Word.ws English Dictionary

whistlestop tour

whistlestop tour noun: a trip by train in which one visits many locations along the way, especially if those locations are not major cities.

whistlestop tour: a trip by train in which one visits many locations along the way, especially if those locations are...
Image: Abbie Rowe, U.S. National Park Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

whistlestop tour (plural whistlestop tours)

  1. A trip by train in which one visits many locations along the way, especially if those locations are not major cities.
    • Gordon then accompanied the former Confederate president on what amounted to a whistlestop tour from Montgomery to Atlanta.1987, Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, →ISBN
    • It now only remained for the world to decipher precisely what de Gaulle had meant in the various utterances of this his first whistlestop tour of Algeria, and how he was going to follow them up.2011, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, →ISBN
  2. (by analogy) An overview of a subject which includes a number of illustrative examples.
    • This chapter is a whistlestop tour of basic marketing ideas.2009, Susannah Bowen, Steve Carey, How to Save Your Life, →ISBN
    • This vast wealth of information has drawn on a wide range of examples and case studies from different parts of the world. Inevitably, this has been something of a whistlestop tour, but it has deliberately paused longer where the materials and technologies are less familiar.2014, Linda Hurcombe, Perishable Material Culture in Prehistory, →ISBN

Examples of whistlestop tour in a sentence

  • In October 1964, First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson embarked on a whistlestop tour of Southern cities to support her husband's presidential reelection bid.2011, Michael O. Holt, Valdosta 1964, →ISBN:
  • It's parked there so visitors can have a peek inside the very train car that took the Great Leader as far as West Africa on a lifelong whistlestop tour of fellow authoritarian regimes.2013, Bill Richardson, Kevin Bleyer, How to Sweet-Talk a Shark:
  • First, let's sketch out that geographical unevenness with a whistlestop tour of the world in figures - excess mortality rates, to be precise..2017, Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World:

Forms of whistlestop tour

pluralwhistlestop tours

Questions about whistlestop tour

What does whistlestop tour mean?
Whistlestop tour means a trip by train in which one visits many locations along the way, especially if those locations are not major cities.
How do you use whistlestop tour in a sentence?
In October 1964, First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson embarked on a whistlestop tour of Southern cities to support her husband's presidential reelection bid.
What part of speech is whistlestop tour?
Whistlestop tour is a noun.
What is the plural of whistlestop tour?
The plural of whistlestop tour is whistlestop tours.

Words near whistlestop tour in the dictionary

  1. whistles in the wind
  2. whistles past
  3. whistles past the graveyard
  4. whistles up
  5. whistlestop
  6. whistlestop tour
  7. whistlestop tours
  8. whistlestopped
  9. whistlestopping
  10. whistlestops
  11. whistlewing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whistlestop tour (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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