Crossword clues for cathead
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Cathead \Cat"head`\, n. (Naut.) A projecting piece of timber or iron near the bow of vessel, to which the anchor is hoisted and secured.
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context nautical English) A heavy piece of timber projecting from each side of the bow of a ship for holding anchors which were fitted with a stock in position for letting go or for securing after weighing. 2 Similar rigging on the outside of a building.
Wikipedia
A cathead is a large wooden beam located on either side of the bow of a sailing ship, and angled forward at roughly 45 degrees. The beam is used to support the ship's anchor when raising it (weighing anchor) or lowering it (letting go), and for carrying the anchor on its stock-end when suspended outside the ship's side. It is furnished with sheaves at the outer end, and the inner end (which is called the cat's-tail) fits down on the cat-beam. The cat stopper also fastens the anchor on. The purpose of the cathead is to provide both a heavy enough beam to support the massive weight of the anchor, and to hold the metal anchor away from the wooden side of the ship to prevent damage.
In common practice, the projecting end of the beam was carved to resemble the face of a lion or cat. Whether such carving was due to a play on the already existing name of the beam or whether the beam was so named because of the practice of such carving is unknown.
The origin of the term "cathead" is obscure, but dates at least to the 17th century used by mainwaring and boteler in their dictionaries.
In Robert Charles Leslie's Old Sea Wings, Ways and Words in the Days of Oak and Hemp (1890), page 154 he writes: "The term catheads used for the two stout projecting timbers on either bow, from which the anchor hung clear of the ship before letting go, was no doubt connected with the fact of a lion or large cat usually carved upon the end of the item."
A Cathead is a beam on a ship for raising the anchor. Cathead or Cat head also may refer to:
- a windlass or capstan used in machinery such as a hoisting drawworks
- A type of biscuit in the cuisine of the Southern United States
- The Cat Heads, San Francisco indie rock band
- Tim Phillips (musician), of the band Cathead
- Cat heads, an inexpensive copy of the Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars
- Cat-Head Comics, a defunct comic book publisher
Usage examples of "cathead".
He held back the forestaysail and guided Stephen to the larboard cathead, where they stood gazing across an even deeper blue expanse of sea to the African shore.
He steadied himself on the protruding cathead, just to starboard of the bowsprit, and swung the lead in a humming circle, dropping it forty yards ahead of the stationary ship.
There were the cobblestones: catheads, trollheads, loaves, short and long setts, rounders, Morpork Sixes, and the eighty-seven types of paving brick, and the fourteen types of stone slab, and the twelve types of stone never intended for street slabs which had got used anyway, and had their own patterns of wear, and the rubbles and the gravels, and the repairs, and the thirteen different types of cellar cover and twenty types of drain lid He bounced a little, like a man testing the hardness of something.
They tore along, the three of them, their lee catheads rarely rising from the white racing water, their decks sloping like the roof of a house, the masts complaining, the wind sweeping in over the starboard rail, singing high and loud in the rigging, all tense and taut to the edge of the breaking-strain.
Her bower anchors were ready, a-cockbill at the catheads, with a kedge at the stern-davits and hands stationed to let them go at the word: there was silence fore and aft, not a sound but the pilot's orders and the leadsman's chant: 'By the deep six, by the deep six: by the mark five.
You are bowling along on a wind that's as steady as a sermon, and just as likely to last, and before you can say Jack Robinson the wind whips around from weather to lee, and if you don't jump for it, you'll have your canvas blown out of the catheads and sailing for heaven in rags and tatters.
The fishing-lines still hung dangling over the catheads, but nobody touched them.
The other had slipped from the larboard cathead where he had_ been -working -feverishly to repair chafing lashings around the anchor stock.
By the time he dropped into the jolly-boat the kedge had already been lowered into the red cutter, the best bower was hanging from the cathead, poised just over the launch, and fresh water was spouting over the side, lightening the ship at a great pace.
One could see the black cancer of Cathead eating into the land and the sea and clouding the air.
Suddenly an anchor dropped from the cathead and was then cut adrift so that it fell into the sea.
Each time he paused for the Surprise to take up the full force of the new thrust: this she did with immense spirit, with the buoyant living grace which so moved his heart - never was such a ship - and when she was moving perhaps as fast as she had ever moved, with her lee cathead well under the foam of her bow-wave, he laid one hand on the hances, feeling the deep note of her hull as he might have felt the vibrations of his fiddle, and the other on a backstay, gauging the exact degree of strain.
This seemed to be the general opinion aboard the flagship, and talk died away entirely, to revive some minutes later in laughter and applause as the Surprise, racing towards destruction under a great spread of canvas, put her helm alee, hauled on an unseen spring leading from her larboard cathead to the towline, and spun about like a cutter.
There were the cobblestones: catheads, trollheads, loaves, short and long setts, rounders, Morpork Sixes, and the eighty-seven types of paving brick, and the fourteen types of stone slab, and the twelve types of stone never intended for street slabs which had got used anyway, and had their own patterns of wear, and the rubbles and the gravels, and the repairs, and the thirteen different types of cellar cover and twenty types of drain lid—.