FLAIL in a Sentence

Learn FLAIL from example sentences, some of them are from classic books. These examples are selected from a corpus with 300,000 sentences, including classic works and current mainstream media. Some sentences also link to their contexts.

For FLAIL, below is one of 5 sentences:
To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking fish.

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 Meanings and Examples of FLAIL
Definition Example Sentence Classic Sentence
flail
 v.  thresh about; give a thrashing to; beat hard
Classic Sentence:
1  I observed, here and there, many in the habit of servants, with a blown bladder, fastened like a flail to the end of a stick, which they carried in their hands.
Gulliver's Travels 2 By Jonathan Swift
Context  Highlight   In PART 3: CHAPTER II.
2  Faster, faster, faster, it whizzed, whirred, buzzed, till all the flails became one flail and up soared the plane away and away.
Between the Acts By Virginia Woolf
Context  Highlight   In Unit 1
3  Daniel galloped up silently, holding a naked dagger in his left hand and thrashing the laboring sides of his chestnut horse with his whip as if it were a flail.
War and Peace 3 By Leo Tolstoy
Context  Highlight   In BOOK 7: CHAPTER V
4  So that tormented to madness, he was now churning through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own comrades.
Moby Dick By Herman Melville
Context  Highlight   In CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
5  To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking fish.
Moby Dick By Herman Melville
Context  Highlight   In CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.
Example Sentence: