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dike

UK/daɪk/US/daɪk/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,143 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: dikes

A dike is a bank built to hold back water. Build a dike, the dike held, a sea dike.

The Netherlands is built behind them, and about a quarter of the country lies below sea level. It is also spelled dyke, which in Britain can mean the ditch as well as the bank. Note that dyke is also a slur for a lesbian, so the word wants care.

Godot13 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of dike

  1. 1noundikeA bank built to hold back water.C1

    “The farmers built a dike to stop the river from flooding their fields.”

dike is a bank.

Also accepted in games: dyke

Where it comes from

Old Norse diki meant a ditch, influenced by Dutch and Low German words for a dam. Ditch is the same word.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *dʰeygʷ-

  2. Middle Low German

    dīk — dam

  3. Middle Dutch

    dijc — ditch; dam

  4. Old Norse

    díki — ditch

  5. enm-nor

    dik

  6. English, today

    dike

Built from

  • dike · Middle English — ditch

From enm-nor dik and dike (“ditch”), from Old Norse díki (“ditch”). Influenced by Middle Dutch dijc (“ditch; dam”) and Middle Low German dīk (“dam”). See also ditch.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

dike in the wild

  • Alternatively, it is called a dike (American English), dyke (Commonwealth English), floodbank, or stop bank.

    Levee

  • In geology, a dike or dyke is a sheet of rock that is formed in a fracture of a pre-existing rock body.

    Dike (geology)

  • Clastic dikes are formed when sediment fills a pre-existing crack.

    Dike (geology)

  • A ring dike or ring dyke is an intrusive igneous body that is circular, oval or arcuate in plan and has steep contacts.

    Ring dike

  • While the widths of ring dikes differ, they can be up to several thousand meters.

    Ring dike

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.