Search the Dictionary

To furnish with thrums; to insert tufts in; to fringe. Are we born to thrum caps or pick straw Quarles.

The crocodile bird. The crocodile . . . opens his chaps to let the trochil in to pick his teeth, which gives it the usual feeding. Sir T. Herbert.

To divide or separate, as one sort from another; to winnow; to sift; to pick out; -- frequently followed by out; as, to try out the wild corn from the good. [Obs.] Sir T. Elyot.

A kind of mattock, or ax; esp., a tool like a pickax, but having, instead of the points, flat terminations, one of which is parallel to the handle, the other perpendicular to it. [Prov. Eng.]

To open by picking out stitches; to take out, or undo, the stitches of; as, to unstitch a seam. Collier.

n Ireland and Scotland; whisky. The Scottish returns being vested in grouse, white hares, pickled salmon, and usquebaugh. Sir W. Scott.

th his Parliament, but to be guided by them. Milton. And vying malice with my gentleness, Pick quarrels with their only happiness. Herbert.

flies, esp. Drosophila ampelopophila, which breed in imperfectly sealed preserves and in pickles.

One of a picked company of irregular riflemen in each regiment of the French infantry.

To choose; to select; specifically (Mining), to pick out the refuse of (coal) by hand, in order to clean it. [Prov. Eng. & Scot.]

The pickerel weed. [Southern U.S.]

Either of several tropical aquatic plants of the genus Eichhornia, related to the pickerel weed.

Used adverbially in a sense corresponding to the adjectival use; as, he picked what good fruit he saw.

by miners to other kind of dark-colored unstratified rocks which resist the point of the pick. -- for example, to masses of chert. Whin-dikes, and whin-sills, are names sometimes given to veins or beds of basalt.