decuman
English
Etymology
From Latin decumānus (“of the tenth, and by metonymy, large”), from decem (“ten”).
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ˈdɛkjʊmən/
Adjective
decuman (not comparable)
- (obsolete) Large; chief; applied to an extraordinary billow, supposed by some to be every tenth in sequence.
- c. 1870, Frederic Farrar, The witness of history to Christ; 5 sermons, being the Hulsean lects. for 1870:
- decuman billows
- (historical) Connected with the principal gate of an Ancient Roman camp, near which the tenth cohort of the legion was stationed.
Noun
decuman (plural decumans)
- (obsolete) An extraordinarily large billow.
- 1869 December (indicated as 1870 January), James Russell Lowell, “The Cathedral”, in James Thomas Fields, editor, The Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics, volume XXV, number CXLVII, Boston, Mass.: Fields, Osgood, & Co., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 5:
- Looking up suddenly, I found mine eyes / Confronted with the minster's vast repose. / Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff / Left inland by the ocean's slow retreat, / […] / Remembering shocks of surf that clomb and fell, / Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman, […]
Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “decuman”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)