MAINMAST

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does mainmast mean? 

• MAINMAST (noun)
  The noun MAINMAST has 1 sense:

1. the chief mast of a sailing vessel with two or more masts

  Familiarity information: MAINMAST used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• MAINMAST (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The chief mast of a sailing vessel with two or more masts

Classified under:

Nouns denoting man-made objects

Hypernyms ("mainmast" is a kind of...):

mast (a vertical spar for supporting sails)

 Context examples 

There was the mainmast, fifteen inches in diameter at what was now the butt, still sixty-five feet in length, and weighing, I roughly calculated, at least three thousand pounds.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

Then turning to his first minister, who waited behind him with a white staff, near as tall as the mainmast of the Royal Sovereign, he observed how contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I: and yet, says he, I dare engage these creatures have their titles and distinctions of honour; they contrive little nests and burrows, that they call houses and cities; they make a figure in dress and equipage; they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, they betray!

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

The room was most dear to her, and she would not have changed its furniture for the handsomest in the house, though what had been originally plain had suffered all the ill-usage of children; and its greatest elegancies and ornaments were a faded footstool of Julia's work, too ill done for the drawing-room, three transparencies, made in a rage for transparencies, for the three lower panes of one window, where Tintern Abbey held its station between a cave in Italy and a moonlight lake in Cumberland, a collection of family profiles, thought unworthy of being anywhere else, over the mantelpiece, and by their side, and pinned against the wall, a small sketch of a ship sent four years ago from the Mediterranean by William, with H.M.S. Antwerp at the bottom, in letters as tall as the mainmast.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

Almost before I knew it, and without one serious hitch, I had the mainmast stepped.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

At the dark end of the first day we returned, exhausted, to our little cove, towing the mainmast behind us.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)