Word.ws English Dictionary

chimney's afire

chimney's afire phrase: a phrase shouted when blood gushes out of a whale's blowhole after a killing blow is struck with a lance.

Phrase

chimney's afire

  1. A phrase shouted when blood gushes out of a whale's blowhole after a killing blow is struck with a lance
    • Success would show itself as a geyser of crimson blood gushing from the whale’s blowhole, which caused whalemen to cry out, ‘Chimney’s afire!’2015 December, Nathaniel Philbrick, “How Nantucket Came to Be the Whaling Capital of the World”, in Smithsonian Magazine

Questions about chimney's afire

What does chimney's afire mean?
Chimney's afire means a phrase shouted when blood gushes out of a whale's blowhole after a killing blow is struck with a lance.
What part of speech is chimney's afire?
Chimney's afire is a phrase.

Words near chimney's afire in the dictionary

  1. chimney sweeper
  2. chimney sweepers
  3. chimney sweeps
  4. chimney swift
  5. chimney swifts
  6. chimney's afire
  7. chimney-breast
  8. chimney-breasts
  9. chimney-corner
  10. chimney-corners
  11. chimney-duty

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chimney's afire (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)-Flame, not lame-chimney's afire.wav.

Cite this entry: “chimney's afire.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chimney%27s_afire. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.