Making short percussive sounds

Usage examples of rattling.

The rain blattered, the windows clattered, the shopshutters flapped, pigs from the lum-heads came rattling down like thunder-claps, and the skies were dismal both with cloud and carry.

Like a few pebbles rattling down into a stoneware bowl, they descended into a rocky crater, maculated with schlock-heaps and filled with a perpetual miasma of wood-smoke.

They awoke to the rattling burp from the manjack set up beside their foxhole and the cracking whistle of railgun rounds in return.

On their right stretched the rocky wolds of the Valverras, and on the left the Caln Marish, with the same rattling stands of black reeds that they had seen before they entered Edinur.

The thought of her rattling around the Metropole, as stuffy as it was expensive, or alone at Winterbourne Manor just waiting for Luke to come home was very depressing.

Durnan with horror, Mirt was startled by a loud rattling of rock behind him.

Each muzzle flares a nova of constant spray, but I do not spout hot gushers of blood, because the coppers are firing over my head at the second wing of the Chinese killers, which lessens the impacts vibrating through this cement monticle and rattling my bones.

As the circle narrowed, and as we caught occasional glimpses of a terrified kangaroo, the cries and antics of Musqueeto and the other natives to the right and left, who were in sight, became more violent and furious, and the black naked savages, rattling their spears and brandishing their waddies, and screaming and dancing about in the most raging state of excitement, resembled a band of demons engaged in some infernal orgies.

Like an airborne mote within the eerily lit bowels of that colossal imaginary mechanism, he drifted past massive walls and interconnected columns of whirling drive shafts, rattling drive chains, myriad thrusting piston rods joined by sliding blocks to connecting rods that were in turn joined by crank wrists to well-greased cranks that turned flywheels of all dimensions.

Captain Predone nodded, the still-unbuckled cheek-plates of his open-faced helm rattling to either side of his grin.

And, unafraid of the grimness, Ellen ran on ahead, her arms crooked back funnily because she had her hands in her pocket to keep the coconut-ice tin from rattling against the protractor, her red hair streaming a yard behind.

A minute or so later, everyone heard her hurried descent of the rear stairs and a rattling and banging at the door at the foot of those same stairs, a few shrieked curses in both English and Norwegian, then a rapid reascent of those same rear stairs.

The way in which that knotty-featured, savage old man would bring out the word irritation--with rattling and rolling reduplication of the resonant letter r--might have taught a lesson in articulation to Salvini.

Too early to be rattling around in the house with a renter under the roof, so she blew out her lamp and stepped out onto the covered walkway that ran in front of her place.

Something like laughter, or, as it were, the clapper of a scarer of birds, echoed among the rocks at the rattling of the rowlocks.