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A Highland air, suited to the particular passion which the musician would either excite or assuage; generally applied to those airs that are played on the bagpipe before the Highlanders when they go out to battle. Jamieson.

Money paid at fairs for leave to break ground for booths. Ainsworth.

eces, to pull apart piece by piece; hence [Colloq.], to analyze; esp., to criticize in detail. -- To pick a quarrel, to give occasion of quarrel intentionally. -- To pick up. (a) To take up, as with the fingers. (b) To get by repeated efforts; to gather here and there; as, to pick up a livelihood; to pick up news.(c)…

Formerly, an entertainment at which each person contributed some dish to a common table; now, an excursion or pleasure party in which the members partake of a collation or repast (usually in the open air, and from food carried by themselves).

A hair; hence, the fiber of wool, cotton, and the like; also, the nap when thick or heavy, as of carpeting and velvet. Velvet soft, or plush with shaggy pile. Cowper.

A small, unmanned balloon sent up to indicate the direction of air currents.

The sound made by a bullet in striking a solid object or in passing through the air.

A fetter for the arm. Ainsworth.

A passageway for the air in speaking and breathing; the windpipe, or one of its divisions.

A thick, black, lustrous, and sticky substance obtained by boiling down tar. It is used in calking the seams of ships; also in coating rope, canvas, wood, ironwork, etc., to preserve them. He that toucheth pitch shall be defiled therewith. Ecclus. xiii. 1.

Any fresh-water air-breathing mollusk belonging to Planorbis and other allied genera, having shells of a discoidal form.

One who plays, or amuses himself; one without serious aims; an idler; a trifler. Shak.

A compress, or small flat tent of lint, laid over a wound, ulcer, or the like, to exclude air, retain dressings, or absorb the matter discharged.

The operation of finding, by means of a mine dial, the place where to sink an air shaft, or to bring an adit to the work, or to find which way the lode inclines.

Consisting of, or resembling, air; having the properties of an elastic fluid; gaseous; opposed to dense or solid. The pneumatical substance being, in some bodies, the native spirit of the body. Bacon.

The state of being pneumatic, or of having a cavity or cavities filled with air; as, the pneumaticity of the bones of birds.

That branch of science which treats of the mechanical properties of air and other elastic fluids, as of their weight, pressure, elasticity, etc. See Mechanics.

A combining form from Gr. wind, air, breath, respiration; as, pneumatograph, pneumatology.

A distention of the scrotum by air; also, hernia of the lungs.

A cyst or sac of a siphonophore, containing air, and serving as a float, as in Physalia.