All 6 Uses of
vary
in
Moby Dick
- He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty-five feet in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the waist.†
Chpt 31-33 *
- For however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable—they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness—and when retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that temporary interests and employments should intervene and hold them healthily suspended for the…†
Chpt 46-48
- But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us on from before, the solitary jet would at times be descried.†
Chpt 49-51
- And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.†
Chpt 55-57
- * *In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a regular semiweekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench the casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is removed by the ship's pumps.†
Chpt 109-111
- Making so long a passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.†
Chpt 124-126
Definition:
-
(vary) to be different, or to changeeditor's notes: Vary is often used to describe small differences or changes--especially about things of the same type. It would be more common to say "The weight of full-grown elephants varies depending upon diet and other factors," than to say "The weight of elephants varies from that of mice."