pocket-handkerchief

plural pocket-handkerchiefs · plural pocket-handkerchieves

1. alternativeAlternative form of pocket handkerchief.

   Here Mrs. Higgs paused for a moment, and drew out a huge red pocket-handkerchief, with which her face was for some minutes confounded.

   1831, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter VI, in Romance and Reality. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, page 124

   5 more examples

   Sheets, tablecloths, white gowns, and pocket-handkerchiefs were instantly in demand, and every one, as has been seen, entered, con amore, into the extempore entertainment of Pandemonic Revels.

   1833 January, “Pandemonic Revels”, in The Royal Lady’s Magazine, and Archives of the Court of St. James’s, number XXV, London, page 15

   Mr. Mantalini waited with much decorum to hear the amount of the proposed stipend, but when it reached his ears, he cast his hat and cane upon the floor, and drawing out his pocket-handkerchief, gave vent to his feelings in a dismal moan.

   1838 March – 1839 October, Charles Dickens, “Wherein Mr. Ralph Nickleby is Visited by Persons with Whom the Reader has been Already Made Acquainted”, in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1839, →OCLC, page 324

   ‘I have before suggested that a genuine blackguard is never without a pocket-handkerchief. But it is not to this fact that I now especially advert.’

   1842, Edgar Allan Poe, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt

   […] I groped from step to step, collecting the shattered earthenware, and drying the spatters of milk from the banister with my pocket-handkerchief.

   1847, Emily Brontë, chapter 13, in Wuthering Heights

   And as for the separation scene from the child, while Becky was reciting it, Emmy retired altogether behind her pocket-handkerchief, so that the consummate little tragedian must have been charmed to see the effect which her performance produced on her audience.

   1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter LXVI, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC

1. attributivenot comparableOf small or restricted size.

   The pocket-handkerchief garden had trees of cypress, olive, lemon and orange, she emphasized.

   1996, Faubion Bowers, Scriabin, a Biography, page 74

   2 more examples

   Throughout the land there is a great variation in the shape and size of village greens, from the many of pocket-handkerchief size to a roadside common of 20 acres or more - as at Lindfield in West Sussex.

   1980, AA Book of British Villages, Drive Publications Ltd, pages 264-265

   When I first went there more than 30 years ago it had patchworks of pocket-handkerchief fields.

   2002 January 19, Tim Wapshott, “I lost my heart in Nohant-en-Graçay, France”, in The Guardian