Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The act or an instance of sighting or reaching land after a voyage or flight.
- noun The land sighted or reached after a voyage or flight.
- noun The reaching of land by an oceanic storm or a part, especially the eye, of a storm.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A land-slide or land-slip.
- noun Nautical, an approach or a coming to land, in the course or at the end of a sea-voyage; also, land so approached or reached.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A sudden transference of property in land by the death of its owner.
- noun (Naut.) Sighting or making land when at sea.
- noun (Naut.) the sighting of land in conformity with the navigator's reckoning and expectation.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Arrival at the
shore byship . - noun The point at which a
hurricane or similar storm reaches land.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the first sighting of land from the sea after a voyage (or flight over water)
- noun the seacoast first sighted on a voyage (or flight over water)
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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Forecasters said the likelihood that Alberto will become a hurricane prior to landfall is decreasing.
June 2006 2006
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Do all you liberals actually think that a hurricane making landfall is reason for every Republican in America to drop what they are doing, clear their agendas and rush to the site of the destruction?
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Now, while I’ll be the first to admit that hurricanes are lethal and forewarning of possible landfall is more than helpful, the constant firing of distress signals by the media tends to dull our fears.
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And we make landfall, which is -- which means that the center of the eye makes landfall, touches land somewhere.
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MYERS: Well, I think we can -- we can safely call landfall now, Tony.
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Because even far away from the forecast track landfall, which is pretty far to the south of here, they're going to easy get winds of (INAUDIBLE) if not hurricane force.
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The area where the hurricane made landfall, which is across the border in Nicaragua, we spoke to a person there, the minister of health, who is there holed up in a hospital.
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This really what it does is allows federal funds, supplies, resources, people to be in place in Texas, even before this makes landfall, which is really a great advantage, a criteria that has to be met.
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The media riot that followed the Katrina landfall was a disgrace to your profession.
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So the storm could strengthen to a category five long before landfall, which is expected at 2: 00 a.m. Tuesday and south of Cancun and Cozumel, north of the Honduras and north of the Belize/Mexico border.
Gammerstang commented on the word landfall
(noun) - A sudden translation of property in land by the death of a rich man. --Rev. John Boag's Imperial Lexicon of the English Language, c. 1850
April 22, 2018