/t͡ʃaɪn/
OriginFrom Middle English chyne, from Old French eschine, from Frankish *skinu, from Proto-Germanic *skinō. Doublet of shin.
- The top of a ridge.
- The spine of an animal.
“And chine with rising bristles roughly spread.”
“[…] the captain aimed at the fugitive one last tremendous cut, which would certainly have split him to the chine had it not been intercepted by our big signboard […]”
“The prerogatives which the Spartans have allowed their kings are the following. In the first place, two priesthoods, those (namely) of Lacedaemonian and of Celestial Jupiter; […] and of having a hundr”
- A piece of the backbone of an animal, with the adjoining parts, cut for cooking.
- A sharp angle in the cross section of a hull.
- A longitudinal line of sharp change in the cross-section profile of the fuselage or similar body.
- A hollowed or bevelled channel in the waterway of a ship's deck.
- The edge or rim of a cask, etc., formed by the projecting ends of the staves; the chamfered end of a stave.
- The back of the blade on a scythe.
- Southern-England, VancouverA steep-sided ravine leading from the top of a cliff down to the sea.
“The cottage in a chine, we were not to behold it.”
“In the odorous stillness of the day I thought of the tracks that threaded Egdon Heath, and of benign, elderly Sandbourne, with its chines and sheltered beach-huts.”
- transitiveTo cut through the backbone of; to cut into chine pieces.
- To chamfer the ends of a stave and form the chine.
- obsoleteTo crack, split, fissure, break.
“The wayward son did chine his father's heart.”
“A drought had caused the earth to chine and cranny.”
“After the erth be brent, chyned & chypped by the hete of the sonne.”
Formschines(plural) · chimb(alternative) · chime(alternative) · chines(present, singular, third-person) · chining(participle, present) · chined(participle, past) · chined(past)