Citations:circumbendibus

Noun

 * 1773 Oliver Goldsmith, She stoops to conquer: or, the mistakes of a night. A comedy., printed for F. Newbery, p93
 * I then rattled them crack over the stones of Up-and-down Hill – I then introduc’d them to the gibbet on Heavy-tree Heath, and from that, with a circumbendibus, I fairly lodged them in the horse-pond at the bottom of the garden.
 * 1846 Thomas Carlyle, letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 18 Dec 1846, collected in The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Volume II, p127
 * And do others like it if you will take circumbendibuses for sound's sake!
 * 1899 Herbert Spencer, Social Statics; Or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed, D. Appleton and company, p383
 * If, as Coleridge says, “a knave is a fool with a circumbendibus,” then by instructing the knave you do but make the circumbendibus a wider one.
 * 1907 Albert Temple Swing, James Harris Fairchild; Or Sixty-Eight Years with a Christian College, F. H. Revell company, p155
 * After he had moved into the house and repaired it Mrs. Mary L. Bacon remembers standing with him one day and looking over the winding flag stones leading up to his front door. “And what is this,” he said, “a circumbendibus?”
 * 1962 Weston Bate, A History of Brighton, Melbourne University Press, p79
 * Such roads you never did see— there is no road to any place but several running in all manner of circumbendibuses amongst the trees, just so as to avoid this stump or that rut.
 * 1968 George William Erskine Russell, Afterthoughts, Ayer Publishing, p152
 * Before tea-time my circumbendibus brought me to the hospitable residence of Tommy’s chief supporter, whom we will call Mr Goodhart.

Adjective

 * 1814 Walter Scott, Waverley, p151
 * But without further tyranny over my readers, or display of the extent of my own reading, I shall content myself with borrowing a single incident from the memorable hunting at Lude, commemorated in the ingenious Mr. Gunn’s essay on the Caledonian Harp, and so proceed in my story with all the brevity that my natural style of composition, partaking of what scholars call the periphrastic and ambagitory, and the vulgar the circumbendibus, will permit me.
 * 1918 Sidney Watson, In the Twinkling of an Eye, Bible institute of Los Angeles, p66
 * “We’re all circumbendibus, / Wherever we may be, / We’re all circumbendibus, / On land or on sea. / Rich or poor or middling, / Wherever we are found, / We’re all circumbendibus, / We’re all going round.”
 * 1987 Syed Tassadque Hussain, Reflections on Kashmir politics,Rima Pub. House, p59
 * The only irresistible inference that can be deduced from a bare perusal of this judgment is that it is circumbendibus in its tenor vague and conjectural in its logic and in fine it is a remarkable piece of a political document.