whale-road
whale-road noun: the ocean; the open sea.
Noun
the whale-road (plural whale-roads)
- The ocean; the open sea.
- […] and his name was called Scyld. He grew to man's estate, and became a mighty king, and subdued the peoples under him. All the neighboring peoples across the whale roads obeyed Scyld.1907, John Gibb, “Beowulf”, in The Children's Hour, volume 4, page 3
- In the end each clan on the outlying coasts / beyond the whale-road had to yield to him / and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.1999, Seamus Heaney, transl., Beowulf
- Synonyms:
- whale's road, whale's way
Synonyms of whale-road
Forms of whale-road
| plural | whale-roads |
|---|
Origin of whale-road
From whale + road, after Old English hranrād, from hran (“whale”) + rād (“road”), though this translation is debated. Another translation is hran as dolphin and rād as a modified form of rāden (to ride). Therefore, hranrād would be the "riding place of dolphins" or "dolphins' riding".
Questions about whale-road
- What does whale-road mean?
- Whale-road means the ocean; the open sea.
- What part of speech is whale-road?
- Whale-road is a noun.
- What is the plural of whale-road?
- The plural of whale-road is whale-roads.
Words near whale-road in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: whale-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.
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Cite this entry: “whale-road.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whale-road. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.