Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- Having short legs, like a duck.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Having short legs, like a waddling duck; short-legged.
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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“Charles Chattey” stood foremost on this black beadroll, and when this name was shouted by the stentorian lungs of one of the scourgers, a little duck-legged Londoner stood forth.
Ralph Rashleigh 2004
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"We didn't know you were aboard," said Mrs. Waterbury, a silly, duck-legged woman looking proudly uncomfortable in her bead-trimmed black silk.
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Good luck go with you for a-- conceited, bragging, empty-headed, duck-legged idiot. '
Barnaby Rudge Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 1892
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"We didn't know you were aboard," said Mrs. Waterbury, a silly, duck-legged woman looking proudly uncomfortable in her bead-trimmed black silk.
Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise David Graham Phillips 1889
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Clarsie rose precipitately, raised the basket, and out flew the "duck-legged Dominicky," with a frantic flutter and hysterical cackling.
In the Tennessee mountains, pseud. Charles Egbert Craddock 1885
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Good luck go with you for a-- conceited, bragging, empty-headed, duck-legged idiot. '
Barnaby Rudge: a tale of the Riots of 'eighty Charles Dickens 1841
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Another had a cocked hat stuck on the back of his head, and decorated with a bunch of cocks 'tails; a third had a pair of rusty gaiters hanging about his heels; while a fourth, a little duck-legged fellow, was equipped in a pair of the general's cast-off breeches, which he held up with one hand while he grasped his firelock with the other.
Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete Washington Irving 1821
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Never did two valiant train-band captains, or two buskined theatric heroes, in the renowned tragedies of Pizarro, Tom Thumb, or any other heroical and fighting tragedy, marshal their gallows-looking, duck-legged, heavy-heeled myrmidons with more glory and self-admiration.
Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete Washington Irving 1821
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a humid duck-legged little man, most terribly homesick, most tremendously lonely, most distressingly alien.
From Place to Place 1910
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WIFE: They came to our cabbage patch and they giggled and said, "Oh, see the little duck-legged things!
The Child's World Third Reader Sarah Withers Hetty Browne
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