What is "toying"

Usage examples of "toying".

All such toyings with illicit ideas are construed as attentats against democracy, which, in a sense, perhaps they are.

He nodded across the room to where Nelson Birr was idly toying with cards at a lonely table.

The other man, happily toying with his sundae, mostly ignored his cigarillo, but as Shadow approached he picked it up, inhaled deeply, and blew two smoke rings-first one large one, then another, smaller one, which passed neatly through the first-and he grinned, as if he were astonishingly pleased with himself.

Fernack and Varetti and even Cokey Walsh and Allen Uttershaw who played with quotations like a tired juggler toying with a cigar.

He had the Cosmopolis, his first-born, a summer hotel in the mountains, purchased in the previous year, and he was toying with the idea of running over to England and putting up another in London.

I was to cut him short, and to answer with a laugh that I did not know what he was talking about, and even to tell him that I was a nun in appearance only, and that in the course of toying I might let him see my hair.

She did not attract me sufficiently to make me attempt more than some slight toying.

The total zero behind the window waited patiently, quietly smiling his zero smile, toying a little at his shirt cuffs and drumming his well-done fingers a little on the counter, nervously, as bank clerks are always apt to do while waiting for old ladies to make that long hitchy walk across the foyer.

And Keill was relieved again to see that Oni and Charrel were in different squads - and that, in the evening, after toying briefly with his meal, Charrel vanished into his cubicle before Oni or anyone could speak to him.

Feather stepped to the left, intending to seek a way around the ravine, when a chilling sound wafted down from overhead, the sound of deep, guttural laughter, echoing from wall to wall, mocking him, making him realize the bearish figures had just been toying with him.

Of all of them, he lounged at his ease on a couch, dangerous as a hunting leopard, toying idly with the ends of his burnouse that lay unwrapped around his neck.

Ash Burry tells me that Fletcher is always toying with it - but it will never work again.

It was consequently a thoughtful Bertram Wooster who half an hour later sat toying with a stoup of malvoisie in the smoking room of the Drones Club.

And he was sitting outdoors at the Baja Naja, toying with the remains of a perfectly agreeable if unspectacular lunch while discussing a kind of previously unsuspected diabolic state of being with an extensively parasitized visitor from another continent.

Sah-luma, reclining in a quaintly carved ebony chair, was toying with the fruit and wine set out before him on an ivory and gold stand,--his dress, simpler than it had been on the previous evening, was of fine white linen gathered loosely about his classic figure,--he wore neither myrtle-wreath nor jewels,--the expression of his face was serious, even noble, and his attitude was one of languid grace and unstudied ease that became him infinitely well.