"fida" hidden in books

face in dire array

But now inglorious, stretch'd along the shore, They hear the brazen voice of war no more; No more the foe they face in dire array: Close in his fleet the angry leader lay; Since fair Briseis from his arms was torn, The noblest spoil from sack'd Lyrnessus borne, Then, when the chief the Theban walls o'erthrew, And the bold sons of great Evenus slew.
— from The Iliad by Homer

facility in draughtsmanship as

And in truth Stefano had great facility in draughtsmanship, as can be seen in our said book in a drawing by his hand, wherein is drawn the Transfiguration (which he painted in the cloister of S. Spirito), in such a manner that in my judgment he drew much better than Giotto.
— from Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 01 (of 10) Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi by Giorgio Vasari

Fell into dust and

she, too, Fell into dust and nothing, and the house Became no better than a broken shed, And in it a dead babe; and also this Fell into dust, and I was left alone.
— from Idylls of the King by Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron

Fanny in dismay at

Fanny, in dismay at such an unprecedented question, did not know which way to look, or how to be prepared for an answer.
— from An Advanced English Grammar with Exercises by George Lyman Kittredge

for instance draw all

Some, for instance, draw all their characters with wind-instruments.—Virgil takes notice of that way in the affair of Dido and Aeneas;—but it is as fallacious as the breath of fame;—and, moreover, bespeaks a narrow genius.
— from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

for its defence and

A grand picture is drawn of the power of Mewar, when the first grand irruption of the Muhammadans occurred in the first century of their era; when “a hundred [28] kings, its allies and dependents, had their thrones raised in Chitor,” for its defence and their own individually [139], when a new religion, propagated by the sword of conquest, came to enslave these realms.
— from Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, v. 1 of 3 or the Central and Western Rajput States of India by James Tod

form its dresses and

Instead of doing as Ariosto, and as, still more offensively, Wieland has done, instead of degrading and deforming passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of concupiscence; Shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse itself, so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful, now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery; or by diverting our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty or profound reflections, which the poet's ever active mind has deduced from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

forms in Donne and

Poetry took new and startling forms in Donne and Herbert, and prose became as somber as Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy .
— from English Literature Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World by William J. (William Joseph) Long

find its disseminated and

As a matter of fact countless human imaginations live in this moralistic and epic kind of a universe, and find its disseminated and strung-along successes sufficient for their rational needs.
— from Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James

flung it down and

At last he flung it down and, scowling at his daughter, as his wont was, went out of the room into his study adjoining, from whence he presently returned with a key.
— from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

feet in diameter and

On the top of the ground, on one side of the hole, is a windlass whose drum is 5 feet in diameter, and the cogwheel which drives it 6 feet; the pinion on the crank axle is 6 inches.
— from Water Supply: the Present Practice of Sinking and Boring Wells With Geological Considerations and Examples of Wells Executed by Ernest Spon

first in Domesday and

It first gives the lands actually held by the Abbey (as coming first in Domesday), and then those of which laymen were in possession.
— from Feudal England: Historical Studies on the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries by John Horace Round

feet in diameter at

The lodge was shaped like a cone, sixty feet in diameter at the base and tapering towards the top.
— from First Across the Continent The Story of the Exploring Expedition of Lewis and Clark in 1804-5-6 by Noah Brooks

foxes is dull and

There is an excitement in the very greatness of a trial or temptation which enables us to resist it; while the chase after little foxes is dull and uninteresting.
— from Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 712 August 18, 1877 by Various

faith in detectives and

CHAPTER IX—Ivy Hayes “I’ve no faith in the police, no faith in detectives and no faith in anybody!”
— from The Luminous Face by Carolyn Wells

fell into decay and

After the dissolution of the monasteries, the abbeys fell into decay, and any engraver who wanted a brass appears to have taken it from the nearest ruin and adapted it to his requirements.
— from Chats on Military Curios by Stanley C. (Stanley Currie) Johnson

fallen into dust at

And in the deep silence it seemed as if one could almost hear the faint noise of the moths preying for a century past upon all this dead splendour, which would have fallen into dust at the slightest touch of a feather broom.
— from The Three Cities Trilogy: Rome, Complete by Émile Zola

This tab, called Hiding in Plain Sight, shows you passages from notable books where your word is accidentally (or perhaps deliberately?) spelled out by the first letters of consecutive words. Why would you care to know such a thing? It's not entirely clear to us, either, but it's fun to explore! What's the longest hidden word you can find? Where is your name hiding?

Color thesaurus

Literary notes

Word games