Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun An embankment of earth and rock built to prevent floods.
  • noun Chiefly British A low wall, often of sod, dividing or enclosing lands.
  • noun A barrier blocking a passage, especially for protection.
  • noun A raised causeway.
  • noun A ditch; a channel.
  • noun Geology A long mass of igneous rock that cuts across the structure of adjacent rock.
  • transitive verb To protect, enclose, or provide with a dike.
  • transitive verb To drain with dikes or ditches.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To make a ditch; dig; delve. See dig.
  • To dig; dig out; excavate. See dig.
  • To inclose with a ditch or with ditches.
  • To furnish with a dike; inclose, restrain, or protect by an embankment: as, to dike a river; to dike a tract of land.
  • To surround with a stone wall.
  • noun A channel for water made by digging; a ditch; a moat. See ditch.
  • noun A small pond or pool.
  • noun A ridge or bank of earth thrown up in excavating canal or a ditch; specifically, such a ridge or bank thrown up to prevent low lands from being overflowed; a continuous dam confining or restraining the waters of a stream or of the sea: as, the Netherlands are defended from the sea by dikes.
  • noun A low wall or fence of stone or turf, dividing or inclosing fields, etc. A dry dike is such a wall built without mortar. See fail-dike.
  • noun In geology, a fissure in rocks filled with material which has found its way into it while melted, or when brought by some other means into a fluid or semi-fluid condition.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To surround or protect with a dike or dry bank; to secure with a bank.
  • transitive verb To drain by a dike or ditch.
  • noun A ditch; a channel for water made by digging.
  • noun An embankment to prevent inundations; a levee.
  • noun Scot. A wall of turf or stone.
  • noun (Geol.) A wall-like mass of mineral matter, usually an intrusion of igneous rocks, filling up rents or fissures in the original strata.
  • intransitive verb obsolete To work as a ditcher; to dig.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun UK The northern English form of ditch.
  • noun A ditch and bank running alongside each other.
  • noun A barrier of stone or earth used to hold back water and prevent flooding.
  • noun pejorative A lesbian, especially a manly or unattractive lesbian.
  • noun geology A body of once molten igneous rock that was injected into older rocks in a manner that crosses bedding planes.
  • verb To erect a dike.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb enclose with a dike
  • noun a barrier constructed to contain the flow of water or to keep out the sea
  • noun (slang) offensive term for a lesbian who is noticeably masculine

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old English dīc, trench; see dhīgw- in Indo-European roots, and from Old Norse dīki, ditch.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Middle English (Northern) dik, dike, from Old Norse díki 'ditch, dike'. More at and doublet of ditch.

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Examples

  • Heavy rain can pour into the lake six times faster than it can be drained and at certain levels, the Corps of Engineers says, the dike is almost certain to fail.

    Joseph B. Treaster: Florida Lake: Could It Kill Again? Joseph B. Treaster 2010

  • Heavy rain can pour into the lake six times faster than it can be drained and at certain levels, the Corps of Engineers says, the dike is almost certain to fail.

    Joseph B. Treaster: Florida Lake: Could It Kill Again? Joseph B. Treaster 2010

  • Heavy rain can pour into the lake six times faster than it can be drained and at certain levels, the Corps of Engineers says, the dike is almost certain to fail.

    Joseph B. Treaster: Florida Lake: Could It Kill Again? Joseph B. Treaster 2010

  • If their fingers slip from the hole in dike and the flood waters pour in, we may be left with no functioning schools, not just poorly funded and performing ones.

    Alan Singer: No Longer Waiting for "Superman" Alan Singer 2010

  • If their fingers slip from the hole in dike and the flood waters pour in, we may be left with no functioning schools, not just poorly funded and performing ones.

    Alan Singer: No Longer Waiting for "Superman" Alan Singer 2010

  • If their fingers slip from the hole in dike and the flood waters pour in, we may be left with no functioning schools, not just poorly funded and performing ones.

    Alan Singer: No Longer Waiting for "Superman" Alan Singer 2010

  • Rush Limbaugh referred - used the word dike when talking about flooding in North Dakota.

    NewsBusters.org - Exposing Liberal Media Bias 2009

  • A fissure in the rock affords convenient space for a flight of steps descending gradually to the "dike" -- the local name for the embankment made at the foot of the cliffs to keep the Loire in its bed, and serve as a causeway for the highroad from

    La Grenadiere Honor�� de Balzac 1824

  • But numbers and political realities are one thing, the heat Steele took from GOP hardliners who like things just the way they are, and think that the way to shore up the floodwaters is to keep sticking there fingers in the hole in the dike is another.

    Michael Steele the Magically Disappearing Negro 2009

  • The property is bisected by an immense straight dike, which is called the Middle Wash, and which is so sluggish, so straight, so ugly, and so deep, as to impress the mind of a stranger with the ideas of suicide.

    John Caldigate 2004

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