Word.ws English Dictionary

breakwater

UK/ˈbɹeɪkˌwɔːtə/

breakwater noun: a construction in or around a harbour designed to break the force of the sea and to provide shelter for vessels lying inside.

breakwater: a construction in or around a harbour designed to break the force of the sea and to provide shelter...
Image: Upload Claus Ableiter, Bild von Mark.murphy, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

breakwater (plural breakwaters)

  1. A construction in or around a harbour designed to break the force of the sea and to provide shelter for vessels lying inside.
    • […]there is a channel, some three miles wide between the city and the mainland, and some mile and a half wide between it and the sandy breakwater called the Lido, which divides the lagoon from the Adriatic,1853, John Ruskin, “The Throne”, in The Stones of Venice, volume II (The Sea-Stories), London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, § VI, page 8
    • But there's a pier or breakwater runs out into the sea just here, which we could defend longer than anything else, like Horatius and his bridge.1908, G[ilbert] K[eith] Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, Bristol: J[ames] W[illiams] Arrowsmith, […]; London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Company, →OCLC, page 259
  2. A low bulkhead across the forecastle deck of a ship which diverts water breaking over the bows into the scuppers.
  3. (on beaches) A wooden or concrete barrier, usually perpendicular to the shore, intended to prevent the movement of sand along a coast.

Proper noun capitalized: Breakwater

Breakwater

  1. A suburb of Geelong, Victoria, Australia

breakwater meaning in Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam and Kannada

breakwater in Tamil

அலைமுறி, அலைதாங்கி, அலைகரை, அணைகரை

breakwater in Urdu

موج شکن

breakwater in Malayalam

sea wall, jetty, mole
അലതാങ്ങി, പുലിമുട്ട്, കടൽഭിത്തി, അഴി, അഴിക്കോട്ട, കടവ്

breakwater in Kannada

ಅಲೆತಡೆ, ಒಡ್ಡು, ಅಲೆಗಳ ಹೊಡೆತವನ್ನು ತಡೆಯುವ ಒಡ್ಡು, ಅಲೆಗಳ ಹೊಡೆತವನ್ನು ತಡೆಯುವ ಏರಿ
More languagesFewer languages
breakwater in Tagalog
pamasag-alon

Forms of breakwater

pluralbreakwaters

Plural of breakwater: breakwaters

Origin of breakwater

From break + water. Compare Dutch breekwater (“breakwater”). Compare firebreak.

Questions about breakwater

What does breakwater mean?
Breakwater means a construction in or around a harbour designed to break the force of the sea and to provide shelter for vessels lying inside.
What is breakwater in Tamil?
Breakwater in Tamil is அலைமுறி, அலைதாங்கி, அலைகரை. See Breakwater meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is breakwater?
Breakwater can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce breakwater?
Breakwater is pronounced /ˈbɹeɪkˌwɔːtə/ (UK).
What is the plural of breakwater?
The plural of breakwater is breakwaters.

Words near breakwater in the dictionary

  1. breaktimes
  2. breakup
  3. breakups
  4. breakwall
  5. breakwalls
  6. breakwater
  7. breakwaters
  8. Breakwell
  9. breakwind
  10. breakwinds
  11. breaky

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: breakwater (page history and authors); Breakwater (page history and authors); breakwater (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); breakwater (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); breakwater (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); breakwater (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vininn126-breakwater.wav.

Cite this entry: “breakwater.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/breakwater. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.