All 50 Uses of
minute
in
All the King's Men
- For in one way, she seemed to be detached from her very slender, compactly made, tight-muscled, soft-fleshed, golden-shouldered body, as though it were an elaborate and cunning mechanism in which she and I shared ownership, which had suddenly dropped to us out of the blue, and which, in our ignorance, we had to study with the greatest patience and most reverent attention lest we miss some minute, scholarly detail without knowledge of which everything would be wasted.
Chpt 7minute = small
- But maybe I was wrong in that surmise, and maybe I could not have hurried the massive deliberation of that current in which we were caught and suspended, or hurried Anne Stanton's pensive and scholarly assimilation of each minute variation which had to be slowly absorbed into the body of our experience before another could be permitted.
Chpt 7 *
Uses with a meaning too common or too rare to warrant foucs:
- He stood that way a minute maybe, and then one of the girls ladling up ice cream happened to see him, and got a look on her face as though her garter belt had busted in church, and dropped her ice-cream scoop, and headed for the back of the store with her hips pumping hell-for-leather under the lettuce-green smock.†
Chpt 1
- But there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back.†
Chpt 1
- He stood there a half minute, not saying a word, and not moving.†
Chpt 1
- You might think he had a mouth like a boy, not quite shaped up, and that was the way he looked that minute, all right, leaning over the bottle and the straws stuck in his lips, which were just puckered up.†
Chpt 1
- We got up close and could see his face, brown and tooled-looking, with the skin and flesh thin on the bone and hanging down from the bone to give that patient look old men's faces have, and his gray hair plastered down on his narrow, egg-thin old skull—the hair still wet as though he had given it a dab with the wet brush when he heard the car, just to be looking right at the last minute—and slow blue eyes in the middle of the brown folded skin.†
Chpt 1
- I thought about that for a minute and admired the sunset colorations and breathed the dry, clean, ammoniac smell, and then pulled out the bottle.†
Chpt 1
- Mr. X and I admired the sunset together for a couple of minutes, and nothing said.†
Chpt 1
- Lucy wiped the perspiration-soaked wisp of hair back from her face, and gave that last-minute look around the table to see if anything was missing, like a general inspecting troops.†
Chpt 1
- At first guess it might have been the look any wife gives her husband when he shoves back after supper and announces he thinks he'll step down town for a minute.†
Chpt 1
- We bored on into the dark for another twenty miles and eighteen minutes.†
Chpt 1
- At about the end of that eighteen minutes and twenty miles, I said: "But suppose I don't find anything before election day?†
Chpt 1
- He looked at the card for a minute, holding it off near arm's length as though he were afraid it would spit in his eye, then he turned it over and looked at the back side a minute till he was dead sure it was blank.†
Chpt 2
- He looked at the card for a minute, holding it off near arm's length as though he were afraid it would spit in his eye, then he turned it over and looked at the back side a minute till he was dead sure it was blank.†
Chpt 2
- And listening to it, you wouldn't be so sure for a minute the bar or board would hold.†
Chpt 2
- He would say, "Now friends, if you will bear patiently with me for a few minutes, I will give you the figures," and he would clear his throat and fumble with a sheet of paper and backbones would sag lower in the seats and folks would start cleaning their fingernails with their pocket knives.†
Chpt 2
- He chewed that for about a minute and then swallowed it.†
Chpt 2
- He sat there a minute longer, then got up and said good night and went to his room.†
Chpt 2
- But after a minute he pulled out of it, stared at me, and said, "I could have made a good Governor.†
Chpt 2
- After about a minute that sound stopped.†
Chpt 2
- In ten minutes I repeated the dose.†
Chpt 2
- And I wouldn't know the truth this minute if that woman right there—" and he pointed down at Sadie—"if that woman right there—" I nudged Sadie and said, "Sister, you are out of a job."†
Chpt 2
- He brooded over that for a minute.†
Chpt 2
- You don't dream in that kind of sleep, but you are aware of it every minute you are asleep, as though you were having a long dream of sleep itself, and in that sleep you were dreaming of sleep, sleeping and dreaming of sleep infinitely inward into the center.†
