# hull

Pronunciation: US say "HUL" /hʌl/; UK

## Noun

1. The body or frame of a vessel such as a ship, or of an aircraft.
   - Simple: The main body of a ship or boat, or of a plane.
   - _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._
2. The layer that encloses a seed or fruit and forms its outer surface, as on a grain of rice.
   - Simple: The outside cover of a seed or fruit.
   - _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._
4. 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.
   - Simple: In math, the smallest shape or set with a certain property that holds all the points of another set.
   - _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._

## Verb

3. To strip the husk or shell from seeds or fruit, as with grain or walnuts.
   - Simple: To take the outside cover off seeds or fruit.
   - _The old mill could hull a ton of grain in a single afternoon._
   - _She spent the evening hulling walnuts for the holiday baking._
5. To strike a ship in its hull with cannon fire or other shot.
   - Simple: To hit the main body of a ship with cannon balls or other shots.
   - _The gunners aimed low, hoping to hull the warship rather than shred its sails._
   - _A lucky shot hulled the frigate just above the waterline._

## Verb

6. To drift with the sails furled, carried along only by the force of wind or water against the hull. *(obsolete)*
   - Simple: To drift with the sails rolled up, pushed only by wind and water.
   - _The crew took in every sail and let the vessel hull until the wind dropped._
   - _All night the disabled ship hulled at the mercy of the gale._

## Other meanings

- (noun) A covering of any kind.

## Origin

**Meanings 2–3** — From Middle English hul, hulle, holle ("seed covering, hull of a ship"), from Old English hulu ("seed covering"), from Proto-Germanic *hul-, perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *ḱel- ("to cover, hide") or possibly from *kal- ("hard"). Compare Dutch hul ("hood") and German Hülle ("cover, wrap"), Hülse ("hull"); for the same shift from shell to ship, compare French coque ("nutshell; ship's hull").
**Meanings 1, 4–6** — From Middle English holle, hoole ("hull, hold of a ship, ship"), of uncertain origin. It is possibly a variant and special use of the other hull ("seed covering"), or else a variant of Middle English hole, holle ("hiding place, den, compartment", literally "hole, hollow"), related to Dutch hol ("hole, ship's cargo hold").

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/hull (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).