Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Alternative spelling of humming top.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • I found the room reeling round in an uncertain way, like a labouring, humming-top.

    The Holly-Tree 2007

  • I found the room reeling round in an uncertain way, like a labouring, humming-top.

    The Holly-Tree 2007

  • You've hit it, precisely; I must whirl hither and thither like a perfect humming-top.

    The Birds 2000

  • I guess she never had to give her humming-top to quiet the baby, and had the paint all sucked off.

    Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends Fanny Fern

  • She seems to have no more power of keeping herself in one position or of remaining in one part of the room, or even of being quiet, than a humming-top.

    Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce E. R. Billings

  • A suggested name for this whistler is the 'humming-top,' from his habit of describing semi-circles on the piano stool, and 'humming most melodiously.'

    Charles Dickens and Music James T. Lightwood

  • The earth is a huge oblate or orange-shaped sphere, spinning on its shorter axis like a humming-top, yet at such a rate of speed as to seem standing still; it goes once round in twenty-four hours, its rotation being both the cause and the measure of day and night.

    Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 Various

  • 'Pon my soul, I'm not sure even now whether it was not a big night bird, for it just swooped by me with about as much noise as a humming-top might make.

    The Motor Pirate G. Sidney Paternoster

  • Might not the child's new-fangled humming-top, which is advertised to dance sixty seconds, be said to dance a minuet?

    Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 Various

  • A humming-top on the subject would have been precisely as instructive and convincing.

    Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, June 4, 1892 Various

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