eagre
Pluraleagres
Pluraleagres
- 1A wave or wall of water that surges upstream along a river as an incoming tide meets the outflowing current.
Surfers traveled from across the country to ride the eagre as it raced upstream.
On certain rivers, eagres can reach several feet in height during the highest tides.
Similarbore
Note
Another name for the tidal bore, and a word whose origin is genuinely unsettled. It may come from an Old English *ēagor, "water, sea," preserved in the compound ēagorstrēam. It may instead come from Old Norse ægir, "sea, ocean." Neither source produces the sounds the word ought to have. Bret Harte uses it as a measure of size in 1896, comparing a vessel's spreading bow wave to "a large wave like an eagre."
- 2Obsolete form of eager.
Note
An older spelling, not a separate word. Walter Raleigh's The History of the World (1614) has the Athenians "eagre to pursue" the war, the same construction with to that eager takes today. Like eager, it forms its comparative with more and most. Keep it apart from the tidal-bore noun, which shares the spelling but has an unrelated and uncertain origin in old words for the sea.
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Origin
The word is not attested in Middle English. It is thought to derive either from Old English *ēagor ("water, sea"), seen in ēagorstrēam, or from Old Norse ægir ("sea, ocean"); however, both possibilities fail to show the phonological outcome one would expect.