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THROES
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Violent pangs of suffering
Example:
death throes
Classified under:
Nouns denoting feelings and emotions
Hypernyms ("throes" is a kind of...):
hurt; suffering (feelings of mental or physical pain)
II. (verb)
Sense 1
Present simple (third person singular) of the verb throe
Context examples:
He was swiftly mastered by the concept or sensation in him that struggled in birth-throes to receive expression and form, and then he forgot himself and where he was, and the old words—the tools of speech he knew—slipped out.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
He saw himself, stripped to the waist, with naked fists, fighting his great fight with Liverpool Red in the forecastle of the Susquehanna; and he saw the bloody deck of the John Rogers, that gray morning of attempted mutiny, the mate kicking in death- throes on the main-hatch, the revolver in the old man's hand spitting fire and smoke, the men with passion-wrenched faces, of brutes screaming vile blasphemies and falling about him—and then he returned to the central scene, calm and clean in the steadfast light, where Ruth sat and talked with him amid books and paintings; and he saw the grand piano upon which she would later play to him; and he heard the echoes of his own selected and correct words, But then, may I not be peculiarly constituted to write?
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
