Meaning of blondin | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A surname from French.
2. An expert tightrope walker.
   idiomatic
3. A specialized type of material ropeway that incorporates a mechanism to raise and lower loads vertically from the suspended ropeway.
4. Alternative letter-case form of blondin.
   alt-of

Equivalents

Examples

“While it is possible with using a blondin to set up the two concrete mixing plants with concretes of different compositions, being placed simultaneously in two distinct zones of the same lift, it is necessary in the case of the conveyor to concrete the two zones successively, which makes it necessary to have vertical shuttering which would not be required in the case of concreting by the aid of the blondin.”

“His Irish labourers were accommodated on the north bank of the bridge when blondins were used to carry men and materials across the river.”

“The fish was brought up by a blondin, a cable crane that operated by hauling up and lowering down a hanging crane pulley when it was run back and forth up and down the suspended cable. […] Again the salmon was brought up from below by blondin.”

“My invention has cost me some money, some anxiety, and condemned my little ones to all the miseries of poverty and banishment in the bush, whereas if I had been a successful cricketer, a good bowler, or a rifle shooter without pluck, a Blondin, or an acrobat, I and mine would have escaped these ills.”

“A step or two upwards, then one to the right, and my exploring hand was able to touch a small, sloping, scree-covered ledge. This was covered by a film of ice, which I cleared as well as I could with one hand while supporting myself with the other. Having at last decided that a step was justifiable, I balanced up with the delicacy, but scarcely the grace, of a Blondin and a moment later was on the ledge.”

“A daily newspaper is a great lake in which intellectual elephants can swim and lambs can paddle. Accordingly, the columnist is a Blondin, treading a tightrope over Victoria Falls between obscurity and triviality, condescension and ostentation, and often falling into the foaming minestrone.”

“But the several schemes that I imagined for passing a message from the train were so doubtful of success, or required the sure-footedness of a Blondin, that I discarded each of them in turn.”

“Incised with painstaking delicacy and strength of vision into the single slab are four scenes: quarry rock-men in a pit with a Blondin (a carrying-cradle running on wire cables) above them; […]”

“Thousands and thousands of steel-mesh bags were filled with boulders, swung into place by a Blondin and dumped one by one into the water until the channel was blocked.”

“Once material arrived at the Lodge, it was shipped to the site by means of a ‘Blondin’ – an overhead ropeway named after the famous Frenchman Charles Blondin, who crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope in 1859.”

“There have been stage plays and songs about the French funambulist, street names, and a Welsh device dubbed a Blondin that carries rocks along a cable.”

“[T]he marshy ground is imprinted with the pattern of long gone railway sleepers. A stump of concrete stands high on the hillside. The remains of a Blondin, a cable lift once used to haul stone and rubble and spoil across the river.”

CEFR level