Definitions

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

  • adverb nautical Towards the stern

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Always a couple of brutes insist upon impelling you sternwards; from whom the only means to release yourself is to kick out vigorously and unmercifully, when the Arabs will possibly retreat.

    Notes of a Journey From Cornhill to Grand Cairo 2004

  • With an obscene wallowing, sucking sound, the schooner's bows tore free of the soft sand, and she shot sternwards into the lagoon.

    The Gates of Noon Rohan, Michael Scott, 1951- 1992

  • The whole boat jerked sternwards abruptly with the recoil, as though when underway she had struck a rock, and the smoke came back round them in a sullen pall.

    Hornblower And The Hotspur Forester, C. S. 1962

  • The passengers, getting wind of some excitement, were hurrying sternwards, and he pushed along with them, glad to forget his sore feelings for a minute.

    All Aboard A Story for Girls Fannie E. Newberry

  • While sternwards whirled unstrung—pale beads of foam,

    Morning at Sea in the Tropics 1918

  • And so he bade his ships drop away sternwards; and then Earl Eric lay broadside on.

    The Red True Story Book Andrew Lang 1900

  • In the centre, sternwards, ran a narrow refreshment bar, where a score of men were standing to refresh themselves.

    Dawn of All Robert Hugh Benson 1892

  • Duff, after eating, returned to the quarter-deck, where he watched with folded arms the rather unskillful efforts to handle the long twelve pounder pointed sternwards from the Wanderer's waist.

    Ralph Granger's Fortunes William Perry Brown 1885

  • As we reached the middle of the sound opposite Armadale, there fell a dead calm; and the Betsey, more actively idle than the ship manned by the Ancient Mariner, dropped sternwards along the tide, to the dull music of the flapping sail.

    The Cruise of the Betsey or, A Summer Ramble Among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist or, Ten Thousand Miles Over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland Hugh Miller 1829

  • She'll be smashed to matchwood in a minute, the after-fall has unshipped; "then whipping a knife from the belt of one of them he severed the remaining fall, and saw the boat plunge down sternwards and outwards from the side just in time; another half-minute and she would have disappeared under the steamer's bottom to be hopelessly stove in.

    Tessa 1901 Louis Becke 1884

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