Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The season when hogs are slaughtered.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

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Examples

  • He endeavoured to make them aware also, that hasty wedlock had been the bane of many a savoury professor — that the unbelieving wife had too often reversed the text and perverted the believing husband — that when the famous Donald Cargill, being then hiding in Lee – Wood, in Lanarkshire, it being killing-time, did, upon importunity, marry Robert Marshal of Starry

    The Heart of Mid-Lothian 2007

  • The period of this tale is in the heat of the killing-time; the scene laid for the most part in solitary hills and morasses, haunted only by the so-called Mountain

    Lay Morals 2005

  • Thus the killing-time, with its festivities, became later and later.

    Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan Clement A. Miles

  • In killing-time they put down hecatombs of beef in snow and of ham and sausage in hot lard, and they have stores of cod-fish to be cooked with cream, and of chickens for potpies, which are never made properly, for some mysterious reason, save by a farmer's wife.

    Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 Various

  • Archbishop Sharp, of the battles of Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge, and of those terrible years still spoken of in Scotland as the "killing-time."

    Claverhouse Mowbray Morris 1879

  • The Killing Time variously capitalised as killing-time, Killing-time,

    Claverhouse Mowbray Morris 1879

  • With the brutal promptitude peculiar to that well-named "killing-time," four of them were drawn up on the road and instantly shot, and buried where they fell, by Lochenkit Moor, where a monument now marks their resting place.

    Hunted and Harried 1859

  • Covenanters, especially of the awful killing-time, when the powers of darkness were let loose on the land to do their worst, and when the blood of Scotland's martyrs flowed like water.

    Hunted and Harried 1859

  • At killing-time, each man either came himself, or sent some one to claim his hogs; all of which were slaughtered on the Peak, and carried away in the form of pork.

    The Crater James Fenimore Cooper 1820

  • And now, in 1680, began what has been termed _the killing-time_; in which Graham of Claverhouse (afterwards Viscount

    Hunted and Harried 1859

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