rockabye

present singular third person rockabyes · participle present rockabyeing · participle present rockabying · participle past rockabyed · past rockabyed

1. ambitransitiveTo rock soothingly.

   And lying down that night why should I hear the Brownsville trains that long had rockabyed me?

   1975, Modern Poetry Studies, page 136

   5 more examples

   “We have a Chopin player in the house,” he said. And with a tiny smile he rockabyed the opening phrase of the Ballade and turned his head to look straight at Katie.

   1952, Isabella Holt, Rampole Place, Bobbs-Merrill Company, page 258

   It was a pleasant day, the boat rockabyed in the slight chop and by late afternoon I was more nearly asleep than awake.

   1969, Harold F. Blaisdell, The Philosophical Fisherman, Houghton Mifflin Company, page 228

   From the lowliest panhandler on the street to the worthiest recipient of today’s social security benefits we are being “spoiled rotten” and rockabyed to sleep to the strains of that haunting lullaby known as the Beggar-American Rhapsody “Gimme gimme, gimme gimme gimme.”

   1969 December 19, Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 91ˢᵗ Congress, First Session, volume 115, part 30, Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, page 40353

   Sprung rubber alarm clock: it bounced apart All over him: boingg: it loves him to death. The rubber loops contort, their moil and clench Rockabyeing him out of this world.

   1982, Rowland Molony, “The Snake and the Lizard”, in Four Voices: Poetry from Zimbabwe, Books of Zimbabwe, →ISBN, page 8

   A contact lens may become scratched, chipped, discolored, contaminated, coated, warped, or desiccated. Poorly fit, it feels like grit or rockabyes out of the eyes.

   1985, David D. Michaels, Visual Optics and Refraction: A Clinical Approach, →ISBN, page 576

plural rockabyes

1. A soothing rocking motion.

   Carruthers’ sobs have a rockabye beat.

   1946, The Penguin New Writing, page 177

   5 more examples

   All the lullabies of the world suggest undulatory movements or rockabyes in the tree tops.

   1916, The Pedagogical Seminary, page 98

   This is what Eve was thinking as she listened to the dance music swinging like a rockabye hammock hung between the silky strands of[…]

   1937, Pictorial Review

   Every forty-five minutes occurred A Laugh, selected sea-chanties were alternately mumbled and roared, and the saddest intermission orchestra I have ever heard fiddled jigs and reels to a rockabye tempo.

   1943, Kappo Phelan, The Commonweal, page 305

   ROCKABYE HAMMOCK. Grown-ups aren’t the only ones who love the sunny laziness of a hammock, so this one has been designed for children between the ages of four and ten.

   1947 April, House Beautiful, volume 89, number 4, page 77

   I have been a rockabye baby sloshed in the sludge of the sea and I have clung with a shell over me waiting a tide to bring me breakfast.

   1965, Carl Sandburg, quotee, Discourse: A Review of the Liberal Arts, page 145