Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Plural form of capstan.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Poor Sundry Buyers continually pressed his abdomen as he toiled around the deck-capstans; and never was Nancy's face quite so forlorn as when he obeyed the Maltese Cockney's command and went up to loose the mizzen-skysail.

    CHAPTER L 2010

  • They were hoisting the mizzen-upper-topsail-yard by means of one of the patent deck-capstans.

    CHAPTER L 2010

  • So we put in the hard infrastructure that provides the clean water – the bores, the big gravity fed water tanks, the capstans and the pipes.

    Oxfam Brings Clean Water, Sanitation to Somali Refugees 2011

  • The capstans in his flight suit inflated with a whoosh to compensate for the loss of cabin pressure, preventing his blood vessels from bursting.

    The U-2 spy plane fiasco Dobbs, Michael 2008

  • The pier was musical with the wash of the sea, the creaking of capstans and windlasses, and the airy fluttering of little vanes and sails.

    A Message from the Sea 2007

  • The pier was musical with the wash of the sea, the creaking of capstans and windlasses, and the airy fluttering of little vanes and sails.

    A Message from the Sea 2007

  • The long flat beach, with its little irregular houses, wooden and brick, and its litter of capstans, and great boats, and sheds, and bare upright poles with tackle and blocks, and loose gravelly waste places overgrown with grass and weeds, wore as dull an appearance as any place I ever saw.

    Bleak House 2007

  • Boats are hauled up upon it, ropes are coiled all over it; lobster-pots, nets, masts, oars, spars, sails, ballast, and rickety capstans, make a perfect labyrinth of it.

    Reprinted Pieces 2007

  • On the beach, among the rough buggers and capstans, groups of storm-beaten boatmen, like a sort of marine monsters, watched under the lee of those objects, or stood leaning forward against the wind, looking out through battered spy-glasses.

    Reprinted Pieces 2007

  • The little boy slept on calmly still, in spite of all the din and uproar, the song and the shout, the tramp of heavy feet, the creaking of capstans, and the thump of bulky oars, and the crush of ponderous rollers.

    Mary Anerley Richard Doddridge 2004

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