Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A wagon-load; a cart-load.
- n. A load; weight; burden; mass.
- n. An old unit of weight for lead, lime, and some other substances; a two-horse cart-load. A fother of lead varies from 19 1/2 to 22 1/2 hundredweight, each hundredweight being usually 120 pounds avoirdupois. At Néwcastle in England a fother is a third of a chaldron; and in American lead-mines the word is sometimes used for a short ton.
- To place a sail or tarpaulin over, as a leak in a ship's hull, for the purpose of keeping the water out. In fathering a leak, rope-yarns, oakum, etc., are thickly stitched on the sail or tarpaulin.
Wiktionary
- n. obsolete a wagonload; a load of any sort.
- n. an old English measure of lead or other metals, usually containing 19.5 hundredweight; a fodder.
- n. dialect Food for animals.
- v. dialect To feed animals (with fother).
- v. dated, nautical To stop a leak with oakum or old rope (often by drawing a sail under the hull).
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. obsolete A wagonload; a load of any sort.
- n. See Fodder, a unit of weight.
- v. To stop (a leak in a ship at sea) by drawing under its bottom a thrummed sail, so that the pressure of the water may force it into the crack.
Etymologies
- From Old Norse fóðr, but see Old English fōdor, from Proto-Germanic *fōdran (compare Dutch voer 'pasture, fodder', German Futter 'feed', Swedish foder), from *fōda 'food', from Proto-Indo-European *pat- 'to feed'. More at food. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“But you - you have become what you are thanks to your fother-in-law.”
“And avril lavigne sings the main song because she wrote this fricken movie fother muckers.”
“Mostly, that's due to fother nations having caught up.”
Gerald Bracey: Falling Behind -- or Just the Old Bait-and-Switch?
“The good fother with the twingling in his eye will always have cakes in his pocket to bethroat us with for our allmichael good.”
“By the way, I experience a similar sort of mishearing where I live as people from other parts of Canada and even of my province think that we say the "a" in "father" like "lather" whereas to me it sounds like others say "fother".”
“On their fifth day, when the ship was riding so low she seemed sure to founder, Cochrane ordered another fother made, but this he ordered big enough to straddle half the starboard hull.”
“The explosion on board the whaler had driven in a section of the frigate's hull, but once the canvas fother was in place the pumps at last could begin to win the battle.”
“In the same way, it is possible to become an expert on the apparatus of the old-time naval world — backstays and top-gallants, twenty-four pounders and hardtack — without having the faintest idea how to fire a gun, reef a sail, or fother a ship's bottom.”
“Arthur went about, and his knights by his side; nought they found alive upon earth but the great fire, and bones innumerable; by estimation it seemed to them thirty fother.”
“Peggy Keys is a goin 'to begin huskin' next week, and we must have rye straw for the fother”
John and Mary; or, The Fugitive Slaves, a Tale of South-Eastern Pennsylvania
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘fother’.
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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word list
abligurition, humectant, absterge, dactylonomy, agamous, olecranon, geosmin, sphallolalia, aquiline, obloquy, quiescent, fother and 17 more...
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English Weights and Measures
Most of these are names of weights and measures in use before 1500, gleaned from household accounts of English estates and colleges.
pondus, clove, wey, charrus, pisa, sum, seam, petra, fatt, peck, quarter, skep and 49 more...
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The Other
Anything with to do with the word "other," or any sort of otherness (including words with the letters o-t-h-e-r, in that order, in their definitions).
other, Constitutive Other, The Other, Other, The Others, otherwise, othering, another, otherworldly, other-worldly, otherways, otherness and 35 more...
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The Aubrey/Maturin List I'm Gonna Mak...
I'm wading through Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels one by one, and someday, I'll wade through them again and list all the words I learned while reading them.
Edit: I started ma...studdingsail, carronade, mumchance, grumlin-futtocks, crosscat-harpings, holystone, sennit, orlop, orchitis, negus, kevel, altumal and 1112 more...
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It Has a Name??
Yes. Yes it does.
aglet, armsaye, scroop, rowel, ferrule, rasceta, chanking, philtrum, frenulum, keeper, agelast, punt and 285 more...
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epeolatrist's list
epeolatry, syzygy, sphallolalia, lucubration, lugubrious, cacology, mellifluous, tmesis, synecdoche, anathema, eschatological, razbliuto and 349 more...
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bloodworm's list
These are words that I enjoy because they are unique, rare, long, or just cool.
circumlocution, hysteresis, schadenfreude, quixotic, loquacious, ennui, sesquipedalian, defenestrate, obfuscate, syzygy, ubiquitous, superfluous and 231 more...
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kinds of kind
kind finds
mankind, enkindle, kindles, kinda, four of a kind, wunderkind, payment in kind, in-kind, kind, kindred, take kindly to, kinder and 53 more...
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Joannasephine's Words
fluffle, squalloop, mungo, shoddy, scroop, jacinth, stirp, honorificabilitud..., iatrogenic, abscission, aedile, allochthonous and 25 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for fother.
reesetee I know some people who could do with a little fothering. Mar 11, 2008
chained_bear "To seal a leak by lowering a sail over the side of the ship and positioning it to be sucked into the hole by the rushing sea."
--A Sea of Words, 202 Mar 11, 2008