hurry-skurry

English

Alternative forms

• hurry-scurry

Verb

hurry-skurry (third-person singular simple present hurry-skurries, present participle hurry-skurrying, simple past and past participle hurry-skurried)

1. (archaic) To hurry; act hurriedly.
   • 1900, Samuel Butler, transl. The Odyssey, Book V., page 62

     " […] Besides, you are perfectly able to protect Telemachus, and to see him safely home again, while the suitors have to come hurry-skurrying back without having killed him."

Noun

hurry-skurry (plural hurry-skurries)

1. A state of confusion and bustle; a frantic hurry; a rushing about.
   • 1793, Arthur Young, “1788 [chapter]”, in Travels during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789, Undertaken More Particularly with a View of Ascertaining the Cultivation, Wealth, Resources, and National Prosperity of the Kingdom of France. […] In Two Volumes, volume I, Dublin: Printed for Messrs. R. Cross, […], →OCLC, page 192:

     An Engliſh family in the country, [...] would receive you with an unquiet hoſpitality, and an anxious politeneſs; and after waiting for a hurry-ſcurry derangement of cloth, table, plates, ſideboard, pot and ſpit, would give you perhaps ſo good a dinner, that none of the family, between anxiety and fatigue, could ſupply one word of converſation, and you would depart under cordial wiſhes that you might never return.—This folly, ſo common in England, is never met with in France: [...]

Adverb

hurry-skurry (not comparable)

1. With confusion and bustle.