Examples
“Each flue must be separated by smoke-proof "withes" or divisions, usually half a brick in thickness; connexion between them causes smoky chimneys.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 "Brescia" to "Bulgaria"
“Many horses were broken, and some men, but I lived at the last to the day when, at the changing of camp-sites in the pursuit of the meat in its seasons, our very babes, in baskets of willow-withes, were slung side and side on the backs of our horses that carried our camp - trappage and dunnage.”
“And of this, one thing is sure: if once we wove withes into baskets, the next and inevitable step would have been the weaving of cloth.”
“It never entered anybody's head to weave a basket out of willow-withes.”
“He was going along the rocks in three-fathom water, watching the pollock catch prawns, and the wrasses nibble barnacles off the rocks, shells and all, when he saw a round cage of green withes; and inside it, looking very much ashamed of himself, sat his friend the lobster, twiddling his horns, instead of thumbs.”
“They sought to bind him with rude bonds, but the bonds would not hold him, and the withes fell far away from his hands and feet: and he sat with a smile in his dark eyes.”
“I was soon forced to see that these honourable and praiseworthy conventions were as withes of straw in the fire of English prejudice.”
“But without waiting for Cowperwood to acquiesce, he went off, returning after a time with three unvarnished frames of chairs and a bundle of cane strips or withes, which he deposited on the floor.”
“English eggs, served at dawn in an English inn — a stone-floored raftered room with a starling hanging in a little cage of withes outside the latticed window.”
“The high-arched, slender feet rested upon soft sandals whose gauzy withes laced the exquisitely formed leg to just below the dimpled knee.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘withes’.
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Learned (or Encountered) in Reading
I have a list for words learned from Newsweek; here's where I keep all the stuff from other shit I read.
Except when I'm looking stuff up and find new words that way. Those go on their...cellie, laminectomy, mridangam, terroir, hypospadias, crus, corpora cavernosa, crura, uretheral meatus, bartholin's gland, coloquintida, colopexy and 921 more...
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the Island of the Day Before
phoebus, promontory, succor, indite, sickle, cerulean, tenebrous, specter, bastion, clemency, miasma, nocturlabe and 112 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for withes.
chained_bear "She had yet another mask, he saw, this one a stiff thing made of basket withes lined with layers of soft cotton cloth. She fitted this gently to Henry's face and, saying something inaudible to him, took up her dropping bottle."
—Diana Gabaldon, An Echo in the Bone (New York: Delacorte Press, 2009), 751 Mar 17, 2010