Moby Dick

American  

[moh-bee dik] / ˈmoʊ bi ˈdɪk /

noun

1. a novel (1851) by Herman Melville.

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Moby Dick Cultural  

1. (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.”

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Example Sentences

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

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

It was, as I wrote in my book “Rio LA, Tales From the Los Angeles River,” “a trompe l’oeil Moby Dick bound for the freedom of a real sea, not a cinematic one.”

From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 28, 2023

I kept Moby Dick on the desk and Whitman in my lap, but even being in English class couldn’t help.

From "Paper Towns" by John Green