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What is "drone"

Crossword clues for drone

drone
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
drone
I.verb
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
on
▪ I'd almost fallen asleep while Uncle Hamish had been droning on.
▪ Halsey droned on, describing every bet he had made.
▪ For months now, I've been droning on and on about how all cars these days are getting too heavy.
▪ Think of a friend who drones on as your mind wanders.
▪ You fell asleep once when I went droning on through Biographica Literaria.
▪ The windscreen wipers droned on and on.
▪ The voices were now droning on, but much softer.
▪ The priest's voice droned on.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ A plane droned overhead.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A lawn mower droned a few houses down.
▪ I'd almost fallen asleep while Uncle Hamish had been droning on.
▪ The windscreen wipers droned on and on.
▪ There were cars and aeroplanes droning.
▪ They droned about, surrounded by the black, dissolving snorts of high explosive.
II.noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ VERB
hear
▪ Didn't she hear it, the drone, the hum, that awful, teasing, dreary hum?
▪ Far off she heard the drone of a tractor working late or set for home.
▪ He could hear the drone of a vacuum cleaner.
▪ Cassie woke just after first light to hear the drone of their engines fading in the direction of the sea.
▪ She heard the drone of some bees in the garden and the angry chatter of birds disputing over their seeds.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ She was labeled a welfare drone.
▪ Shelby was one of the drones on the factory floor.
▪ The police use high-tech radar drones to catch speeders.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Didn't she hear it, the drone, the hum, that awful, teasing, dreary hum?
▪ Gradually, the drone of the Boeing's engines faded into the background of her thought.
▪ I fall asleep to the drone of sirens and helicopters overhead.
▪ Nothing in the sing-song drone showed that he noticed.
▪ The organism of a hive yields integration for its community of worker bees, drones, pollen and brood.
▪ There he crowded against other inhabitants in mutual discomfort as the drone of bombers drew near.
▪ They needed the repetition, the dense hypnotic drone of woods and water, but above all they needed to be together.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Drone

Drone \Drone\, n. [OE. drane a dronebee, AS. dr[=a]n; akin to OS. dr[=a]n, OHG. treno, G. drohne, Dan. drone, cf. Gr. ? a kind of wasp, dial. Gr. ? drone. Prob. named fr. the droning sound. See Drone, v. i.]

  1. (Zo["o]l.) The male of bees, esp. of the honeybee. It gathers no honey. See Honeybee.

    All with united force combine to drive The lazy drones from the laborious hive.
    --Dryden.

  2. One who lives on the labors of others; a lazy, idle fellow; a sluggard.

    By living as a drone,to be an unprofitable and unworthy member of so noble and learned a society. -- Burton.

  3. That which gives out a grave or monotonous tone or dull sound; as:

    1. A drum. [Obs.] Halliwell.

    2. The part of the bagpipe containing the two lowest tubes, which always sound the key note and the fifth.

  4. A humming or deep murmuring sound.

    The monotonous drone of the wheel.
    --Longfellow.

  5. (Mus.) A monotonous bass, as in a pastoral composition.

Drone

Drone \Drone\ (dr[=o]n), v. i. [imp. & p. p. Droned; p. pr. & vb. n. Droning.] [Cf. (for sense 1) D. dreunen, G. dr["o]hnen, Icel. drynja to roar, drynr a roaring, Sw. dr["o]na to bellow, drone, Dan. dr["o]ne, Goth. drunjus sound, Gr. ? dirge, ? to cry aloud, Skr. dhran to sound. Cf. Drone, n.]

  1. To utter or make a low, dull, monotonous, humming or murmuring sound.

    Where the beetle wheels his droning flight.
    --T. Gray.

  2. To love in idleness; to do nothing. ``Race of droning kings.''
    --Dryden.

Related phrases:
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
drone

Old English dran, dræn "male honeybee," from Proto-Germanic *dran- (cognates: Middle Dutch drane; Old High German treno; German Drohne, which is from Middle Low German drone), probably imitative; given a figurative sense of "idler, lazy worker" (male bees make no honey) 1520s. Meaning "pilotless aircraft" is from 1946.\n\nDrones, as the radio-controlled craft are called, have many potentialities, civilian and military. Some day huge mother ships may guide fleets of long-distance, cargo-carrying airplanes across continents and oceans. Long-range drones armed with atomic bombs could be flown by accompanying mother ships to their targets and in for perfect hits.

