chine

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The backbone or spine, especially of an animal.
• noun A cut of meat containing part of the backbone.
• noun A ridge or crest.
• noun Nautical The line of intersection between the side and bottom of a flatbottom or V-bottom boat.
• transitive verb To cut (a carcass, for example) through the spine, as when butchering.

from The Century Dictionary.

• To split open; crack; chink; chap.
• To split; crack; burst; lay open.
• noun A crack; chink; rift; cleft; crevice; fissure.
• noun A ravine or large fissure in a cliff: a term especially common in the Isle of Wight and Hampshire, England: as, Black-gang chine.
• noun The backbone or spine: now commonly used only of an animal.
• noun A piece of the backbone of an animal, with the adjoining parts, cut for cooking.
• noun Figuratively, a ridge of land.
• To cut through the backbone or into chine-pieces.
• noun An erroneous form for chime (of a cask).
• noun A part of a ship. See chime, 2.
• Literally, colored in Chinese fashion: applied to fabrics in which the warp is dyed in different colors, so that a mottled effect is produced, or in which a double thread, formed of two smaller threads of different colors twisted together, is used to produce a similar mottled or speckled appearance.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun Prov. Eng. A chink or cleft; a narrow and deep ravine.
• noun The backbone or spine of an animal; the back.
• noun A piece of the backbone of an animal, with the adjoining parts, cut for cooking. [See Illust. of Beef.]
• noun The edge or rim of a cask, etc., formed by the projecting ends of the staves; the chamfered end of a stave.
• transitive verb To cut through the backbone of; to cut into chine pieces.
• transitive verb Too chamfer the ends of a stave and form the chine..

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

• noun The top of a ridge.
• noun The spine of an animal.
• noun nautical a sharp angle in the cross section of a hull
• verb transitive To cut through the backbone of; to cut into chine pieces.
• verb To chamfer the ends of a stave and form the chine.
• noun Southern England a steep-sided ravine leading from the top of a cliff down to the sea

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun backbone of an animal
• noun cut of meat or fish including at least part of the backbone
• verb cut through the backbone of an animal