What is "cumbrous"

Usage examples of "cumbrous".

While he taught us the rigadoons of his own country, his vanity induced him to attempt feats much above the cumbrous weight of his frame.

His expression was as simple as resentment without understanding can be: now like plesiosaurus laboring all four limbs for the paddles they were, lifting a small head to see pterodactyl raise its absurd body on more absurd wings and with cumbrous scaling gain the sky, a ridiculous place to be, certainly, but for that moment he watched, disconcerting to plesiosaurus, to whom no such extravagance had ever occurred and who, by no feat of skill or imagination, could hope to accomplish it now.

From this time their course was a continual ascent, as was soon evident in the strain it made on the bullocks to drag along the cumbrous wagon.

In an allegory -- rendered perhaps somewhat cumbrous by the detail of chivalric ceremonial, and the heraldic minuteness, which entered so liberally into poetry, as into the daily life of the classes for whom poetry was then written -- Chaucer beautifully enforces the lasting advantages of purity, valour, and faithful love, and the fleeting and disappointing character of mere idle pleasure, of sloth and listless retirement from the battle of life.

For some time there had been talk of an operation to be carried out in those uncomfortable waters, partly to diminish the influence of the French, partly to please the Grand Turk, who was at least the nominal ruler of the Arabian shore as far as the Bab el Mandeb and of the Egyptian as far as the dominions of the Negus, and partly to satisfy those English merchants who suffered from the exactions and ill-usage of the Tallal ibn Yahya, who ruled over the small island of Mubara and part of the mainland coast and whose ancestors had levied a toll on all ships that passed within reach and that were neither strong enough to resist nor swift enough to outsail their cumbrous dhows.

The plated ware Mademoiselle left behind her was too cumbrous, probably for which reason, no doubt, she also left the fire irons, the chimney-glasses, and the rosewood cottage piano.

By traveling far enough in forward time, I expected to find one of two things: men would either have learned to discard their cumbrous and complicated engines, or would have been destroyed by them, giving place to some other and more sensible species in the course of mundane evolution.

Causing the great cumbrous chair, which he now rarely quitted, to be placed beneath a cloth of estate embroidered with the arms of England, he sat in it propped up with velvet pillows, and wrapped in a long gown of white tylsent, flowered with gold, and lined and bordered with fur, and having wide sleeves.

This belief had early led me to contemplate the possibility of telepathy or mental communication by means of suitable apparatus, and I had in my college days prepared a set of transmitting and receiving instruments somewhat similar to the cumbrous devices employed in wireless telegraphy at that crude, pre-radio period.