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War and Peace vocabulary
564 vocabulary words, including people, places, music, artists, etc.
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navvy
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► definition
Definition:a laborer who builds roads, canals or railroads
Photo by Thomas Chan, CC0, https://unsplash.com/photos/1Edse3mzfpI
► uses
Uses:
Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock.
Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace: With bonus material from Give War and Peace A Chance by Andrew D. Kaufman . Simon & Schuster
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Now and then on holidays navvies working on the bridge would come to the village; they begged for alms, laughed at the women, and sometimes carried off something.
Anton Chekhov. The Witch and other stories
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Looking between his fingers he could see the six-year-old face convulsed like a navvy's with labour.
Graham Greene. The Heart of the Matter, p.125 (1948)
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The navvy, swaying, presses a forefinger against a wing of his nose and ejects from the farther nostril a long liquid jet of snot. Shouldering the lamp he staggers away through the crowd with his flaring cresset.
James Joyce. Ulysses
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