Moby Dick

American

[moh-bee dik] / ˈmoʊ bi ˈdɪk /

noun

a novel (1851) by Herman Melville.

Moby Dick Cultural

(1851) A novel by Herman Melville. Its central character, Captain Ahab, engages in a mad, obsessive quest for Moby Dick, a great white whale. The novel opens with the famous sentence “Call me Ishmael.”

Example Sentences

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Moby Dick

Those dramatic encounters later inspired Herman Melville's classic novel, Moby Dick.

From Science Daily ● Mar. 23, 2026

In his 1851 novel Moby Dick, Herman Melville describes right whales as “the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted by man.”

From National Geographic ● Jan. 25, 2024

Lines seem to form all day at Moby Dick, which touts its legacy as White Rock’s go-to fish and chips shop.

From Seattle Times ● Jul. 26, 2023

Auden hailed his "magnificent Moby Dick rhetoric", while Orwell said Hilton's voice was "exceedingly rare and correspondingly important" and declared he had a "considerable literary gift".

From BBC ● Jul. 7, 2023

Just as the chapters on whaling in Moby Dick can be omitted by all but the most punishment-loving readers, so the packing scenes that Morgenstern details here are really best left alone.

From "The Princess Bride" by William Goldman

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023