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Great Expectations vocabulary
361 vocabulary words, including people, places, music, artists, etc.
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furlong
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tags: [unit]
► definition
Definition:the distance a team of oxen could plough without resting.This was standardised to be exactly 40 rods = 10 chains = 220 yards = 1/8 mile---The name furlong derives from the Old English words furh (furrow) and lang (long). Dating back at least to early Anglo-Saxon times, it originally referred to the length of the furrow in one acre of a ploughed open field (a medieval communal field which was divided into strips).text from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike
image: By Unitfreak (derivative work), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4564923
► uses
Uses:
hat the mother and father, unknown to one another, were dwelling within so many miles, furlongs, yards if you like, of one another.
Charles Dickens. Great Expectations (1861)
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The Königin Luise's boiler needed to be transported in one piece, and every furlong of its transport had cost the life of a man in the forest.
Cecil Scott Forester. The African Queen, p.13 (1935)
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A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach.
Herman Melville. Moby Dick.
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