had climbed up the stairs.†   (source)
  • Vee culled id a'reddy, Ufficeh!†   (source)
  • And it was brighter than the pith of lightning and milder than pearl,) vealing a white puffy ring about the ankle, at (And made the darkness dark because the dark had culled its radiance for that jewel.†   (source)
  • She had begun as he had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest was the result of accessible popular novels and dressing-room conversation culled from a slightly older set.†   (source)
  • It was to this effect: In the case of a war-ship short of hands whose speedy sailing was imperative, the deficient quota in lack of any other way of making it good, would be eked out by draughts culled direct from the jails.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Hatch swam in a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, of aspirations culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion journals, and a gaudy world of sport still more completely beyond her companion's ken.†   (source)
  • Two of our boats, with men all safe, we took off the Cisco, and, to Wolf Larsen's huge delight and my own grief, he culled Smoke, with Nilson and Leach, from the San Diego.†   (source)
  • The night was fast closing in, when he returned homeward: laden with flowers which he had culled, with peculiar care, for the adornment of the sick chamber.†   (source)
  •   No, madam; we have cull'd such necessaries
      As are behoveful for our state to-morrow.   (source)
    cull'd = selected from among many
  • And do you now cull out a holiday?   (source)
    cull = take
  •   I do remember an apothecary—
      And hereabouts he dwells,—which late I noted
      In tatter'd weeds, with overwhelming brows,
      Culling of simples. ...   (source)
    culling = selecting from among many
  • His eyes he opened, and beheld a field,
    Part arable and tilth, whereon were sheaves
    New reaped; the other part sheep-walks and folds;
    I' the midst an altar as the land-mark stood,
    Rustick, of grassy sord; thither anon
    A sweaty reaper from his tillage brought
    First fruits, the green ear, and the yellow sheaf,
    Unculled, as came to hand; a shepherd next,
    More meek, came with the firstlings of his flock,
    Choicest and best; then, sacrificing, laid
    The inwards and their fat, with incense strowed,
    On the cleft wood, and all due rights performed:
    His offering soon propitious fire from Heaven
    Consumed with nimble glance, and grateful steam;
    The other'†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unculled means not and reverses the meaning of culled. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
  • The old put wanted to make a parson of me, but d—n me, thinks I to myself, I'll nick you there, old cull; the devil a smack of your nonsense shall you ever get into me.†   (source)
  • There's Jemmy Oliver, of our regiment, he narrowly escaped being a pimp too, and that would have been a thousand pities; for d—n me if he is not one of the prettiest fellows in the whole world; but he went farther than I with the old cull, for Jimmey can neither write nor read.†   (source)
  • Still Captain Culler broke a window in the Kildare street club with a slog to square leg.†   (source)
  • Subsequently he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said, in my honour.†   (source)
  • And by that way wend the herds innumerable of bellwethers and flushed ewes and shearling rams and lambs and stubble geese and medium steers and roaring mares and polled calves and longwoods and storesheep and Cuffe's prime springers and culls and sowpigs and baconhogs and the various different varieties of highly distinguished swine and Angus heifers and polly bulllocks of immaculate pedigree together with prime premiated milchcows and beeves: and there is ever heard a trampling, cackling, roaring, lowing, bleating, bellowing, rumbling, grunting, champing, chewing, of sheep and pig†   (source)
  • The word is well culled, chose, sweet, and apt, I do assure you, sir; I do assure.†   (source)
  • Night, Erebus, and Chaos she proclaims, And threefold Hecate, with her hundred names, And three Dianas: next, she sprinkles round With feign'd Avernian drops the hallow'd ground; Culls hoary simples, found by Phoebe's light, With brazen sickles reap'd at noon of night; Then mixes baleful juices in the bowl, And cuts the forehead of a newborn foal, Robbing the mother's love.†   (source)
  • That the other part of the parliament consisted of an assembly called the House of Commons, who were all principal gentlemen, freely picked and culled out by the people themselves, for their great abilities and love of their country, to represent the wisdom of the whole nation.†   (source)
  • Of all complexions the cull'd sovereignty Do meet, as at a fair, in her fair cheek, Where several worthies make one dignity, Where nothing wants that want itself doth seek.†   (source)
  • The reader will, I fancy, allow that Fortune could not have culled out a more improper person for Mr Jones to attack with any probability of success; nor could the whimsical lady have directed this attack at a more unseasonable time.†   (source)
  • Mr Watson, with whom I now lived in the closest amity, had unluckily the former failing to a very great excess; so that instead of making a fortune by his profession, as some others did, he was alternately rich and poor, and was often obliged to surrender to his cooler friends, over a bottle which they never tasted, that plunder that he had taken from culls at the public table.†   (source)
  • The three hundred lucky guests culled from 13 and the many refugees wear their everyday clothes, the decorations are made from autumn foliage, the music is provided by a choir of children accompanied by the lone fiddler who made it out of 12 with his instrument.   (source)
    culled = selected
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