Reduce, with ''down''

Usage examples of whittle.

All-Soul being whittled down into fragments, yet this is what they would be doing, annulling the All-Soul--if any collective soul existed at all--making it a mere piece of terminology, thinking of it like wine separated into many portions, each portion, in its jar, being described as a portion of the total thing, wine.

Equally determined that no such horrifying revelation should be made, Pauline Whittle and her husband were clinging grimly to the edges of the pillowcase, and so successful were their joint efforts that, by the sheer weight of their bodies, Quintus Bland was borne off center and crumpled clatteringly back in his chair.

Knowing him to be hungry, they whittled down his rations, then laughed at him when, to keep alive, he crept from the camp evenings and crawled about the island in search of purslane and gnetum seeds and other scraggly growing things to munch raw when the cramps bent him.

His parents had even kept his little treasures: a wooden frog he had whittled and painted, under the instruction of the head gardener, a couple of battered shuttlecock racquets that needed restringing, and a bag of marbles, swirled with amber, scarlet, and blue.

She cast a last glance to the hilltop where Throm stood with arms outflung, the sharp wind whittling his flesh away.

I whittled as sharp a point as I could on one end while the young Chron watched me avidly.

Practiced fingers whittled away at the dart foreshaft he crafted so carefully.

Knowing him to be hungry, they whittled down his rations, then laughed at him when, to keep alive, he crept from the camp evenings and crawled about the island in search of purslane and gnetum seeds and other scraggly growing things to munch raw when the cramps bent him.

Court in a matter of that gravity, we would whittle the concept of justiciability down to the stature of minor or conventional controversies.

His face, his chest, hips, legs, everything but his bones and them, too, he believed at times, had been whittled away, the shavings of Waff en SS Captain Luis de Vega must be lying in a trash bin somewhere in the Berlin recovery ward of his previous eleven months.

With her bronze blade she whittled a splinter of wood into a fine-tooth comb and spent hours each day under the gun carriage combing the nits out of her long, golden hair, and from the tufts of her body hair.

Although four Justices are recorded as concurring in the opinion, their accompanying opinions whittle their concurrence in some instances to the vanishing point.

I want you to whittle some pegs about a foot long, about an inch thick, and I want them peeled.

The slender cleric sat on a fallen log whittling the finishing touches into the butt of a staff.

And old Rufus the woodchopper, who had whittled things for her since she could remember.