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What is "wind-up"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
wind-up
I.noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Berg tapped into the unpalatable side of public opinion, becoming addicted to verbal wind-ups and hostility with fatal results.
▪ It should have been there by now and its non-appearance is a real wind-up.
▪ It was a hell of an elaborate plan just for a wind-up.
▪ It wasn't that I minded Fenella and I could have had fun doing a wind-up on her parents.
▪ Perhaps it was a wind-up, he thought.
▪ What if all this was merely a wind-up?
II.adjective
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Directly in front of him were two wind-up monkeys, one with a tambourine and the other with a drum.
▪ Estimates show that by the wind-up stage, the corporation would be left with just over 1,900 houses.
▪ I hang up, feeling like a wind-up toy.
▪ If he were a wind-up toy, he would run in an engaging curve backward.
▪ Not even for a wind-up gramophone.
▪ She was a wind-up putting-away doll, clicking through its programmed movements.
▪ Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only with the electric clocks, but the wind-up kind, too.
▪ The wind-up speech for the Government was made by John Nott.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Wind-up

Wind-up \Wind"-up`\, n. Act of winding up, or closing; a concluding act or part; the end.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
wind-up

1570s, "conclusion or final adjustment and settlement of some matter," from verbal phrase wind up (see wind (v.1)). Baseball pitching sense attested from 1906.

Wiktionary
wind-up

a. (context of a machine English) needing to be wind up in order to function. n. 1 The end or conclusion of something. 2 A punch line of a joke or comedy routine. 3 A joke, an attempt to fool someone or to make them angry. 4 (context baseball English) the part of a pitch where the pitcher moves his or her arm backwards before throwing the ball.

Wikipedia
Wind-up

Wind-up or windup may refer to:

  • Pain wind-up, central sensitization caused by repeated stimulation of C nociceptors
  • Windup, one of the two legal pitching positions in baseball
  • Wind-up Records, a New York record label
  • " Wind It Up (Rewound)", a single by The Prodigy
  • "Wind Up", a song from the 2001 album Full Collapse by post-hardcore band Thursday
  • "Wind Up", a song by Foo Fighters from their 1997 album The Colour and the Shape
  • "Wind Up", a song by Jethro Tull off their 1971 album Aqualung
  • Integral windup, an error condition that occurs in a PID controller
  • Wind-up toy, a toy powered by a wound clockwork motor
  • Winding-up, or liquidation of a company
  • Winding up, UK slang for teasing

Usage examples of "wind-up".

A spectacular collection of wind-up animals, clockwork figures, and tin soldiers littered the surface of a library table, and a tall cylindrical zoetrope stood on a special display stand nearby.

Johnny Semple was with you when you found him, what have you got wind-up about?

I imagined him bouncing around on the Appalachian Trail like some wind-up toy that had fallen on its back.

CONTENTS The New Fable of the Private Agitator and What He Cooked Up The New Fable of the Speedy Sprite The New Fable of the Intermittent Fusser The New Fable of the Search for Climate The New Fable of the Father Who Jumped In The New Fable of the Uplifter and His Dandy Little Opus The New Fable of the Wandering Boy and the Wayward Parent The New Fable of What Transpires After the Wind-up The Dream That Came Out with Much to Boot The New Fable of the Toilsome Ascent and the Shining Table-Land The New Fable of the Aerial Performer, the Buzzing Blondine, and the Daughter of Mr.

On consignment, he gave Brad a selection of novelty merchandise that could be peddled at almost any small business: little mechanical wind-up figures, key chains, penlights, punchboards, miniature telescopes with a pinup girl inside, playing cards, movie star pin-back buttons, two-headed nickels, and various other items that could be displayed next to a cash register to prompt impulse buying.

Sex is rendered topologically, in terms of tensed arcs and shifting planes: a poetry for wind-up romance.

Highland flings and Irish step-dances on a raised wooden platform like a boxing ring, the music provided by a wind-up gramophone.

A spectacular collection of wind-up animals, clockwork figures, and tin soldiers littered the surface of a library table, and a tall cylindrical zoetrope stood on a special display stand nearby.

Murakami's previous stories, Wind-Up Bird is part detective story, part Bildungsroman, part fairy tale, part science-fiction-meets-Lewis Carroll.

The Chattery Teeth came to rest on the wind-up key, a slanted, disembodied grin out here in the middle of no-man's-land.

Then you hollow out a section and put a wind-up motor like a clockworks in it, and a little cassette tape, and you stand in line with it, and then just before it goes through customs you wind up the key and it walks up to the customs man, who says to it, 'Do you have anything to declare?

It was an old hunting watch, a big wind-up watch on a chain, with a protective case.

I was pawing through the fourth cabinet, past the half-ounce of grass that Steff and I bought four years ago and had still not smoked much of, past Billy's wind-up set of chatter-ing teeth from the Auburn Novelty Shop, past the drifts of photos Steffy kept forgetting to glue in our album.

Usually Bright would have been home for hours and listening to his radio cassette player, to Elgar or Vera Lynn or the dance bands his father used to play on the wind-up record player, but something about the day had made him reluctant to be alone.

Fred took one deep breath, paused like an ace relief pitcher at the top of his wind-up .