hull

Pluralhulls

Formshulls, hulling, hulled

1. 1
   nouncountable

   The body or frame of a vessel such as a ship, or of an aircraft.

   Ice tore a long gash in the tanker's steel hull.

   The seaplane's hull is shaped like a boat so that it can land on water.

   Note

   Whether a ship's hull and a seed's hull are one word is uncertain. This one came through Middle English holle, which could mean a ship's hold or the ship itself, and it may be the seed-covering word put to new use and spelled to match. For aircraft, fuselage is the usual term; hull suits the boat-shaped body of a seaplane.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   The layer that encloses a seed or fruit and forms its outer surface, as on a grain of rice.

   Each grain is wrapped in a tough hull that must be removed before the rice can be eaten.

   A pile of walnut hulls had stained her fingers brown.

   Similarhusk, shell, peel

   Note

   The plant word is the older of the two hulls, going back to Old English hulu, a seed covering, perhaps from a root meaning "to cover, hide". In use it overlaps with husk, shell and peel; hull is the usual word for the tough coat around grains such as rice, which must come off before they are eaten.

3. 3
   verbtransitive

   To strip the husk or shell from seeds or fruit, as with grain or walnuts.

   The old mill could hull a ton of grain in a single afternoon.

   She spent the evening hulling walnuts for the holiday baking.

   Similarhusk, shell, shuck, peel

4. 4
   nouncountable

   The smallest set that has a given property, such as convexity, and contains every point of a set A; equivalently, the intersection of all sets with that property containing A.

   The program computes the convex hull of a million points in under a second.

   The affine hull of two distinct points is the line that passes through them.

   Note

   Mathematicians rarely say hull alone; a qualifier names the property, as in convex hull, affine hull or injective hull, and the linear hull is better known as the span. The convex hull gives the everyday picture, the shape a rubber band takes when stretched around pins on a board, and computing it quickly is a classic problem in computational geometry.

5. 5
   verbtransitive

   To strike a ship in its hull with cannon fire or other shot.

   The gunners aimed low, hoping to hull the warship rather than shred its sails.

   A lucky shot hulled the frigate just above the waterline.

   Note

   The verb is made straight from the ship's body: to hull a ship is to put shot into it, below the rigging and sails. George Shelvocke's The Voyage of Captain Shelvock Round the World (1774) reports that the enemy often hulled us, yet not a man was killed or wounded.

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