dykes
- 1Plural of dyke.
Miles of earthen dykes protect the low farmland from winter storms at sea.
Geologists traced several dark dykes cutting across the paler granite of the cliff.
Note
A regular plural that covers the whole range of dyke: earth banks against the sea, channels dug to carry water, bodies of rock that filled cracks in older layers, and the offensive slang word for lesbians. Because the slur and the engineer's word share one spelling, the setting has to make the meaning plain. In a workshop the word means something else again, a pair of wire cutters.
- 2Diagonal cutting pliers, a type of wire cutters.
Use a sturdy pair of dykes to trim the leads flush with the circuit board.
Cheap dykes will chip if you try to cut thick steel wire with them.
Note
A workshop word that probably began as a blend of diagonal and cut, with dyke and dike shaping its spelling. Like pliers and scissors it lives only in the plural: a pair of dykes, these dykes, never a dyke. People who wire audio gear use it for their everyday cutters, and stained-glass makers buy lead came dykes, nippers made to cut the soft lead without crushing it.
dykes is a form of dyke
dyke, noun: An offensive slang word for a lesbian, especially one seen as masculine, and by extension for any woman who is not heterosexual or any woman thought to look or act masculine. Full entry
- Forms
- dykedykes plural
- Spelling
- dyke → dykes: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /s/.
Use it in a sentence
Write your own sentence with dykes, and AI will tell you whether it fits and which meaning you used.
Origin
Likely a blend of diagonal and cut, influenced by dyke and dike.