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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
hawser
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Above, below and around them, girders and hawsers criss-crossed an apparently boundless gulf.
▪ Finally one end of the hawser was fastened to the bank, and the makeshift life raft was dispatched.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Hawser

Hawser \Haws"er\ (h[add]z"[~e]r or h[add]s"[~e]r), n. [From F. hausser to lift, raise (cf. OF. hausser['e]e towpath, towing, F. haussi[`e]re hawser), LL. altiare, fr. L. altus high. See Haughty.] A large rope made of three strands each containing many yarns.

Note: Three hawsers twisted together make a cable; but it nautical usage the distinction between cable and hawser is often one of size rather than of manufacture.

Hawser iron, a calking iron.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
hawser

"large rope used for mooring, towing, etc.," late 13c., from Anglo-French haucer, from Old French halcier, haucier, literally "hoister," from Vulgar Latin *altiare, alteration of Late Latin altare "make high," from altus "high" (see old). Altered in English on mistaken association with hawse and perhaps haul.

Wiktionary
hawser

n. (context nautical English) a cable or heavy rope used to tow or moor a ship

WordNet
hawser

n. large heavy rope for nautical use

Wikipedia
Hawser

Hawser is a nautical term for a thick cable or rope used in mooring or towing a ship.

A hawser passes through a hawsehole, also known as a cat hole, located on the hawse.

Usage examples of "hawser".

But when they had loosed the hawsers thence in fair weather, then Euphemus bethought him of a dream of the night, reverencing the glorious son of Maia.

They had done this before the sad day off the Crozets, and the sum was still much the same, amounting to the kedge alone and just enough cablets and hawsers to veer out a reasonable scope.

The hairy, brutish hawsers and cablets allowed him to carry sail that would otherwise tear the masts out of the ship, and this had won the frigate many a charming prize before now, or had allowed her to run clear away from much superior force.

The hawsers and the hairy cablets did indeed look heavy, lumpish and untidy with these Irish pennants all along - not perhaps unseamanlike, but something that no crack spit-and-polish ship could bear for a moment.

Monk muttered, and held Habeas by an ear to keep him away from the insulated copper hawsers.

At the end of a long hawser, she passed again under Point Loma and continued westward to sea, bobbing high in the water as when she had first been launched, but now blind and comatose, bereft of sensors, crew and weapons, and thus no longer a ship, only a hull as she had been at Orange when I first saw her.

We now had three whale-boats, two plying steadily between the vessel and shore, the other kept busy running out anchors, rebending parted hawsers, and recovering the lost anchors.

His and hers, for Vanni, if she remembered him at all, was probably living under the protection of a wealthy balletomane or even married to a dancer with hamstrings like hawsers and long hair.

Hawsers bowsed as tight as can be, and God help us if we have to strike topmasts.

When the hawsers commence to lift out of the sea, The Squarehead gave a warning shout, whereupon Mr.

The anchorman waited there, too, but instead of his flower of hooks, he carried a simple hawser.

The blade sliced through one of the rope hawsers but made no impression on the wired ones, a tangled mess, and buried itself into the beflagged lid or bottom--he did not know or care which--and split it.

And on the next day they fastened the hawsers to the coast opposite the Bithynian land.

In abandon-ship drills, he had always gone hand over hand down a dangling hawser.

All during the fading clatter from the fire escape and the dwindling footbeats from the cement of the rear courtyard, The Shadow lashed about the room with Hawser, artfully, forcing the strangler to waste his convulsive fury.