How to Use blowhole in a Sentence
blowhole
noun-
Baleen whales have two openings in their blowhole, while toothed whales have one.
—Los Angeles Times, 5 Aug. 2021
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Dip into the cobalt waters, jump from the volcanic cliffs, or get sprayed by the blowhole on the paved path from the overlook.
—Cailey Rizzo, Travel + Leisure, 26 Mar. 2023
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With no sense of fear, the whale exhaled from its blowholes, threw its fluke up and continued to dive for more food.
—Coastmag, Orange County Register, 28 Mar. 2017
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The blowhole is the first body part to rise out of the water, followed by the back and tail as the whale dives below the surface in one graceful motion.
—Nora Mishanec, SFChronicle.com, 2 Jan. 2021
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During dives, the blowhole is sealed by a nasal plug that opens when the animal surfaces.
—Los Angeles Times, 5 Aug. 2021
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On the other side of our boat, another whale exhaled a huge plume of spray from its blowhole.
—Kathleen Wong, USA TODAY, 10 Jan. 2023
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Some of the people who interacted with Tião grabbed his fins, hit him, and tried to put ice cream sticks in his blowhole.
—Cathleen O'Grady, Smithsonian Magazine, 22 July 2020
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What made this encounter unique, though, is that as the whale blew water from its blowhole, a rainbow appeared.
—Madison Alcedo, Country Living, 17 Mar. 2017
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In the wheelhouse of a crab boat named Heidi Sue, Mike Pettis watched the gray whale surface and shoot water through its blowhole.
—Ed Komenda, Anchorage Daily News, 5 Aug. 2023
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The 17-year-old mother, named for a callosity near her blowhole that looks like a snow cone, no longer had the same girth or the dark black skin of a healthy right whale.
—David Abel, BostonGlobe.com, 30 Sep. 2022
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The telltale sign of the whales is their spout, the steamy exhalation of air and bits of other, less agreeable things that are fired out of its blowhole at the end of a dive.
—Discover Magazine, 5 Aug. 2022
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The whales also breathe through their blowholes, which are separate from their mouths, and very rarely blocked by debris.
—Sarah Keartes, National Geographic, 30 July 2019
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The parts aren’t exactly alike, but both animals have a dorsal fin and a blowhole.
—Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 20 Apr. 2021
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The solution, of course, is to fly a snot-collecting drone — called the Snotbot — over an erupting blowhole.
—Carl Engelking, Discover Magazine, 24 July 2015
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Let’s be clear: any whale that expels water from its blowhole is drowning.
—Claire Eamer, Smithsonian, 27 Mar. 2018
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Someone had hacked off its flukes, and another person, or perhaps the same one, had stuck a cigar butt in its blowhole.
—Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 6 June 2022
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As Equinac points out in their post, dolphins, unlike fish, breath oxygen in the air through their blowhole, not oxygen in water with gills.
—Robert Newhouse, Teen Vogue, 17 Aug. 2017
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Blocking the whale’s blowhole was Kramer’s infamous golf ball—a Titleist.
—Kyle Hill, Discover Magazine, 19 June 2013
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The blowhole is in a place where ocean waves marching in from the north have undercut a lava shelf and carved a tire-sized hole so that surf can spout up like a Yellowstone geyser.
—Brian J. Cantwell, chicagotribune.com, 24 Apr. 2018
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Ascend their tails to get to the blowhole on their heads, then get launched a great distance upwards to escape a tricky situation.
—Erik Kain, Forbes, 18 Jan. 2022
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After that, the orcas jumped onto the whale's blowhole to exhaust the animal and prevent it from breathing.
—Corryn Wetzel, Smithsonian Magazine, 4 Feb. 2022
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In other words, a lot of climatic factors must conspire for this chilly blowhole-like structure to arise.
—Katherine J. Wu, Smithsonian Magazine, 20 Feb. 2020
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And an 18-year-old right whale was entangled in fishing gear near Quebec, with a rope cutting into its head and over its blowhole.
—Amanda Coletta, Anchorage Daily News, 2 Aug. 2019
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And just a few weeks ago in Australia, an octopus clung to a dolphin’s back, dangerously close to its blowhole.
—Joanna Klein, New York Times, 5 Apr. 2017
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Sperm whales are the only living cetacean that has a single blowhole asymmetrically situated on the left side of the crown of the head.
—al, 23 Nov. 2020
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These Jurassic animals most likely breathed through their noses rather than blowholes.
—Hiroko Masuike, New York Times, 20 Apr. 2020
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The remoras glide along their host’s body, clustering near a whale’s blowhole and dorsal fin where there is minimal drag—all the while nibbling on dead skin and parasites.
—Rachael Lallensack, Smithsonian Magazine, 28 Dec. 2020
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Squids do not have blowholes but do have siphons, which look similar and are involved in the animal's respiration process.
—Eleanor McCrary, USA TODAY, 27 Apr. 2023
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The sounds of gasping blowhole spouts mixed in with their normal chatter, which developed a kind of conversational rhythm as time went on.
—Hillary Richard, New York Times, 11 May 2020
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Using drones to capture the mist from humpback whale blowholes, a team of Australian researchers has found viruses related to human pathogens like ones that cause the common cold.
—Megha Satyanarayana, STAT, 11 June 2018
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'blowhole.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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