storm oil
storm oil noun: oil carried by a ship and dispersed into an area of water to calm it (as it absorbs some of the energy of waves, and covers a large area in a slick film upon which wind can get less traction to produce waves).
Noun
storm oil (uncountable)
- Oil carried by a ship and dispersed into an area of water to calm it (as it absorbs some of the energy of waves, and covers a large area in a slick film upon which wind can get less traction to produce waves).
- While bound east, latitude 41 degrees, longitude 56 degrees 54 minutes, during a northerly gale with very high rolling seas, used storm oil through forward waste pipe with good effect.1914, Leslie's, page 322
- With the appearance of more modern ships, storm oil lost much of its importance, but even today power-driven U. S. merchant ships of more than 200 gross tons are required to carry 30 gallons of it and those of 5000 tons or more ...1956, All Hands, page 15
Questions about storm oil
- What does storm oil mean?
- Storm oil means oil carried by a ship and dispersed into an area of water to calm it (as it absorbs some of the energy of waves, and covers a large area in a slick film upon which wind can get less traction to produce waves).
- What part of speech is storm oil?
- Storm oil is a noun.
Words near storm oil in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: storm oil (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “storm oil.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/storm_oil. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
