Related:

• SERIAL, n. A literary work, usually a story that is not true, creeping through several issues of a newspaper or magazine.
  Frequently appended to each installment is a "synposis of preceding chapters" for those who have not read them, but a direr need is a synposis of succeeding chapters for those who do not intend to read _them_....
• FAIRY, n. A creature, variously fashioned and endowed, that formerly inhabited the meadows and forests.
  It was nocturnal in its habits, and somewhat addicted to dancing and the theft of children....
• BIRTH, n. The first and direst of all disasters. As to the nature of it there appears to be no uniformity.
  Castor and Pollux were born from the egg. Pallas came out of a skull....
• INGRATE, n. One who receives a benefit from another, or is otherwise an object of charity.
  "All men are ingrates," sneered the cynic. "Nay," The good philanthropist replied...
• He flung himself on his horse and rode madly off in all directions.
• He flung himself on his horse and rode madly off in all directio
• ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are.
  In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, as a domestic horse to the hitching-post, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination -- free, lawless, immune to bit and rein....
• CENTAUR, n. One of a race of persons who lived before the division of labor had been carried to such a pitch of differentiatio
  and who followed the primitive economic maxim, "Every man his own horse....