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CORACLE
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A small rounded boat made of hides stretched over a wicker frame; still used in some parts of Great Britain
Classified under:
Nouns denoting man-made objects
Hypernyms ("coracle" is a kind of...):
small boat (a boat that is small)
Context examples:
The current was bearing coracle and schooner southward at an equal rate.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
Ten to one, if I were so foolhardy as to cut the HISPANIOLA from her anchor, I and the coracle would be knocked clean out of the water.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
With one hand I caught the jib-boom, while my foot was lodged between the stay and the brace; and as I still clung there panting, a dull blow told me that the schooner had charged down upon and struck the coracle and that I was left without retreat on the HISPANIOLA.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
First, moving with all care, I gradually baled out the coracle with my sea-cap; then, getting my eye once more above the gunwale, I set myself to study how it was she managed to slip so quietly through the rollers.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
The current had turned at right angles, sweeping round along with it the tall schooner and the little dancing coracle; ever quickening, ever bubbling higher, ever muttering louder, it went spinning through the narrows for the open sea.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
The ebb had already run some time, and I had to wade through a long belt of swampy sand, where I sank several times above the ankle, before I came to the edge of the retreating water, and wading a little way in, with some strength and dexterity, set my coracle, keel downwards, on the surface.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
Striking, as we did, pretty near north-west across the island, we drew, on the one hand, ever nearer under the shoulders of the Spy-glass, and on the other, looked ever wider over that western bay where I had once tossed and trembled in the coracle.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
Gradually weariness grew upon me; a numbness, an occasional stupor, fell upon my mind even in the midst of my terrors, until sleep at last supervened and in my sea-tossed coracle I lay and dreamed of home and the old Admiral Benbow.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
Now and again too there would come a cloud of light sprays over the bulwark and a heavy blow of the ship's bows against the swell; so much heavier weather was made of it by this great rigged ship than by my home-made, lop-sided coracle, now gone to the bottom of the sea.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
Often, as I still lay at the bottom and kept no more than an eye above the gunwale, I would see a big blue summit heaving close above me; yet the coracle would but bounce a little, dance as if on springs, and subside on the other side into the trough as lightly as a bird.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