["Popular Science," November, 1946]

\nMeaning "deep, continuous humming sound" is early 16c., apparently imitative (compare threnody). The verb in the sound sense is early 16c.; it often is the characteristic sound of airplane engines. Related: Droned; droning.
Wiktionary
drone

Etymology 1 n. 1 A male bee or wasp, which does not work but can fertilize the queen bee. 2 (context now rare English) Someone who doesn't work; a lazy person, an idler. 3 A remotely controlled aircraft, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Etymology 2

n. 1 A low-pitched hum or buzz. 2 (rft-sense) One who performs menial or tedious work; a drudge. 3 One of the fixed-pitch pipes on a bagpipe. 4 A genre of music similar to that of noise. 5 A humming or deep murmuring sound. vb. 1 To produce a low-pitched hum or buzz. 2 To speak in a monotone way.

Related phrases:
WordNet
drone

  1. v. make a monotonous low dull sound; "The harmonium was droning on"

  2. talk in a monotonous voice [syn: drone on]

drone

  1. n. stingless male bee in a colony of social bees (especially honeybees) whose sole function is to mate with the queen

  2. an unchanging intonation [syn: monotone, droning]

  3. someone who takes more time than necessary; someone who lags behind [syn: dawdler, laggard, lagger, trailer]

  4. an aircraft without a pilot that is operated by remote control [syn: pilotless aircraft, radio-controlled aircraft]

  5. a pipe of the bagpipe that is tuned to produce a single continuous tone [syn: drone pipe, bourdon]

Related phrases:
Wikipedia
Drone

Drone or drones may refer to:

Drone (bee)

A drone is a male bee that is the product of an unfertilized egg. Unlike the female worker bee, drones do not have stingers and do not participate in nectar and pollen gathering. A drone's primary role is to mate with a fertile queen.

Drone (Star Trek: Voyager)

"Drone" is the 96th episode of the science fiction television series Star Trek: Voyager, the second episode of the fifth season.

It is an important episode for the character "Seven", as she showed that she is determined to stay with Voyager as opposed to rejoining the Borg Collective.

Drone (2014 film)
Not to be confused with Drones (2013 film), an American thriller film.

Drone is a 2014 English-language documentary film directed by Norwegian director Tonje Hessen Schei. The film explores the use of drones in warfare. Drone aired on the TV network Arte on , 2014. The documentary screened at several film festivals throughout 2014, winning several awards. Drone was released in Norway on , 2015.

Usage examples of "drone".

He had given the name of Stanley Adams, and had had such a queerly thick droning voice, that it made the clerk abnormally dizzy and sleepy to listen to him.

The musty auditorium was a dimly lit torture chamber, filled with the droning dull voice punctuated by the sharp screams of the electrified, the sea of nodding heads abob here and there with painfully leaping figures.

Casey Acker, the human resources drone who was conducting her latest in a series of interviews with the Umbrella Corporation.

The dogs of unbelievers at Amalgamated claim our ship as security against the advance, though if they had credited us with the metals sent back by drone over the last three years, the debt would have been paid three times over.

Whereupon the Bailly leaned forward and droned a question to the Grand Enquete in the shadow.

Then, as the seated Bas spoke on, droning now, Cormac took note of that rich and outsized chair.

A small, flat-bottomed green-anodized aluminum bateau approached from a side channel, the harsh drone of its outboard motor enough to shoo the diving pelican away.

There, in that moribund, ancient town, wrapped in its siesta, flagellated with heat, deserted, ignored, baking in a noon-day silence, these two strange men, the one a poet by nature, the other by training, both out of tune with their world, dreamers, introspective, morbid, lost and unfamiliar at that end-of-the-century time, searching for a sign, groping and baffled amidst the perplexing obscurity of the Delusion, sat over empty wine glasses, silent with the pervading silence that surrounded them, hearing only the cooing of doves and the drone of bees, the quiet so profound, that at length they could plainly distinguish at intervals the puffing and coughing of a locomotive switching cars in the station yard of Bonneville.

The cocks and the cicalas make themselves heard, and now Madame Prune will begin her mystic drone.

He could see the glow of the campfires above the treeline, hear the chant of songs, the haunting drone of the didgeridoo and the throbbing of music sticks.

Across it taxis and scooters droned to and from the cluster of carbuncular hotels on the far side.

The voice droned on in an undulating chant, and we all fell silent to hear it, save the amir, who rose, bowed to the eparch, spoke a word and departed.

But here they were just one of a variety of insects, like the butterflies flicking their bright colors in a quivery dance across the tops of the fescue, and the harmless drone fly, that resembled a stinging honeybee, hovering over a buttercup.

While they waited for Margot to return, Hagbut and Quince droned on without letup.

Laurie let the woman drone on about genes and how certain traits could be linked with other traits to form specific haplotypes that were inherited over generations.