cordage

Borrowed from French cordage.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈkɔːdɪdʒ/

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cordage (countable and uncountable, plural cordages)

1. (uncountable) Cord (of any type) when viewed as a mass or commodity.
2. (nautical) A set of ropes and cords, especially that used for a ship's rigging.
   • 1819 July 15, [Lord Byron], Don Juan, London: […] Thomas Davison, […], →OCLC, canto II, stanza 13:

     So Juan stood, bewildered on the deck: / The wind sung, cordage strained, and sailors swore […]

   • 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “chapter 22”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:

     […] as the old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang […]

   • 1923, Charles Boardman Hawes, The Dark Frigate, Chapter 8:

     Boatswain Marsham fell to work overhauling the bolts of sail-cloth and the hanks of cordage and the coils of rope, till he had found a new foresail and laid it under the hatch, and had placed great ropes and such cordage as headlines and marlines and sennets so that a man could lay hands on them in a time of haste and confusion.

   • 1974, Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur, Faber & Faber, published 1992, page 151:

     A lone river wind sighed in the cordage of the ship.

3. (obsolete) An amount of wood measured in cords.

• (a set of ropes used on a ship): buntline, clewline, cringle, cunningham, downhaul, footrope, guy, halyard, horse, lift, outhaul, sheet, shroud, stay, tack

• (a set of ropes used on a ship): rigging

From corde +‎ -age.

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cordage m (plural cordages)

1. rope (especially, for a vessel)

• “cordage”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012