Wikipedia
Morphy may refer to:
- Paul Morphy, an American chess player, considered an unofficial world champion in the late 1850s
- George Morphy (20th century), British athlete
- Morphy (character), a fictional king
- Morphy (drug), a highly potent opiate, analgesic drug
Usage examples of "morphy".
Here was no less than the gold watch Paul Morphy, meteorically short-reigned King of American chess, had been given by an adoring public in New York City on May 25, 1859, after the triumphal tour of London and Paris which had proven him to be perhaps the greatest chess genius of all time.
Ritter brooded over the silver love-cross for a bit, then shook his head and idly asked about another item and still another, working his insidious way toward the Morphy watch.
The Morphy watch, the watch Paul Morphy had kept his whole short life, despite his growing hatred of chess, the watch he had willed to his French admirer and favorite opponent Jules Arnous de Riviere, the watch that had then mysteriously disappeared, the watch of watcheswas his!
Why the devil should he think that having the Morphy watch should improve his chess game?
After a brief pauseas if for propitiatory prayer, he told himself sardonicallyhe gingerly took out the Morphy watch and centered it for inspection with the unwrapped silver pawn behind it.
Had he also, Ritter asked himself, been one of the players to own the Morphy silver-and-gold chess set and the Morphy watch?
He thought about Paul Morphy retiring from chess at the age of 21 after beating every important player in the world and issuing a challenge, never accepted, to take on any master at the odds of Pawn and Move.
Twenty-five years of brooding in solitude without the solace of playing chess, but with the Morphy chess set and the Morphy watch in the same room, testimonials to his world mastery.
Ritter wondered if those circumstanceswith Morphy constantly thinking of chess, he felt surewere not ideal for the transmission of the vibrations of thought and feeling into inanimate objects, in this case the golden Morphy set and watch.
Edgar Allan Poe had died when Morphy was 12 years old and beating his uncle, Ernest Morphy, then chess king of New Orleans.
Doubly impossible that it should begin to run at approximately the right timehis wrist watch and the Morphy watch were no more than a minute apart.
Over paranoid years Morphy had imbued it with psychic energy and vast chessic wisdom.
Next day he awoke restless, scratchy, and eagerand with the feeling that the three or four dim figures had stood around his couch all night vibrating like strobe lights to the rhythm of the Morphy watch.
It seemed to him that there were four dim figures stalking him relentlessly as lions right now in the Chinatown crowds, while despite the noise he could hear and feel the ticking of the Morphy watch at his waist.
The only sound he heard was the ticking, thunderous to him, of the Morphy watch.