whale's road

English

Etymology

Calque of Old English hranrād, from hran (“whale”) + rād (“road”).

Noun

the whale's road

  1. (literary) The ocean; the open sea.
    Synonyms: whale-road, whale's way
    • 1899, Robert Kilburn Root, Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew, New York: Henry Holt and Company, page 9:
      From the land of Mermedonia are we come,
      Borne hither from afar; our high-prowed ship
      Carried us o'er the whale's road with the flood,
      Our sea-horse fleet, all girt about with speed.
    • 1952, The American Temper, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, page 203:
      [E]ach of the transcendentalists went his own way [...] driven at last to some wayward retreat of his own - a library in a mossy house in Concard, a pitched tent along the Merrimack River, or even at sea , on the whale's road, where the white foam sprays and the horological soul dreams of its chronometrical truth.
    • 2014, M.J. Toswell, Borges the Unacknowledged Medievalist, New York: Palgrave Macmillan:
      Taken by themselves, the kennings are not especially witty, and calling a ship “a sea-stallion” and the open sea “the whale's road” is no great feat.
    • 2006, Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley, edited by Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, A Place To Believe In, Pennsylvania University Press, page 103:
      [H]ow likely was it that a man would take a ship alone, especially in deep water, the whale's road?
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