bight
English
Etymology
From Middle English bight, biȝt, byȝt (also bought, bowght, bouȝt, see bought), from Old English byht (“bend, angle, corner; bay, bight”), from Proto-Germanic *buhtiz (“bend, curve”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰūgʰ- (“to bend”). Cognate with Scots bicht (“bight”), Dutch bocht (“bend, curve”), Low German Bucht (“bend, bay”), German Bucht (“bay, bight”), Danish bugt (“bay”), Icelandic bugða (“curve”), Albanian butë (“soft, flabby”) . Compare bought.
Pronunciation
Noun
bight (plural bights)
- A corner, bend, or angle; a hollow
- the bight of a horse's knee
- the bight of an elbow
- 1905, Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, page 166
- I spied a bight of meadow some way below the roadway in an angle of the river.
- An area of sea lying between two promontories, larger than a bay, wider than a gulf
- (geography) A bend or curve in a coastline, river, or other geographical feature.
- A curve in a rope
- 1899 February, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number M, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part I:
- I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking.
Related terms
Translations
bend
|
large bay
|
curve
See also
Categories:
- English terms derived from Proto-Indo-European
- English terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *bʰewgʰ-
- English terms inherited from Middle English
- English terms derived from Middle English
- English terms inherited from Old English
- English terms derived from Old English
- English terms inherited from Proto-Germanic
- English terms derived from Proto-Germanic
- English 1-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio pronunciation
- Rhymes:English/aɪt
- Rhymes:English/aɪt/1 syllable
- English terms with homophones
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- en:Geography
- English terms with quotations