sealight

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English[edit]

Noun[edit]

sealight (countable and uncountable, plural sealights)

  1. Alternative form of sea-light
    1. Light from the sea.
      • 1834, Andrew Crichton, The History of Arabia, page 67:
        Those sealights have been explained by a diversity of causes ; but the singular brilliancy of the Red Sea seems owing to fish-spawn and animalculae, a conjecture which receives some corroboration from the circumstance that travellers who mention it visited the gulf during the spawning period, — that is, between the latter end of December and the end of February.
      • 1892, William Churchill, A Princess of Fiji, page 210:
        Twixt starlight and sealight swiftly we go.
      • 2004, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, The Daydreaming Boy, page 171:
        I am sure the Lebanon tried to save me with her geography the mountains and cypress and twice-bloomed jasmine and wisteria and red brick roofs and the sweets the delicacies which make the mouth water — with all of her bodied earth and perhaps she did and perhaps I have not died in the sea after a long swim, Juliana at the shore yelling at me to not do it; and the sealight as always is the most beautiful.
    2. A light on the seacoast to warn or guide boats.
      • 1860, “Latin London”, in Charles Dickens, editor, All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal, volume 3, page 78:
        When we had crossed from Gaul, guided by the lofty sealight of Dubrae (Dover, if you will), our mariners cast anchor under the massive walls of the citadel of Rutupiae, chief port in our remote province of Britain, which is, in your tongue, Richborough, near Sanwich.
      • 1890, John Richard Vernon, Gleanings After Harvest, Or, Idylls of the Home: Studies and Sketches:
        But reappearing with calm, steadfast ray, A sealight cleaves the murky, sullen dark.
      • 1993, J. F. Quinn, History of Mayo, volume 2, page 138:
        A lighthouse crowns a lofty cliff on the north-east extremity, and though of doubtful value as a sealight forms a good mark for entering Clew Bay.