HIGH WATER

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does high water mean? 

• HIGH WATER (noun)
  The noun HIGH WATER has 1 sense:

1. the tide when the water is highest

  Familiarity information: HIGH WATER used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• HIGH WATER (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The tide when the water is highest

Classified under:

Nouns denoting natural events

Synonyms:

high tide; high water; highwater

Hypernyms ("high water" is a kind of...):

tide (the periodic rise and fall of the sea level under the gravitational pull of the moon)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "high water"):

direct tide (the occurrence of high tide on one side of the earth coinciding with high tide on the opposite side)

neap; neap tide (a less than average tide occurring at the first and third quarters of the moon)

springtide (a greater than average tide occurring during the new and full moons)

 Context examples 

Come high water, all hands take a pull upon the line, and off she comes as sweet as natur'.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

Area of shore between mean high water and mean low water.

(Littoral zone, NOAA Paleoclimate Glossary)

B-DNA is the most common DNA conformation in vivo and the favored conformation at high water concentrations.

(B-DNA, NCI Thesaurus)

It is nice at high water; but when the tide is out it shoals away to nothing, and there is merely the stream of the Esk, running between banks of sand, with rocks here and there.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

It was really March; but it was April in its mild air, brisk soft wind, and bright sun, occasionally clouded for a minute; and everything looked so beautiful under the influence of such a sky, the effects of the shadows pursuing each other on the ships at Spithead and the island beyond, with the ever-varying hues of the sea, now at high water, dancing in its glee and dashing against the ramparts with so fine a sound, produced altogether such a combination of charms for Fanny, as made her gradually almost careless of the circumstances under which she felt them.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

Having thus fixed fifty hooks to as many cables, I went back to the north-east coast, and putting off my coat, shoes, and stockings, walked into the sea, in my leathern jerkin, about half an hour before high water.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

In three minutes I had the HISPANIOLA sailing easily before the wind along the coast of Treasure Island, with good hopes of turning the northern point ere noon and beating down again as far as North Inlet before high water, when we might beach her safely and wait till the subsiding tide permitted us to land.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

If they come to torture me, I might let slip a word of where the ship is, for I got the ship, part by luck and part by risking, and she lies in North Inlet, on the southern beach, and just below high water.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)