Word.ws English Dictionary

water-laid

water-laid adjective: consisting of three or more hawser-laid ropes twisted together in the opposite direction from that in which the hawser-laid ropes are twisted; cable-laid.

Adjective

water-laid (not comparable)

  1. (rope-making) Consisting of three or more hawser-laid ropes twisted together in the opposite direction from that in which the hawser-laid ropes are twisted; cable-laid.
    • In these days of steel hawsers and towing machines, water-laid rope is going out of fashion, and the writer being one of the men that never saw this splice made does not hope to now;1903, Morgan Robertson, “The Splicing of Rope”, in The Rudder, volume 14, page 41
    • Rope may be divided into three main classes, according to the manner in which the strands are laid: (1) Plain-laid rope, composed of three strands; (2) shroud-laid rope, composed of four or six strands with a core or heart running through the center: and (3) cable-laid rope, hawser-laid or...1922, United States Tariff Commission, Tariff Information
  2. Deposited by a stream, river, or other body of water; alluvial.
    • This is 25 feet of light-gray thinly bedded and cross-bedded water-laid tuff, which in turn overlies a poorly indurated ash-flow sheet, 125 feet thick.1963, Israel Gregory Sohn, Raymond Elliot Peck, Theriosynoecum Wyomingense
    • In a ravine about a quarter of a mile south of Cairn Point, Bootlegger Cove Clay extends from the beach to a level 126 feet above it (Miller and Dobrovolny, 1959, p. 39(; the horizontally bedded clay is overlain by hard, stony sand interpreted by the writers as water-laid "till."1964, Geological Survey Water-supply Paper, page 33
  3. (materials engineering) Manufactured by suspending material in water and then draining the water away through a net, screen, or similar device.
    • A continuous method of making hydraulic cement products comprising forming a plurality of water-laid sheets of hydraulic cement, having linear fibers therein which are oriented longitudinally of the surface of said sheets, […]1947, Gustave L. Easterberg, Roger A. MacArthur, “2422345: Manufacture of Hydraulic Cement Products”, in Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, page 452
    • The improved sheet formation of foam-laid paper is shown visually in Fig. 2 where softwood kraft handsheets, water-laid and foam-laid are shown for comparison.1974, Paper Technology - Volume 15, page 347

Examples of water-laid in a sentence

  • Three hawser-laid ropes, each of 120 fathoms, laid up together in the opposite direction to that of their own lay will form a "cable-laid" or "water-laid rope", 100 fathoms in length.1951, Great Britain. Admiralty, Manual of Seamanship, page 86:
  • Mine workings show that the upper part of this fill is made up of flows, stratified tuff, breccia, and water-laid debris.1975, Glenn R. Scott, Richard B. Taylor, Post-Paleocene Teritar Rocks and Quaternary Volcanic Ash of the Wet Mountain Valley, Colorado:

Questions about water-laid

What does water-laid mean?
Water-laid means consisting of three or more hawser-laid ropes twisted together in the opposite direction from that in which the hawser-laid ropes are twisted; cable-laid.
How do you use water-laid in a sentence?
Three hawser-laid ropes, each of 120 fathoms, laid up together in the opposite direction to that of their own lay will form a "cable-laid" or "water-laid rope", 100 fathoms in length.
What part of speech is water-laid?
Water-laid is an adjective.

Words near water-laid in the dictionary

  1. water-ices
  2. water-jar
  3. water-jars
  4. water-jug
  5. water-jugs
  6. water-laid
  7. water-leech
  8. water-leeches
  9. water-lettuce
  10. water-lettuces
  11. water-level

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: water-laid (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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