Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun An indirect or chance blow.
- noun Offensive A person born to parents not married to each other.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A side or accidental blow.
- noun An illegitimate child.
- noun A calamity or disaster out of the common.
- noun A blow that misses its aim.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A side or incidental blow; an accidental blow.
- noun An illegitimate child; a bastard.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A blow struck to the side or from the side, as in
swordplay ; asecondary orincidental strike of any sort. - noun An
illegitimate child; a child of an unknown or unmarried father.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the illegitimate offspring of unmarried parents
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word by-blow.
Examples
-
In the past, every time that there's been attempts to craft this external villain, the people who are here in the United States and were born here, are native here, were raised here, or legally immigrated here, we end up kind of catching the by-blow.
-
I was beginning to wonder if Custer wasn't perhaps some by-blow of the Flashman family.
Isabelle Estelle Bruno 2010
-
A by-blow of MPs having both their mortgages and their food bills paid for by the Taxpayer – in the case of John Prescott having the nightly technicolour yawn subsidised as well – is that they perforce become immune from the reality of the remorseless rise in food prices and interest rates that afflict not just the poor but most hard-working people in the UK.
-
A by-blow of MPs having both their mortgages and their food bills paid for by the Taxpayer – in the case of John Prescott having the nightly technicolour yawn subsidised as well – is that they perforce become immune from the reality of the remorseless rise in food prices and interest rates that afflict not just the poor but most hard-working people in the UK.
Archive 2008-04-20 2008
-
Yet that is what has happened, and it is not a cynical by-blow on the part of Dryden; the last line is entirely rousing and single-hearted.
"Courage is not solely for men, but it is mainly for men." Ann Althouse 2009
-
Speck Daniels, another suspected Watson by-blow, possesses his father's meanness as well as his shrewd sense of the world.
An Epic of the Everglades Dirda, Michael 2008
-
Stephen is supposedly some sort of semi-royal by-blow: brought up for payment, discreetly, as their own, by discreet people in a small town.
Cromwell & Wolsey: From 'Wolf Hall' Mantel, Hilary 2008
-
Certainly they're being kept away from the minute-by-minute, the blow - by-blow, of the prime minister's condition.
-
If he'd mentally goggled at the notion of her bearding Elderby with the existence of a family by-blow, he reeled at the thought of her approaching Lord Thomas Caverlock with the same news.
Hero Come Back Laurens, Stephanie 2005
-
“Meshisha is a by-blow, gotten in an evil hour,” says he.
Flashman on the March Fraser, George MacDonald, 1925- 2005
Comments
Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.