Chpt 2
- He seemed to take the question under advisement for a half minute, as though I had asked him a real question, which maybe it was.†
Chpt 2
- For about five minutes the dancing had some value in itself, then it became very much like acting out some complicated and portentous business in a dream which seems to have a meaning but whose meaning you can't figure out.†
Chpt 2
- She didn't say anything for a minute, then said: "I saw him on the street and he didn't look well.†
Chpt 2
- There wasn't a sound for half a minute.†
Chpt 3
- Hugh Miller looked down at him a half minute, down into the beefy upturned face and the steady protruding eyes.†
Chpt 3
- The Boss regarded the fine paneling of the closed door for a couple of minutes.†
Chpt 3
- His mother didn't say anything for a minute, making a sharp, bright clicking on the pavement with her heels as she walked along, holding her small shoulders trimly back, carrying her famished-cheeked, blue-eyed, absolutely innocent face slightly lifted to the pulsing sunset world of April like a very expensive present the world ought to be glad even to have a look at.†
Chpt 4
- He stood there for some minutes, he did not know how long, then left the summerhouse, where she still sat, and walked down the alley.†
Chpt 4
- She stood there for a minute or two with her head on my chest, and you could have seen daylight between her and her friend, if there had been any daylight, while her friend gave her the impersonal and therapeutic pats on the shoulder.†
Chpt 5
- You would think of a great turbine or dynamo making a million revs a minute and boiling out the power and about to jump loose from its moorings.†
Chpt 5
- Why, just a minute, and they'd find out.†
Chpt 5
- He looked at me for nearly a minute, with an unsmiling clinical eye as though my symptoms merited special attention; then he slowly shook his head.†
Chpt 6
- I may not be high-toned and maybe I did live in a snack but it hadn't been for me he wouldn't be Governor this minute and he knows it and she better not get gay, for high-toned or not, I'll show her.†
Chpt 6
- I was in Long Beach thirty-six hours, and spent all of that time in a hotel room, except for forty minutes in a barbershop off the lobby of the hotel.†
Chpt 7
- I kept thinking that now in a minute I would reach over and take hold.†
Chpt 7
- Then, after a few minutes, I switched on the motor again, and exploded off the Stanton property with a grind of tires that must have scattered the shells of the drive like spray.†
Chpt 7
- But sometimes she would let her book slide down to the blanket and lie back staring up into the high arch and tangle of the pine boughs, and I would begin to spy on her until, in a minute, it would be as though Adam weren't there.†
Chpt 7
- He would be down in a few minutes, she said.†
Chpt 7
- I didn't answer for a minute.†
Chpt 7
- She was quiet for a little, then said, "You just thought of that this minute.†
Chpt 7
- We stood that way for a couple of minutes, like lovers in an advertisement watching a dramatic sunset or the ocean or Niagara Falls.†
Chpt 7
- By ransacking the kitchen and your wife's dressing table you can get together in five minutes enough of a kit to set up in business for yourself.†
Chpt 8
- So the fellow said his name was Coffee (the name is Hubert Coffee) and asked if he could come in for a minute.†
Chpt 8
- The Boss was fit to be tied when I saw him a few minutes after Tom's departure.†
Chpt 8
- The windows of the room were closed, and the curtains drawn to give a shadowy, aqueous light in which we sat silently for a minute as though at a funeral.†
Chpt 8
Definitions:
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(1)
(minute as in: minute size) small, exceptionally small, or insignificant
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(2)
(minute as in: minute description) detailed (including even small considerations); and/or careful (done with care)
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(3)
(minutes as in: keep the minutes) a written record of what happened at a meeting
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(4)
(meaning too common or rare to warrant focus) Much more commonly, minute and minutes refer to a period of time lasting 60 seconds.
Less commonly, they refer to a measurement of angle where 60 minutes make up a single degree, and where a right angle has 90 degrees and a circle has 360 degrees.