Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A venthole, as in a cask.
- noun One of the spiracles or stigmata through which insects respire. Also called
breathing-pore . - noun The spiracle or blowhole of a cetacean.
- noun A hole in the ice where an aquatic mammal, as a seal, comes up to breathe.
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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They use their blubber stove to melt snow for drinking water but do not pause to catch fresh meat, despite the many breathing-hole domes Silence points out in the ice.
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Perhaps in the sunlight of summer, late spring, or autumn its shadow might be visible under the ice, its nose visible beneath the tiny breathing-hole opening … but in starlight?
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Crozier believes Silence when she strings that there are dozens of such breathing-hole domes within a single seal's territory, but he's damned if he can find them.
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Once next to the breathing-hole dome in the dark, moving in slow motion, she softly pushes several forked antlers into the snow and sets her knife, harpoon, lines, and other hunting bric-a-brac on them so that she can retrieve them without making a noise.
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Here is shewn a ghastly pool, a breathing-hole of the grim lord of hell, and a vast chasm breaking into Acheron yawns with pestilential throat.
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Porter wore a leather face-mask, with a lozenge-shaped breathing-hole, and slanted openings covered with yellow glass for eyes.
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She had come back to find her breathing-hole and her baby.
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Each mother seal hollows out a little igloo under the snow, around her breathing-hole, and leaves a tiny hole in the top of it, so her baby can have plenty of fresh air and be hidden from sight at the same time.
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He knew that by the time he overtook her, and fixed his teeth in her throat, he would be fairly winded; and then, with no breathing-hole at hand, he would die terribly, bumping up against the clear ice and staring madly through at the free air for which his lungs were agonizing.
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As soon as the dog had scented a breathing-hole, Kotuko would reverse the sleigh, driving a couple of sawed-off antlers, that stuck up like perambulator-handles from the back-rest, deep into the snow, so that the team could not get away.
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