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BOUGH
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Any of the larger branches of a tree
Classified under:
Hypernyms ("bough" is a kind of...):
limb; tree branch (any of the main branches arising from the trunk or a bough of a tree)
Context examples:
As I walked to and fro in the garden, and the twilight began to close around me, their little voices were hushed; and that peculiar silence which belongs to such an evening in the country when the lightest trees are quite still, save for the occasional droppings from their boughs, prevailed.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
Then away rattled the nuts down among the boughs and one of the thieves cried, “Bless me, it is hailing.”
(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)
Some pitched the flies, others cut firewood and pine boughs for the beds, and still others carried water or ice for the cooks.
(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)
There are but two boughs left upon this old, old Saxon trunk.
(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
A great broken bough upon the grass showed whence he had gained his leverage to tilt over our bridge.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
As I continued to thread the tall woods, I could hear from far before me not only the continuous thunder of the surf, but a certain tossing of foliage and grinding of boughs which showed me the sea breeze had set in higher than usual.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
The cloven halves were not broken from each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below; though community of vitality was destroyed—the sap could flow no more: their great boughs on each side were dead, and next winter's tempests would be sure to fell one or both to earth: as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree—a ruin, but an entire ruin.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
I immediately went into an explanation how I had never seen my own father; and how my mother and I had always lived by ourselves in the happiest state imaginable, and lived so then, and always meant to live so; and how my father's grave was in the churchyard near our house, and shaded by a tree, beneath the boughs of which I had walked and heard the birds sing many a pleasant morning.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
Never did tombs look so ghastly white; never did cypress, or yew, or juniper so seem the embodiment of funereal gloom; never did tree or grass wave or rustle so ominously; never did bough creak so mysteriously; and never did the far-away howling of dogs send such a woeful presage through the night.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
But a bird sang blithely on a budding bough, close by, the snowdrops blossomed freshly at the window, and the spring sunshine streamed in like a benediction over the placid face upon the pillow, a face so full of painless peace that those who loved it best smiled through their tears, and thanked God that Beth was well at last.
(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)
