sea-light

English

Alternative forms

• sealight
• sea light

Etymology

sea +‎ light

Noun

sea-light (countable and uncountable, plural sea-lights)

1. Light from the sea, either due to reflection off the waves or from bioluminescence.
   • 2012, Jenny Nimmo, Charlie Bone and the Wilderness Wolf, →ISBN:

     A damp mist filled the room and the musty-coloured books that lined the walls were bathed in eerie sea-light.

   • 2013, Jan Campbell, Freudian Passions: Psychoanalysis, Form and Literature, →ISBN:

     There it is: an octagonal shaped white house with a thatched roof, my bedroom with the grey sea-light streaming through slanted windows.

   • 2014, Alexander Cordell, The Dreams of Fair Women, →ISBN:

     It is she, they say, who is waving festival lanterns down there, making such beautiful sea-lights.

2. A light on the seacoast to warn or guide boats.
   • 1848, William Laxton, The Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal - Volume 11, page 208:

     The elevation of the lantern above the sea should not, if possible, for sea-lights, exceed 200 feet ; and about 150 feet is sufficient, under almost any circumstances, to give the range which is required.

   • 1999, Elbert Hubbard, Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book, →ISBN:

     For the good of man, his father and grandfather planted the high sea-lights upon the Inchcape and the Tyree Coast.

   • 2013, D. Alan Stevenson, The World's Lighthouses: From Ancient Times to 1820, →ISBN, page 1809:

     On it's trial as a sea-light at Havre the result was unsatisfactory, as the compromise of merging two different curves in the design halved the concentration of light obtainable from a complete parabolic reflector without gaining sufficient compensation from the wider spread of weak light from the elliptic portion.