kettle-bottom

[ket-l-bot-uhm]

adjective

Nautical.

1. noting a wide, flat-bottomed hull formerly used for merchant sailing vessels.

Example Sentences

Built of steel throughout, and for passenger traffic only, she carried no combustible cargo to threaten her destruction by fire; and the immunity from the demand for cargo space had enabled her designers to discard the flat, kettle-bottom of cargo boats and give her the sharp dead-rise—or slant from the keel—of a steam yacht, and this improved her behavior in a seaway.

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We have shown him what a kettle-bottom can do before the wind, and now let him give us a tow to windward like a generous antagonist.

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