Dyke

Pronunciation

• IPA: en, /daɪk/
• Rhymes: -en, -aɪk

Alternative forms

• dike,

A variant of dike, from Northern and dike ("ditch"), from . Influenced by and .

Oxford Dictionaries. "dyke".

See also

ditch.

Full definition of dyke

Noun

1. (historical) A long, narrow hollow dug from the ground to serve as a boundary marker.
2. A long, narrow hollow dug from the ground to conduct water.
3. (dialect) Any navigable watercourse.
4. (dialect) Any watercourse.
5. (dialect) Any small body of water.
6. (obsolete) Any hollow dug into the ground.
7. (now chiefly Australia, slang) A place to urinate and defecate: an outhouse or lavatory.
8. An embankment formed by the creation of a ditch.
9. (obsolete) A city wall.
10. (now chiefly Scotland) A low embankment or stone wall serving as an enclosure and boundary marker.
11. (dialect) Any fence or hedge.
12. An earthwork raised to prevent inundation of low land by the sea or flooding rivers.
13. (figuratively) Any impediment, barrier, or difficulty.
14. A beaver's dam.
15. (dialect) A jetty; a pier.
16. A raised causeway.
17. (dialect, mining) A fissure in a rock stratum filled with intrusive rock; a fault.
18. (geology) A body of rock (usually igneous) originally filling a fissure but now often rising above the older stratum as it is eroded away.
• 1968,

Synonyms

• (long, narrow excavation) ditch, trench, fosse
• (small body of water) puddle, pond, pool, lakelet, mere
• (any hollow) den, cave, hole, pit
• (any embankment) bank, embankment, earthwork
• (barrier of stone or earth) bank, embankment, dam, levee, breakwater, floodwall, seawall

Derived terms

• Devil's Dyke
• dry-stone dyke
• dyke-back
• dyke bottom
• dyke louper
• dyke phase, dyke-phase
• dyke road
• dyke-rock
• dyke swarm, dyke-swarm
• fail dyke
• February fill-dyke, fill-dyke
• finger in the dyke
• King's Dyke

Related terms

• ditch
• dig

Verb

1. (transitive or intransitive) To dig, particularly to create a ditch.
2. (transitive) To surround with a ditch, to entrench.
3. (transitive, Scotland) To surround with a low dirt or stone wall.
4. (transitive or intransitive) To raise a protective earthwork against a sea or river.
5. (transitive) To scour a watercourse.
6. (transitive) To steep fibers within a watercourse.

. Attested since the 1940s (in Berrey and Van den Bark’s 1942 American Thesaurus of Slang)

"dike, dyke, n.3" The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford UP, April 4, 2000.http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50064031.

or 1930s.

MWO

Semantic development from dyke ("ditch") has been proposed, and some sources from the 1890s are said to record dyke as slang for "vulva" and hedge of the dyke as slang for "pubic hair",

GDoS|id=djbkqki|entry=hedge

but Green's Dictionary of Slang says dyke in the latter phrase had no reference to lesbianism and Dictionary.com considers a connection unlikely.

Bull dyke
bulldike is attested earlier, in reference to women since at least the 1920s

Dictionary.com|bulldyke

Etymonline

(the 29 July 1892 Decatur Daily Review in Illinois mentions a woman who "won the affections of Harvey Neal, alias 'Bulldyke'", whose gender is unclear;

GDoS|id=x3tzlsa|entry=bull-dyke

compare dike ("well-dressed man")), and bulldyker (and the practice of bulldyking) are also attested earlier, e.g. in Parke's 1906 Human Sexuality, in the speech of Philadelphians,

Joseph Richardson Parke, Human Sexuality: A Medico-literary Treatise (1906), page 309: "In American homosexual argot, female inverts, or lesbian lovers, are known euphemistically as 'bulldykers,' whatever that may mean: at least that is their sobriquet in the 'Red Light' district of Philadelphia.

and backcountry Black Americans.

Compare bulldagger, attested since around the same time

and used especially by Black women.

JoAnne Myers, Historical Dictionary of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movements (2013), p. 97

Yetta Howard, Ugly Differences: Queer Female Sexuality in the Underground (2018), p. 238, which also refers to "Bogus, “The 'Queen B,'” and Walker, “The Debutante in Harlem,” 58–102, and “Lesbian Pulp in Black and White,” 103–138, for considerations of the figure of the black bulldagger in other Harlem Renaissance texts."

Other linguists suggested that bull dyke(r) referred to strong Black women who dug dikes, or derived from bull + dick, perhaps in reference to Black men.

Charles Panati, Sexy Origins and Intimate Things (1998), p. 181: "In fact, “bulldiking” is one of the earliest phrases in which the term “dike" has tough female overtones. It appeared in the American South in the nineteenth century, used by Black Americans. Some linguists believe that strong black women who helped dig watercourses on Southern plantations were called “bulldikes.” Others, however, claim that "dike" is really a corruption of "dick", slang for "penis," and ... argue that in the American South, Black men who worked on plantations were called "bull dicks" by their white owners."

It has also been suggested that dyke is a shortening of morphodyke, from morphodite, from hermaphrodite,

1991, Sterling K. Eisiminger, The Consequence of Error and Other Language Essays

although the derivation may go in the other direction instead, with morphodyke being a blend of morphodite with the already-extant word dyke.

Noun

1. (slang, usually pejorative, offensive) A lesbian, particularly one with masculine or butch traits or behavior.
2. (slang, usually pejorative, loosely, offensive) A non-heterosexual woman.

Usage notes

This term for a lesbian is often derogatory (or taken as such) when used by heterosexuals but is also used by some lesbians to refer to themselves positively. See reclaimed word and reappropriation for discussion.

Synonyms

• See

Derived terms

Anagrams