Word.ws English Dictionary

whale's road

whale's road noun: the ocean; the open sea.

Noun

the whale's road

  1. (literary, kenning) The ocean; the open sea.
    • From the land of Mermedonia are we come,
      Borne hither from afar; our high-prowed ship
      Carried us o'er the whale's road with the flood,
      Our sea-horse fleet, all girt about with speed.1899, Robert Kilburn Root, Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew, New York: Henry Holt and Company, page 9
    • [E]ach of the transcendentalists went his own way [...] driven at last to some wayward retreat of his own - a library in a mossy house in Concard, a pitched tent along the Merrimack River, or even at sea , on the whale's road, where the white foam sprays and the horological soul dreams of its...1952, The American Temper, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, page 203

Examples of whale's road in a sentence

  • Taken by themselves, the kennings are not especially witty, and calling a ship “a sea-stallion” and the open sea “the whale's road” is no great feat.2014, M.J. Toswell, Borges the Unacknowledged Medievalist, New York: Palgrave Macmillan:
  • [H]ow likely was it that a man would take a ship alone, especially in deep water, the whale's road?2006, Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley, edited by Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, A Place To Believe In, Pennsylvania University Press, page...

Synonyms of whale's road

Origin of whale's road

Calque of Old English hranrād, from hran (“whale”) + rād (“road”).

Questions about whale's road

What does whale's road mean?
Whale's road means the ocean; the open sea.
How do you use whale's road in a sentence?
Taken by themselves, the kennings are not especially witty, and calling a ship “a sea-stallion” and the open sea “the whale's road” is no great feat.
What part of speech is whale's road?
Whale's road is a noun.

Words near whale's road in the dictionary

  1. whale watcher
  2. whale watchers
  3. whale watches
  4. whale watching
  5. whale's guide
  6. whale's road
  7. whale's tail
  8. whale's way
  9. whale-backed
  10. whale-fisher
  11. whale-fishers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whale's road (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: “whale's road.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whale%27s_road. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.