trowel

The oatmeal color looks about right and when Risa picks at it with her trowel, the surrounding black and gray debris falls away, revealing the rough outline of a box’s edge.

From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 4, 2025

The intros had been written, the praise laid on thick, with a trowel.

From BBC ● Jan. 23, 2025

This is after all a horror picture, and Stevenson layers on the horror tropes with a trowel, so much so that the movie descends into wretched excessiveness.

From Seattle Times ● Apr. 5, 2024

The team of researchers used a trowel to shave 1 to 2 centimeters of snow from the surface of 130 polar bear prints left near Alaska’s North Slope.

From Science Magazine ● Dec. 5, 2023

She ducked under the tangled honeysuckle toward the garden path, using her trowel like a machete to hack through some overgrown vines that crowded her jungly little porch.

From "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver

LUMEZI, Zambia—Three-year-old Dickson Ngwira was deep into his afternoon nap when half a dozen elephants, using trunks as trowels, gouged a five-foot-wide hole in the brick wall near his bed.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 30, 2026

Professor Cobb pointed out that "Archaeologists must have their hands free while recording data, since we need to hold our trowels and brushes while digging."

From Science Daily ● Nov. 21, 2024

That’s in no more than half an hour of walking around, without trowels and paintbrushes.

From Science Magazine ● Nov. 30, 2023

Only gloves and trowels are needed to remove the particle.

From BBC ● Nov. 11, 2022

Bobby Gene drew the line with the hoe and Cory and I followed with trowels, digging it deeper.

From "The Season of Styx Malone" by Kekla Magoon

Or the installers might have troweled on a floor-leveling compound but failed to smooth it.

From Washington Post ● Jan. 16, 2022

In the 1960s and early ’70s, a narrow range of poured, sprayed and thickly troweled Color Field painting was being advanced as the victory of an establishment avant-garde.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 13, 2018

The plaster was troweled directly onto the brick walls, making removal difficult.

From Washington Post ● Aug. 1, 2016

So thickly is this dysfunctional dynamic troweled on to the opening episodes that it not only feels fake, but oppressive.

From The Guardian ● Nov. 2, 2015

He mixed the cement and troweled over the hole.

From "Stargirl" by Jerry Spinelli

Paul senses the irony is being rather trowelled on, but it's now too late.

From The Guardian ● Apr. 28, 2013

The ghost of the abstract expressionist Clyfford Still and his sooty trowelled surfaces is intimated in a painting of a slabby night-time wall, illuminated by a single yellow-lit window.

From The Guardian ● Jul. 7, 2010

“Try the beef, guv’ner,” says a gentleman in the style of head-dress known as a “deerstalker,” which he wore while he trowelled his dinner into his mouth with the blade of a very wide knife.

From Original Penny Readings A Series of Short Sketches by George Manville Fenn

An author may sometimes think he is fulsomely praised and may even feel a sort of disgust for the slab adulation trowelled upon him, but his admirer need not fear being accused of insincerity.

From Imaginary Interviews by William Dean Howells

Still Lady Linden prodded and trowelled at the neat bed, still she demanded occasional help from the patient Curtis; and now came a man, breathless and coatless, rushing across the lawn.

From The Imaginary Marriage by Henry St. John Cooper

You’re basically painting or troweling on a thin layer of limestone.

From Seattle Times ● Feb. 3, 2022

Immediately, this dynamo of energy fell in love with the slow, methodical process of mixing mortar, troweling, and stacking bricks.

From Salon ● Oct. 1, 2019

Working in a hot kitchen, troweling french fries into paper bags, isn’t easy, but a lot of people would consider it easier than helping an adult out of bed and to the toilet.

From Washington Times ● Jan. 2, 2019

In one song near the end, “S/word and Leviathan,” he protects his right to go loud, constructing a big, echoey pattern played on a lute, with faraway vocals, then troweling electric guitar on top.

From New York Times ● Feb. 20, 2011

Laborers carried the mortar down the ladders to the masons who would lay the stones on top of each other, troweling a layer of mortar between each stone and each layer of stones.

From "Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction" by David Macaulay

The Italian version of As Tears Go By has real value to Stones fans, as it has a substantially different arrangement to their orginal English-language recording, trowelling on the medieval knight-in-shining-armour Lady Jane shtick.

From The Guardian ● Mar. 10, 2011

Much depends upon the workmen giving it sufficient labour, and trowelling it down.

From The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, Adapted to the Use of Private Families by Mary Eaton

No matter that the larva will perish by this untimely trowelling: the moment has come to wall up the door; the door is walled up.

From The Mason-Bees by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos