Search the Dictionary

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

A ditcher. Piers Plowman.

A dike a marsh or fen. [Prov. Eng.] Halliwell.

A charge or rate against lands; as, an agistment of sea banks, i. e., charge for banks or dikes.

To raise a mound or dike about; to inclose, defend, or fortify with a bank; to embank. "Banked well with earth." Holland.

A vein or dike crossing a lode.

abash tree. (Bot.), a tree of tropical America (Crescentia cujete), producing a large gourdike fruit, containing a purgative pulp. Its hard shell, after the removal of the pulp, is used for cups, bottles, etc. The African calabash tree is the baobab.

ntreat Her once to show, ne court, nor dalliance. Spenser. I went to make my court to the Dike and Duches of Newcastle. Evelyn.

A bank; a dike. [Obs.] Sir W. Temple.

To strike; to thump; to pound. [Obs.] Diken, or delven, or dingen upon sheaves. Piers Plowman.

tend, as a mass of metal into wire. How long her face is drawn! Shak. And the huge Offa's dike which he drew from the mouth of Wye to that of Dee. J. R. Green.

See Dike. The spelling dyke is restricted by some to the geological meaning.

A dike of piles in the sea, a river, etc., to check the approach of an enemy.

o erect, build, or set up; to make or construct; to raise or cast up; as, to levy a mill, dike, ditch, a nuisance, etc. [Obs.] Cowell. Blackstone.

The molten matter within the earth, the source of the material of lava flows, dikes of eruptive rocks, etc.

nd-reed (Ammophila arundinacea) which is used in Holland to bind the sand of the seacoast dikes (see Beach grass, under Beach); also, the Lygeum Spartum, a Mediterranean grass of similar habit.

A breaking or overflow of a bank or a dike by the sea. L'Estrange.

Same as Thrash. He would thresh, and thereto dike and delve. Chaucer.

Of or pertaining to trap rock; as, a trap dike.

illing inclined or vertical fissures not corresponding with the stratification; a lode; a dike; -- often limited, in the language of miners, to a mineral vein or lode, that is, to a vein which contains useful minerals or ores.