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as an expression of hatred, passion, or disapproval. The merchants among the people shall hiss at thee. Ezek. xxvii. 36.

The act of emitting a hiss or hisses.

With a hissing sound.

A fabulous serpent, or dragon. The ancients alleged that its hissing would drive away all other serpents, and that its breath, and even its look, was fatal. See Cockatrice. Make me not sighted like the basilisk. Shak.

A striking of hands to express approbation. Unextrected claps or hisses. Addison.

Consisting of, or like, cork; dry shriveled up. Bind fast hiss corky arms. Shak.

A crab apple; -- so named from its harsh taste. When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, Then nightly sings the staring owl. Shak.

To condemn as bad or displeasing, by open expression, as by denuciation, hissing, hooting, etc. You are not so arrant a critic as to damn them [the works of modern poets] . . . without hearing. Pope. Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering teach the rest to sneer. Pope.

out her blessings and her gold. Tickell. The nightly mallet deals resounding blows. Gay. Hissing through the skies, the feathery deaths were dealt. Dryden.

If we take a high vowel, such as (i) [= nearly i of bit], and devocalize it, we obtain a hiss which is quite distinct enough to stand for a weak (jh). H. Sweet.

To be in a state of natural ebullition; to bubble and hiss, as fermenting liquors, or any fluid, when some part escapes in a gaseous form.

A firework, made of damp powder, which makes a fizzing or hissing noise when it explodes.

To make a hissing sound, as a burning fuse.

To make a hissing sound. It is the easfizzling. B. Jonson.

To hiss. [Obs.] Shak.

contracted; mean; illiberal; ungenerous. The long-necked geese of the world that are ever hissing dispraise, Because their natures are little. Tennyson. Little chief. (Zoöl.) See Chief hare. -- Little finger, the fourth and smallest finger of the hand. -- Little go (Eng. Universities), a public examination about the…

imitative of the sound of the thing which the word represents; as, the buzz of bees; the hiss of a goose; the crackle of fire.

Simmering; boiling; sizzling; hissing; -- from the sound of boiling fluids. Piping crow, Piping crow shrike, Piping roller (Zoöl.), any Australian bird of the genus Gymnorhina, esp. G. tibicen, which is black and white, and the size of a small crow. Called also caruck. -- Piping frog (Zoöl.), a small American tree fro…

the English alphabet, is a consonanat, and is often called a sibilant, in allusion to its hissing sound. It has two principal sounds; one a more hissing, as in sack, this; the other a vocal hissing (the same as that of z), as in is, wise. Besides these it sometimes has the sounds of sh and zh, as in sure, measure. It g…

n. Milton would not have avoided them for their sibilancy, he who wrote . . . verses that hiss like Medusa's head in wrath. Lowell.