humming-top

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