Chine

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -aɪn

From Middle English chyne, from Middle French eschine.

Noun

1. The top of a ridge.
2. The spine of an animal.
• DrydenAnd chine with rising bristles roughly spread.
• 1883: Robert Louis Stevenson, ... the captain aimed at the fugitive one last tremendous cut, which would certainly have split him to the chine had it not been intercepted by our big signboard ...
3. A piece of the backbone of an animal, with the adjoining parts, cut for cooking.
4. (nautical) a sharp angle in the cross section of a hull
5. The edge or rim of a cask, etc., formed by the projecting ends of the staves; the chamfered end of a stave.

Full definition of chine

Verb

1. (transitive) To cut through the backbone of; to cut into chine pieces.
2. To chamfer the ends of a stave and form the chine.

Middle English chin ("crack, fissure, chasm"), from Old English cine, cinu. The Old English term is cognate to Old Saxon kena, and is related to the Old English verb cīnan ("to grow in size, crack, split, gape"), from Proto Germanic *kīnaną ("to sprout, germinate, split open"), from Proto-Indo-European *geie ("to split open, to sprout").

Noun

1. (Southern England) a steep-sided ravine leading from the top of a cliff down to the sea
• J. IngelowThe cottage in a chine.
• 1988, Alan Hollinghurst, , Penguin Books (1988), page 169In the odorous stillness of the day I thought of the tracks that threaded Egdon Heath, and of benign, elderly Sandbourne, with its chines and sheltered beach-huts.

Anagrams

• niche