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What is "dike"

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dike
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
dike
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ He had sifted some larger pebbles from the sand and was throwing them absently at the dike of drift and kelp.
▪ I skirted the dike district too - or at any rate two big chicks denied me entry to their purple sanctum.
▪ Somehow, I made it to the dike, dove over the dike, and there was my whole squad.
▪ Soon, we moved, and I walked over a dike.
▪ The dike around the shop complex had broken.
▪ The ammo bearer lifted his head above the dike to help call in artillery.
▪ They have proposed building a temporary dike around the crash site.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Dike

Dike \Dike\, v. i. To work as a ditcher; to dig. [Obs.]

He would thresh and thereto dike and delve.
--Chaucer.

Dike

Dike \Dike\ (d[imac]), n. [OE. dic, dike, diche, ditch, AS. d[imac]c dike, ditch; akin to D. dijk dike, G. deich, and prob. teich pond, Icel. d[imac]ki dike, ditch, Dan. dige; perh. akin to Gr. tei^chos (for qei^chos) wall, and even E. dough; or perh. to Gr. ti^fos pool, marsh. Cf. Ditch.]

  1. A ditch; a channel for water made by digging.

    Little channels or dikes cut to every bed.
    --Ray.

  2. An embankment to prevent inundations; a levee.

    Dikes that the hands of the farmers had raised . . . Shut out the turbulent tides.
    --Longfellow.

  3. A wall of turf or stone. [Scot.]

  4. (Geol.) A wall-like mass of mineral matter, usually an intrusion of igneous rocks, filling up rents or fissures in the original strata.

Dike

Dike \Dike\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Diked; p. pr. & vb. n. Diking.] [OE. diken, dichen, AS. d[=i]cian to dike. See Dike.]

  1. To surround or protect with a dike or dry bank; to secure with a bank.

  2. To drain by a dike or ditch.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
dike

Old English dic "trench, ditch; an earthwork with a trench; moat," from Proto-Germanic *dik- (cognates: Old Norse diki "ditch, fishpond," Old Frisian dik "mound, dam," Middle Dutch dijc "mound, dam, pool," Dutch dijk "dam," German Deich "embankment"), from PIE root *dhigw- "to pierce; to fix, fasten" (cognates: Sanskrit dehi- "wall," Old Persian dida "wall, stronghold, fortress," Persian diz).\n

\nAt first "an excavation," later (late 15c.) applied to the resulting earth mound; a sense development paralleled by cognate forms in many other languages. This is the northern variant of the word that in the south of England yielded ditch (n.).

Wiktionary
dike

n. 1 (context British English) Archaic spelling of all (context British English) meanings of dyke. 2 A barrier of stone or earth used to hold back water and prevent flooding. 3 (context pejorative English) A lesbian, especially a butch lesbian. 4 (context geology English) A body of once molten igneous rock that was injected into older rocks in a manner that crosses bedding planes. vb. (context transitive English) To surround or protect with a dike or dry bank; to secure with a bank.

WordNet
dike

  1. n. offensive terms for a lesbian who is noticeably masculine [syn: butch, dyke]

  2. a barrier constructed to contain the flow of water or to keep out the sea [syn: dam, dyke, levee]

  3. v. enclose with a dike; "dike the land to protect it from water" [syn: dyke]

Gazetteer
Dike, IA -- U.S. city in Iowa
Population (2000): 944
Housing Units (2000): 393
Land area (2000): 1.304685 sq. miles (3.379118 sq. km)
Water area (2000): 0.000000 sq. miles (0.000000 sq. km)
Total area (2000): 1.304685 sq. miles (3.379118 sq. km)
FIPS code: 21405
Located within: Iowa (IA), FIPS 19
Location: 42.464706 N, 92.627688 W
ZIP Codes (1990): 50624
Note: some ZIP codes may be omitted esp. for suburbs.
Headwords:
Dike, IA
Dike
Wikipedia
Dike (geology)

A dike or dyke, in geological usage, is a sheet of rock that formed in a fracture in a pre-existing rock body. Dikes can be either magmatic or sedimentary in origin. Magmatic dikes form when magma intrudes into a crack then crystallizes as a sheet intrusion, either cutting across layers of rock or through an unlayered mass of rock. Clastic dikes are formed when sediment fills a pre-existing crack.

Vertical basalt dikes cutting horizontal lava flows, Lord Howe Island, Australia

A small dike on the Baranof Cross-Island Trail, Alaska

Magmatic dikes radiating from West Spanish Peak, Colorado, U.S.

Dike (mythology)

In ancient Greek culture, Dikē ( or ; Greek: Δίκη, English translation: "justice") was the goddess of justice and the spirit of moral order and fair judgement based on immemorial custom, in the sense of socially enforced norms and conventional rules. According to Hesiod ( Theogony, l. 901), she was fathered by Zeus upon his second consort, Themis. She and her mother were both personifications of justice. She is depicted as a young slender woman carrying a physical balance scale and wearing a laurel wreath while her Roman counterpart (Justitia) appears in a similar fashion but blind-folded. She is represented in the constellation Libra which is named for the Latin name of her symbol (Scales). She is often associated with Astraea, the goddess of innocence and purity. Astraea is also one of her epithets referring to her appearance in the nearby constellation Virgo which is said to represent Astraea . This reflects her symbolic association with Astraea, who too has a similar iconography.

Related phrases:

Usage examples of "dike".

No datable objects have yet been discovered, and Hague Dike so far remains undated.

There were gobble-mole ditches druggled through the meadow, dirt thrown up on either side in little dikes, a shower of earth flying up from time to time to mark the location of the mole as it druggled for beetles and worms and blind snakes.

For outworks it had nothing more than an earthern dike, surrounded by a ditch that had once been full of sharpened stakes.

Mennonite preachers, he, here named never to be named again, inspects the dike tops, the enrockment and the groins, and drives off the pigs, because according to the Rural Police Regulations of November 1848, Clause 8, all animals, furred and feathered, are forbidden to graze and burrow on the dike.

Far under his feet the river was louder than usual, the enlarged flume thundering an increased flood down beyond the dam, while to the upriver the earthwork diversion dike had backed up increasingly deeper water, still water to all appearance, until it slipped violently down that chute and boiled among the rocks before it started its seaward course again.

There was a faint gleam of fire far down the path, that wound down to the site, the diversion dike, from which the big flume carried its thundering load toward the black mass of the dam and over.

Cursing, he leaped up, threw himself on Gair and rolled with him into the damp bushes beside the nearest dike.

Look steadily to the eastward of that second dike and you will see the pink light upon the sands, which baffled every one until our friend Hamel came and caught it on his canvas.

These side flows from dikes are termed laccolites, a word which signifies the pool-like nature of the stony mass which they form between the strata.

Trin lived a good way out on the dike in a little hut, and when the old woman did her chores in the house, this monster of a cat used to sit in front of the house door and blink into the summer day and at the peewits that flew past.

A great banquet, the first since the funeral banquet of old Tede Volkerst, was given in the house of the dikemaster, to which all the dike overseers and the greater landowners were invited.

Dicken saw that he had isolated a recombined variety of unencapsulated RNA virus from the blood and sputum of all the afflicted children, in titers sufficient to suggest massive infection.

The wall around Vyring was in the nature of a dike, not a fortification.

Jupiter will still be in good shape, though, and the Jovian magnetosphere has enough dikes to dampen out the worse of any particle floods the enemy might throw their way.

This process often has importance of an economic kind, for it not infrequently leads to the formation of metalliferous veins or other aggregations of ores, either in the dike itself or in the country rock.