chine
Pronunciation Noun

chine (plural chines)

  1. The top of a ridge.
  2. The spine of an animal.
    • And chine with rising bristles roughly spread.
    • 1883: Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
      […] the captain aimed at the fugitive one last tremendous cut, which would certainly have split him to the chine had it not been intercepted by our big signboard […]
  3. A piece of the backbone of an animal, with the adjoining parts, cut for cooking.
  4. (nautical) A sharp angle in the cross section of a hull.
  5. (nautical) A hollowed or bevelled channel in the waterway of a ship's deck.
  6. The edge or rim of a cask, etc., formed by the projecting ends of the staves; the chamfered end of a stave.
  7. The back of the blade on a scythe.
Translations
  • Russian: хребе́т
Translations Verb

chine (chines, present participle chining; past and past participle chined)

  1. (transitive) To cut through the backbone of; to cut into chine pieces.
  2. To chamfer the ends of a stave and form the chine.
Noun

chine (plural chines)

  1. (Southern England) A steep-sided ravine leading from the top of a cliff down to the sea.
    • The cottage in a chine.
    • 1988, Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library, Penguin Books (1988), page 169
      In the odorous stillness of the day I thought of the tracks that threaded Egdon Heath, and of benign, elderly Sandbourne, with its chines and sheltered beach-huts.
Verb

chine (chines, present participle chining; past chined, past participle chined)

  1. (obsolete) To crack, split, fissure, break. [9th-16th c.]
    The wayward son did chine his father's heart.
    A drought had caused the earth to chine and cranny.
    • After the erth be brent, chyned and chypped by the hete of the sonne.
Related terms


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