DIKE • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Dike

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noun

Dike n.

A ditch; a channel for water made by digging. "Little channels or dikes cut to every bed."

An embankment to prevent inundations; a levee. "Dikes that the hands of the farmers had raised... Shut out the turbulent tides."

A wall of turf or stone. (Scot.)

(Geol.) A wall-like mass of mineral matter, usually an intrusion of igneous rocks, filling up rents or fissures in the original strata.

verb

Dike v. t. (past & past part. diked; pres. part. diking)

To surround or protect with a dike or dry bank; to secure with a bank.

To drain by a dike or ditch.

Dike v. i. To work as a ditcher; to dig. (Obs.) "He would thresh and thereto dike and delve."

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Etymology of 'Dike'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Dike" Quotes from Famous Books

... escarpment where some resistant layer of rocks still holds itself up against the forces of erosion. Elsewhere its smooth surfaces are broken by lava-capped mesas or by ridges where some ancient volcanic dike is so hard that it has not yet been worn away. The soil, though excellent, is thinner and less fertile than in the prairies. Nevertheless the population might in time become as dense and prosperous as almost any in the world if only the rainfall were more abundant and good supplies ...

— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington

... field of Chalmette near New Orleans. Fort Jackson was a huge star of stone and mortar. In its massive walls were great cavernous bomb-proofs in which the soldiers were secure from bursting shells. It stood back about a hundred yards from the levee, and its casemates just rose above the huge dike that keeps the Mississippi in its proper channel. When the river was high from the spring floods of the north, a steamer floating on its swift tide towered high above the bastions of the fort. In the casemates ...

— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... a child finding a little leak in the dike that shuts off the sea from Holland, and stopping it with his hand till help could come, staying there all the night, holding back the floods with his little hand. It was but a tiny, trickling stream ...

— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller

... my heroes, tempt the fearless toil, Enrich your nations with the nurturing spoil; O'er my vast vales let yellow harvests wave, Quay the calm ports and dike the lawns I lave. Win from the waters every stagnant fen, Where truant rills escape my conscious ken; And break those remnant rocks that still impede My current crowding thro ...

— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... fall of the tides is used as motive power for the generation of electricity is described in L'Electricien. Near Ploumanach, on the northern coast of France, where the tides have a daily range of 39 feet, a small fish pond separated from the sea by a dike is arranged with gates so that at high tide the water flows in and fills it, the gates closing automatically when the tide recedes. The machinery of an old grist mill is used to operate a small dynamo, which charges a storage battery ...

— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various

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