Word.ws English Dictionary

there she blows

there she blows phrase: the traditional hail of the lookout in a whaler (whaling ship) when sighting the spouting water thrown up by a whale surfacing.

Phrase

there she blows

  1. The traditional hail of the lookout in a whaler (whaling ship) when sighting the spouting water thrown up by a whale surfacing.
    • "There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!"
      "Where-away?"
      "On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!"1851, Herman Melville, chapter 47, in Moby Dick

Forms of there she blows

alternative formthar she blows

Questions about there she blows

What does there she blows mean?
There she blows means the traditional hail of the lookout in a whaler (whaling ship) when sighting the spouting water thrown up by a whale surfacing.
What part of speech is there she blows?
There she blows is a phrase.

Words near there she blows in the dictionary

  1. there now
  2. there one has it
  3. there ought to be a law
  4. there oughta be a law
  5. there oughtta be a law
  6. there she blows
  7. there was
  8. there we go
  9. there were
  10. there ya go
  11. there you are

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: there she blows (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)-Vealhurl-there she blows.wav.

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