dead water
Word Rarity
Common
Frequency: Zipf frequency 5.03 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
3
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The eddying water under a slow-moving ship's counter, or a similar area of stationary fluid or gas in advance of a concave angle, which can occur when there is strong vertical density stratification (due to salinity or temperature or both), and can cause ships to become hard to control.
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "A "deadwater," that is a region occupied by stationary fluid or by gas at suitable pressure, ahead of a concave angle was shown to be possible by Villat."
- "Some of our party went down the deadwater for a short distance in it and came back with three black ducks and one golden eye."
- "The deadwater region is viewed to be in backmix flow and to be interchanging fluid slowly with the active backmix flow region."
- "The river is divided into two regions: the main channel and a deadwater zone."
- "the Deadwaters of the Penobscot River"
- "On other days we journeyed as far up the main branch as far as we could, sometimes following small brooks back to their deadwaters."