Dictionaries › English

hull

Pronunciation: /hʌl/

The English word “hull” has 7 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. The outer covering of a fruit or seed.
  2. Any covering.
  3. The body or frame of a vessel, such as a ship or plane.
  4. The smallest set that possesses a particular property (such as convexity) and contains every point of A; slightly more formally, the intersection of all sets which possess the specified property and of which A is a subset.

verb

  1. To remove the outer covering of a fruit or seed.
  2. To drift; to be carried by the impetus of wind or water on the ship's hull alone, with sails furled.
  3. To hit (a ship) in the hull with cannon fire etc.

Etymology

From Middle English hul, hulle, holle (“seed covering, hull of a ship”), from Old English hulu (“seed covering”), from Proto-Germanic *hul-, perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *ḱel- (“to cover, hide”); or possibly from Proto-Indo-European *kal- (“hard”). Compare Dutch hul (“hood”), German Hülle (“cover, wrap”), Hülse (“hull”); also Old Irish calad, calath (“hard”), Latin callus, callum (“rough…

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “hull” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

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