Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. An uproar; a hubbub.
- n. See hookah.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A continued bubbling or gurgling sound.
- n. A primitive form of pipe for smoking, popular among the lower classes in India. It consists of a cocoanut-shell having a bowl and reed inserted in the top, and a hole in the side, usually without a mouthpiece, through which the smoke is drawn, as it passes from the bowl through the reed into water contained in the shell, causing the bubbling or gurgling sound which gives the name to the pipe. The name is also applied to similar pipes made of clay, glass, silver, etc. Compare
hooka and narghile. Alsohobble-bobble .
Wiktionary
- n. a hookah
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A tobacco pipe, so arranged that the smoke passes through water, making a bubbling noise, whence its name. In India, the bulb containing the water is often a cocoanut shell. It is a simple type of hookah.
WordNet 3.0
- n. an oriental tobacco pipe with a long flexible tube connected to a container where the smoke is cooled by passing through water
Etymologies
- Reduplication and alteration of bubble.
Examples
“Listening to the harsh, monotonous screeching of the cart, he puffs happily at his mud-stained hubble-bubble, lost in broken and distorted memories of the past.”
What Sri Aurobindo wrote about community presages The Mother’s Auroville Charter
“Pleasantly weary, he stretched out on a rope bed, eavesdropping on his father's guests and supplicants -- smoky, piratical gatherings in the hujera's great room, with hubble-bubble hookahs and high-caliber bandoleers, lulling him to sleep with the streamside murmur of their mutter and growl, and the whine and hum of their radio, beaming news from the great beyond.”
“Already in that early day it was his habit to smoke in bed, and he had made him an Oriental pipe of the hubble-bubble variety, because it would hold more and was more comfortable than the regular short pipe of daytime use.”
“Inevitably one made up things like that about Hugh; that was his style; the style of those admirable letters which Peter had read thousands of miles across the sea in the Times, and had thanked God he was out of that pernicious hubble-bubble if it were only to hear baboons chatter and coolies beat their wives.”
“Tasslehoff closed his eyes so he wouldn't have to see the gnome, but he saw him anyway-his nut-brown face and his wispy hair that floated about his head as though he were perpetually poking his finger into one of his own inventions, perhaps the steam-powered preambulating hubble-bubble or the locomotive, self-winding rutabaga slicer.”
Dragons Of A Vanished Moon
“Sindbad the Sailor, a Joe Meek mountain-man type, one moribund hash aficionado complete with hubble-bubble, and a classic British birdwatcher," Pitkin rattled off in snap appraisal.”
The Golden Torc
“Alas, no! She entertains a set of lazy bearers, smoking the hubble-bubble around a palanquin as they wait for a fare; and her buksheesh may be a cowry or two.”
“Ah, ah," said the Chinaman, placing a hubble-bubble before his guest, who condescended to shut the mouthpiece in under his long moustache, while he sat silently for nearly half an hour.”
“All smoke, using sometimes this long-stemmed, small-bowled pipe, and sometimes the water pipe, akin in principle to the Indian hubble-bubble.”
A Wayfarer in China Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia
“Turks sitting in the shadow of a little saddler's shop by the street smoking their hubble-bubble water-pipes, and saying words like these:”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘hubble-bubble’.
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Whence
Definitions with a whence in them.
girasol, spider, Good King Whenceslas, Æ, whence, narwhal, lithophyse, henbane, gamboge, cirripedia, thermifugine, zietrisikite and 37 more...
chained_bear "Captain Aubrey found Stephen and Dr. Jacob sitting on the Crown's veranda, smoking a hubble-bubble."
--Patrick O'Brian, Blue at the Mizzen, 25 Mar 27, 2008