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dyke

Pronunciation: /ˈdaɪ̯k/

The English word “dyke” has 20 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. An earthwork raised to prevent inundation of low land by the sea or flooding rivers.
  2. A low embankment or stone wall serving as an enclosure and boundary marker.
  3. A raised causeway.
  4. A long, narrow hollow dug from the ground to conduct water.
  5. Any navigable watercourse.
  6. Any watercourse.
  7. Any small body of water.
  8. A body of rock (usually igneous) originally filling a fissure but now often rising above the older stratum as it is eroded away.
  9. A place to urinate and defecate: an outhouse or lavatory.
  10. An embankment formed by the spoil from the creation of a ditch.
  11. Any hollow dug into the ground.
  12. A long, narrow hollow dug from the ground to serve as a boundary marker.
  13. A wall, especially (obsolete outside heraldry) a masoned city or castle wall.
  14. Any fence or hedge.
  15. Any impediment, barrier, or difficulty.
  16. A beaver's dam.
  17. A jetty; a pier.
  18. A fissure in a rock stratum filled with intrusive rock; a fault.

verb

  1. To dig, particularly to create a ditch.
  2. To surround with a ditch, to entrench.

Etymology

A variant of dike, from Northern Middle English dik and dike (“ditch”), from Old Norse díki (“ditch”). Influenced by Middle Dutch dijc (“ditch; dam”) and Middle Low German dīk (“dam”). See also ditch. Ultimately from Proto-Germanic *dīkiją (“trench, ditch”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeygʷ- (“stick into, pierce; dig, stick a spade into”). The semantic evolution (also seen in several cognate…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.