What is "battening"

Usage examples of "battening".

That looks as though they were battening down the hatches for the next big engagement.

After that I fell deeply asleep and dreamed of pale-faced men like maggots and gorgeously-clad women in silk dresses that rose behind them like glittering wings, living in a carcase and battening on its rich rotting meat.

Bay the weather worsened steadily, and at last it came to be a choice between battening down the hatches both forward and aft, or being incontinently swamped.

So from the moment of battening down, the gas which oozed from the coal mixed with the air till the whole ship became one huge explosive bomb, which the merest spark would touch off.

When the echo of the wooden hammer battening the hatch had died, John heard breathing and movement around him.

If you were not all skunks and cowards youd be suffering with them instead of battening here on the plunder of the poor.

Kofi had retracted the flybridge, battening down for the storm, but it was easy enough to tell the computer to open the main hatch, which was nearly flush with the dorsal surface.

Here he is generally surrounded by an admiring throng of ostlers, stableboys, shoeblacks, and those nameless hangers-on that infest inns and taverns, and run errands and do all kind of odd jobs for the privilege of battening on the drippings of the kitchen and the leakage of the tap-room.

Jellyfish were battening on the drifting garbage of the great ships that were gone.

They worked long into the night battening hatches under the incomprehensible cursings of the first officer, under the roll of the ship lights, driving wedges, lashing the canvas tight.

How courteously the highest noble of the Acolhua summoned to his presence this lowly foreigner who had been battening on his hospitality.

Behind them, with staggering sound and visual effects, Martian colonists were battening hatches and shoveling Marsdust to cover glass walls.

It was the first French battery and, even as Sharpe watched, he saw the tiny figures of men throwing up more earth and battening great fascines to the crest of the mound.

Somewhere beyond the battening, urged sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across all the dark beige hills, somehow implicit in an arrogance or bite to the smog the more inland somnolence of San Narciso did lack, lurked the sea, the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homosexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moon's tearing-free and monument to her exile.