decuman

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In "The Year is Gone" there is great tenderness of sentiment and grace of expression; "Love Disposed of" is a pretty fancy embodied with true lyric feeling; but the poem which over crests all the others like a decuman wave is "The Brave Old Ship, the Orient."

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Definitions (5)

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  1. In Rom. milit. antiq., an epithet applied to a gate of the Roman camp near which the tenth cohorts of the legions were encamped. The decuman gate was the principal entrance to the camp, and was that furthest from the enemy. Pompey, finding the enemy in his camp, rode out of the decuman gate. Amer. Jour. Philol., VI. 182.
  2. Large; immense: used especially of waves. Overwhelmed and quite sunk by such decumane billowes. Bp. Gauden, Tears of the Church, p. 30. That same decumane wave that took us fore and aft somewhat altered my pulse. Urquhart, tr. of Rabelais, iv. 23.
  3. In astrology, one of the ten divisions of the ecliptic.

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Etymologies (1)

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  1. Also decumane; = Spanish Portuguese Italian decumano, from Latin decumanus, decimanus, of or belonging to the tenth part (plural decumani, the tenth cohort, porta decumana, the decuman gate), also considerable, large, immense (applied to eggs and waves, apparently from the notion that every tenth egg or wave in a series is the largest), from decumus, decimus, tenth: see decimal.
 

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