What is "skein"

Usage examples of "skein".

They left the dark upper corners of the human quarters where, mourning the loss of Billy Anker and his girl, they had clung in loose temporary skeins like cobwebs in the folds of an old curtain.

Rooms at the Skein of Geese were given infuriatingly anserine names rather than mere utilitarian numbers.

If the skein of historical causality had been different - if the brilliant guesses of the atomists on the nature of matter, the plurality of worlds, the vastness of space and time had been treasured and built upon, if the innovative technology of Archimedes had been taught and emulated, if the notion of invariable laws of Nature that humans must seek out and understand had been widely propagated - I wonder what kind of world we would live in now.

The light of day was gone by now, and by the smooth amber of the lamps, Cyrion chose from among the ropes of jewels and skeins of metal, from the cups and gemmy daggers, the armlets and the armour.

Bloom wound a skein round four forkfingers, stretched it, relaxed, and wound it round his troubled double, fourfold, in octave, gyved them fast.

She was cloaked by a skein of ravelled fluff beneath us and we caught the chant before she rose into the sunlight.

She grubbed in her workbag, digging past rolags, scissors, skeins of finished yarn.

His six-room Boston apartment took up half the upper floor of a mellow old brownstone on Beacon Hill, and an endless skein of nubile, saponaceous Melissas and Randis and Cheryls replaced one another at eager intervals as unpaid housekeepers, cooks, and laundresses for Harvey S.

Boston apartment took up half the upper floor ofa mellow old brownstone on Beacon Hill, and an endless skein of nubile, saponaceous Melissas and Randis and Cheryls replaced one another at eager intervals as unpaid housekeepers,cooks, and laundresses for Harvey S.

These test skeins or pieces ought to be well washed in hot water before use, so that they are clean and free from any size or grease.

There was a hint - a probably false-signal resonation in the skein of space-time behind them - that there might be a craft following them, but then it was not unusual for other civilisations to follow ships of the Zetetic Elench.

Yet down their sides plashed their tinsel hair, skein on skein, strand on strand.

Mrs Pettigrew, the widowed postmistress, who dyed her hair with tea-leaves and kept a small limp dog which looked like a skein of grey wool.

When she lay beneath him, her hair fanned across the plaid like a skein of black embroidery silk, he kissed her, parting her lips with his tongue to stroke her own, then nipping at her pouty lower lip.

A land that had been thus ever since ringing legend had dwindled into mere history and the thundering rhetoric of mythical heroes had become the ranting and mewling of an interminable list of political leaders in whose wake lay, inevitably, a long tangled skein of unfulfilled promises and broken pacts and treaties.