a-dying

• “We're doomed yet again, for a variety of reasons, but we do seem to be taking our sweet time a-dying.”

  Archive 2009-12-01

• “Drink-sodden Scots who die in their fifties and sixties are a considerable saving to the exchequer since they don't live to collect their pensions or clog up doctors 'waiting rooms or take an unconscienable time a-dying and costing the rest of us billions.”

  Giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Tony Blair said: “I...

• “The rump of that empire lingered, taking a long time a-dying, another couple of years before it finally expired.”

  Archive 2007-07-15

• “Woe, woe! rend the cheek; like a swan with clear loud note beside the brimming river calling to its parent dear that lies a-dying in the meshes of the crafty net, so I bewail thee, my hapless sire,”

  Electra

• “And as it fell, the traitors had been set to watch while the others slept; and sleeping the caitiffs found them, and slew the said men-at-arms at once, but bound Hugh to a tree that he might be the longer a-dying; since none looked for any but their own folk to pass by that way.”

  The Water of the Wondrous Isles

• “I will teach a trick to know it: give out you lie a-dying, and if you hear the common people curse you, be sure you are taken for one of the prime night-caps. 28”

  The Duchess of Malfi

• “And the Gorge to be filled with dull and dreadful echoings, as that an hundred Monsters died in this place and that of the darkness in the Gorge, and all to be bred of the noise of that mildewed hill a-dying.”

  The Night Land

• “It may be partly because there was never the squire and the serf attitude in the US, and I think that attitude has been a long time a-dying in England, although hopefully it is fading.”

  Levy Didn't Propose Honours List Names. Yeah, Right...

• “Your letter to the Reverend H.B. Gage is a document which, in my sight, if you had filled me with bread when I was starving, if you had sat up to nurse my father when he lay a-dying, would yet absolve me from the bonds of gratitude.”

  Lay Morals

• “‘She’s a-dying, I tell you, Mr. Tudor,’ continued the landlady, ‘and if she do die, be sure of this,”

  The Three Clerks

Show 10 more examples...