[Echoic; cf. FIZZLE v.] intr. To make a hissing or sputtering sound.
1685. Crowne, Sir Courtly Nice, III. I kiss’d all the wenches as I came along, and made their moyst lips fiz again.
1687. Cotton, Burlesque upon B. (ed. 2), 136.
| Thou oft has made thy fiery Dart | |
| Fizz in the hollow of his Heart. |
1786. Burns, Scotch Drink, 57.
| O rare! to see thee fizz an’ freath | |
| I’ th’ lugget caup! |
1827. Praed, Red Fisherm., 213.
| The Fisherman gave it a kick and a spin, | |
| And the water fizzed as it tumbled in! |
1839. Marryat, Diary Amer., Ser. I. I. 286. One minute you have a shower-bath from a negress, who is throwing water at the windows on the first floor; and the next you have to hop over a stream across the pavement, occasioned by some black fellow, who, rather than go for a broom to sweep away any small portion of dust collected before his master’s door, brings out the leather hose, attached to the hydrants, as they term them here, and fizzes away with it till the stream has forced the dust into the gutter.
1861. Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxf., v. (1889), 38. His host put the kettle on the fire, to ascertain that it was quite boiling, and then, as it spluttered and fizzed, filled up the two tumblers, and restored it to its place on the hob.
b. To move with a fizzing sound.
1864. Reader, 3 Dec., 707/2. Drones live an idle, gregarious, and monotonous life, in a comparatively speaking inoffensive way; but the bluebottle is always rushing about by itself; fizzes fussily into some poor man’s cottage, buzzes incessantly and distractingly; knocks its blunt head two or three times against what it doesn’t understand, and at last is off, to the unutterable relief of the nerves.
1880. Sir S. Lakeman, What I saw in Kaffir-Land, 48. Up and down the lines he used to fizz with his fat podgy legs, basting the men with hot drippings of his marital wrath.
c. trans. (causal.)
1665. Cotton, Scarron., Æn. IV. 80.
| There will I stand with flaming taper, | |
| To Fizze thy tail instead of paper. |
Hence Fizzing vbl. sb.
1842. C. Whitehead, R. Savage (1845), II. iv. 217. Such a roaring, and fizzing, and chuckling!
1877. Wraxall, Hugo’s Les Misérables, IV. xxv. 15. The children heard the phizzing of a match dipped into the bottle of phosphorus.
