out on a limb
In a risky, precarious, daring, or uncompromising position, especially one outside of the mainstream; vulnerable.
For quotations using this term, see Citations:out on a limb.
noun
A major appendage of human or animal, used for locomotion (such as an arm, leg or wing).
UUhoſe hands are made to gripe a warlike Lance— Their ſhoulders broad, for complet armour fit, Their lims more large and of a bigger ſize Than all the brats yſprong from Typhons loins:
Three chairs of the steamer type, all maimed, comprised the furniture of this roof-garden, with […] on one of the copings a row of four red clay flower-pots filled with sun-baked dust from which gnarled and rusty stalks thrust themselves up like withered elfin limbs.
A branch of a tree.
The part of the bow, from the handle to the tip.
An elementary piece of the mechanism of a lock.
A thing or person regarded as a part or member of, or attachment to, something else.
That little limb of the devil has cheated the gallows.
verb
To remove the limbs from (an animal or tree).
They limbed the felled trees before cutting them into logs.
To supply with limbs.
Innumerous living creatures , perfect forms , Limb'd and full grown: out of the ground uprose
Man was not made so large limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world and wall in a space such as fitted him.
To thoroughly defeat an opponent in fisticuffs
Brian limbed Roger over at the Beahive last night.
noun
The apparent visual edge of a celestial body.
the solar limb
At 4h 57m 9s by my chronometer, (see Schedule B,) I observed with my telescope a small black speck on the preceding limb of the sun's disk, at the precise point to which I had been for some minutes directing my attention.
The graduated edge of a circle or arc.
The border or upper spreading part of a monopetalous corolla, or of a petal or sepal; blade.
The corolla limb of the moonvine Calonyction aculeatum is normally undivided.