Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Nautical A horn for sounding warning signals in fog or darkness, used especially on ships, buoys, and coastal installations.
- n. A booming, insistent voice.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A horn used on board a vessel to sound a warning signal to other vessels in foggy weather.
- n. A sounding instrument for warning vessels off shore during a fog. The most powerful of these instruments is the siren, or siren fog-horn (see
siren ), in which the sound is produced by means of a disk with twelve radial slits, which is made to rotate in front of a fixed disk exactly similar, a cast-iron trumpet 20 feet long forming part of the apparatus. The moving disk revolves 2,800 times a minute, and in each revolution there are of course twelve coincidences between the two disks; through the openings thus made steam or air at a high pressure is made to pass, so that there are 33,600 puffs of steam or compressed air per minute. The pulsations thus developed impinge upon the sides of the trumpet and are reflected outward in parallel rays, producing a blast of very great power in the direction required.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A horn that emits a loud low-pitched sound, used on ships navigating in a fog, to warn other ships of their presence.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a warning device consisting of a horn that generates a loud low tone
- n. a loud low warning signal that can be heard by fogbound ships
Examples
“i am constantly reminded of that little chickenhawk feller who used to appear in foghorn leghorn cartoons.”
“So I write here today once again, simply trying to be a "foghorn" in the midst of the religious smokescreens that are thrown up daily by the modern day "ministers" of God.”
“The rise of the Tea Party owes a great deal to Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV, the foghorn of extremism that changed the nature of political discourse.”
The Guardian: Britain must resist Tea Party thinking | Polly Toynbee
“How dare Rush Limbaugh, the principal foghorn of the Right-wing noise machine, denounce them as "freeloaders?”
“On Giglio, the head waiter's parents knew to listen for the foghorn, local newspaper Il Tirreno reported, saying that the head waiter had placed a call to his father earlier Friday, telling him to look for the ship at 9:30 p.m.”
The Wall Street Journal: Italian Captain: 'We Abandoned the Ship'
“The bishop has been forced into a humiliating retreat after endorsing a booklet by Stephen Green, the foghorn from Christian Voice.”
“You can barely hear the music over the carping, which appears to be getting louder as her debut album approaches: a cynic might say that's just as well, given the recent Saturday Night Live appearance in which she demonstrated her uncanny mastery of the vocal style deployed by Ian Brown during the Stone Roses' later years – she honked like the foghorn on Portland Bill lighthouse.”
“IN his dressing room last week John Goodman stood up, emitted a long, blaring foghorn blast and then announced in a loudspeaker voice, “Now docking. ...””
“When foggy preaching ambiguously handles the topic of social suffering, toughminded clergy bring a foghorn, exposing the policies and practices that, in part, contribute to disproportionately high levels of joblessness, foreclosures and poor health in black and brown communities.”
The Huffington Post: Andrew Wilkes: Tough Minds And Tender Hearts: An Open Letter To Young Clergy
“Over here, about 75% of any X Factor episode is made of endless desperate-eyed hopefuls wailing Someone Like You like a foghorn being attacked by a walrus.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘foghorn’.
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Just 'cause I like 'em, F
felony, frolic, fend, fuselage, farthingale, freewheeling, frigorific, flummery, fancypants, felsitic, flagstone, flageolet and 295 more...
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Compounds That Look Freakish
You know who you are, freakish compounds. Though very useful, some of these words just don't seem right together--or, their meanings are so far from what the two (or more) component words suggest t...
nightjar, bullfinch, grassquit, bananaquit, ovenbird, waxwing, stonechat, wheatear, bushtit, wrentit, starthroat, godwit and 158 more...
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GRE list 1
Bloviate, Bacchanalia, mirth, covet, inconsequential, prescient, heresy, revelry, modality, gentrify, vitiate, tantalize and 182 more...
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2008 Wordlist
Hopefully, I'll be using this site for more than one year. It will be fun then to look back and see what new words I found worthy of notice in any given year.
All words spotted in 2008...longanimity, permalancer, breeder, biodegradable, handicapable, gender-neutral, translator, interpreter, translation, interpreting, kleptocracy, fanfiction and 1598 more...
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jgs's Words
liminal, luminescence, trajectory, simulacrum, thundersnow, trappings, rigour, temporality, mammalian, diffuse, tearing, flail and 83 more...
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leahbrooks's Words
sympathy, foghorn, dangle, resound, resolve, etymology, lingua franca, amazon, sequin, nostalgia, frenchify, wiki
Tweets
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