floe
Also called ice floe. a sheet of floating ice, chiefly on the surface of the sea, smaller than an ice field.
a detached floating portion of such a sheet.
Origin of floe
1Words that may be confused with floe
- floe , flow
Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
How to use floe in a sentence
In colder climates, melting arctic plates has forced polar bears to abandon their ice floes for dry land hunting.
How Climate Change Is Causing Chaos in the Animal Kingdom | Nina Strochlic | January 23, 2014 | THE DAILY BEASTMud containing microscopic shells which only occur in Siberia has been collected on some of these southward-bound ice-floes.
Good progress was made to the south; the vessel dodging icebergs and detached floes.
The Home of the Blizzard | Douglas MawsonThe separate floes stood some ten or fifteen feet above the water-level, and the lengths of several exceeded a quarter of a mile.
The Home of the Blizzard | Douglas MawsonGradually there opened up a beautiful vista of sea, dotted with floes and rocky islets (many of which were ice-capped).
The Home of the Blizzard | Douglas Mawson
About this time, too, we met numerous fields and floes of ice, to get through which we often experienced considerable difficulty.
Hudson Bay | R.M. Ballantyne
British Dictionary definitions for floe
/ (fləʊ) /
See ice floe
Origin of floe
1Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
Scientific definitions for floe
[ flō ]
A mass or sheet of floating ice.
The American Heritage® Science Dictionary Copyright © 2011. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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