half-an-inch

Updated: June 23, 2025

Within that shell, of the thickness of half-an-inch good, you shall have a kind of hard substance and very white, no less good and sweet than almonds; within that again, a certain clear liquor which being drunk, you shall not only find it very delicate and sweet, but most comfortable and cordial.

Francis Pretty - Sir Francis Drake's Famous Voyage Round the World

Yet it is to be remarked, that though nothing can be more miscellaneous than the passengers, consisting of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Yankee; of Jews, Turks, and heretics; of tourists, physicians, smugglers, and all the other diversities of idling, business, and knavery; yet families who choose to pay for them, may have separate cabins, and enjoy as much privacy as is possible with specimens of all the world within half-an-inch of their abode.

Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 327, January, 1843

He fumbled about at the back of the cabinet for a spring that would release another secret cubby-hole, and was rewarded at last by an unexpected click, and the seemingly solid jaws of the lion fell apart about half-an-inch. But the little aperture which they revealed was empty. Further experiment at last discovered the fourth hiding place, but this also contained nothing.

Latta Griswold - The Inn at the Red Oak

And it is just in the one fundamental thing: the holding of the violin in exactly the same position when it is taken up by the player, never varying by so much as half-an-inch, and the correct attack by the bow, in which the majority of pupils are deficient. If the violin is not held at the proper angle, for instance, it is just as though a piano were to stand on a sloping floor.

Frederick Herman Martens - Violin Mastery: Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers

But it's aye the way wi' women; if they ever hand their tongues ava', ye may swear it's for mischief. I wish I could set her on again without this blood-sucker kenning what I am doing. But he's as gleg as MacKeachan's elshin,* that ran through sax plies of bendleather and half-an-inch into the king's heel."

Sir Walter Scott - The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete

All the Ecitons hunt in large organised bodies; but almost every species has its own special manner of hunting. Eciton rapax. One of the foragers, Eciton rapax, the giant of its genus, whose worker-majors are half-an-inch in length, hunts in single file through the forest.

Henry Walter Bates - The Naturalist on the River Amazons