What is "paring"

Usage examples of "paring".

Concentrating a moment over her artistry, she picked up the paring knife from the table and began to cut little wisps of hair in front of her ears until each had a soft curl dangling in front of it.

With the paring of a peare, And drynke them without feare If you will have remedy.

He threatened Sensar with a paring knife, demanding the return of the cut-toll.

They joked about how soon the men would be reduced to cooking their millet gruel over a fire of broken chopsticks and fingernail parings.

The cervix uteri, or neck of the womb, is supplied with but few nerves of sensation, and is almost as destitute of sensation as the finger or toe nails, the paring of which causes not the slightest pain.

We never realize, however, that we are merely paring things on the island, very much like paring coffee and tea, or bread and tortillas, or chili and mustard.

A freckled boy of about seventeen was stooped over his jointer, busy bevelling a barrel-stave, and another a year or two younger was carefully paring long bands of willow for binding the staves together when the barrel was set up in its truss hoop.

This last representation required careful crimping and most of her concentration, as she built up the crest of curls to an impressive height above her noble brow, but with the small portion of her mind that was uninvolved with her hair Ginger thought about the evening to come, taking her speculations about events to come in tiny sips like bitter coffee, or nibbling at them as at scorched macaroons, or paring away, cell by cell, as at the very old corn on her biggest toe.

All over Brentford, dartsmen were awakening, flexing their sensitive fingers, and pre­ paring themselves for the biggest night of the year.

She found a paring knife in a drawer, pulled out the chopping board, and began chopping chives.

For days and days before Thanksgiving the boy was kept at work evenings, pounding and paring and cutting up and mixing (not being allowed to taste much), until the world seemed to him to be made of fragrant spices, green fruit, raisins, and pastry,--a world that he was only yet allowed to enjoy through his nose.

The room was lined with shelves of linens, amongst which scurried ratfinks - native rodent-like creatures who swarmed the Trooper installations and appeared to feed on linoleum wax and toenail parings.

The trees were whole kilometers away and no bigger than a fingernail paring, and yet she could see the shape of their every branch in the clear still air, stenciled against the colors around the sun, great bands of subtle, gradated, desert color, umber to amber to translucent pearly white.

Now he approached Eddie with a pair of pliers in one hand and a paring knife in the other.

It was this drought, this tearlessness that brought those who could afford it to Schmuh's Onion Cellar, where the host handed them a little chopping board -- pig or fish -- a paring knife for eighty pfennigs, and for twelve marks an ordinary field-, garden-, and kitchen-variety onion, and induced them to cut their onions smaller and smaller until the juice -- what did the onion juice do?